People who are ignorant of science sometimes speak as if the scientific method was some esoteric, arcane method of problem-solving, applicable only to a few highly specialized areas of inquiry and having no relevance to everyday life. But nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, the scientific method is just a more sophisticated, more careful way of asking and answering questions about what is true, with extra safeguards built in to counteract the ways that human beings often fool or mislead ourselves. In principle, science can answer any question whose answer is a matter of empirical fact and not just a matter of opinion or subjective judgment.

This fact has implications for a broad range of religious claims, especially about the efficacy of prayer. Large, well-designed scientific studies have repeatedly failed to find any evidence that sick people who are being prayed for recover faster or more completely than people who aren't. In response, many apologists have retreated to claiming that prayer's effectiveness can't be tested scientifically, such as this one:

Luckily for everyone, scientific attempts to prove or disprove God are all doomed to failure. We live in exactly the world the thoughtful Christian would expect to find. For those who believe, hints of God are everywhere. But none are convincing. Faith remains a requirement...

But this claim probably says more than its originator intended. When theists say that prayer is untestable, what they're really saying, whether they realize it or not, is that prayer has no measurable effect on the world. If it did have a measurable, repeatable effect, we could easily design an experiment that would show it. But since believers say that this can't be done, they must mean that prayer has no benefits that can be proven by any test. Consider some of the consequences that necessarily follow from this claim:

• Sick theists who pray for healing are no more likely to recover than sick atheists. If people who were prayed for recovered more quickly or more fully than people receiving no prayer, we could easily show this with a test. That was the point of the MANTRA study I linked to above. But if prayer is untestable, then that must mean that prayer has no measurable effect on a person's recovery, regardless of how many people are offering prayers for them or how fervent those people are in their faith.

• Theists who pray for success and prosperity are no more likely to receive it than atheists. Prosperity-gospel churches often teach that the more money a believer tithes, the more God will reward them. Again, a longitudinal study tracking the amount of people's donations and comparing it to their subsequent financial success could easily show this to be so. If prayer is untestable, however, this must mean that the amount of money you give to your church has no effect on the odds of your subsequently becoming rich.

• More committed, more faithful believers have their prayers answered at the same rate as more casual, less committed believers. Even if you start with the assumption that God only grants prayers that agree with his will, it seems like a reasonable guess that more devoted, more committed believers would have at least a slightly greater understanding of God's will than casual, apathetic churchgoers, and hence their prayers would be more likely to come true. But if prayer is untestable, there must be no such measurable effect, which means that one's level of commitment means nothing to the effectiveness of one's prayers.

• The number of people praying for some outcome makes no difference to its probability. Even if the level of one's devotion makes no difference, you might guess that the number of people praying for some outcome would be correlated with how likely that outcome is. But if prayer is untestable, then it must make no difference whether one, a hundred, or a million people pray for something - it would be just as likely, or rather unlikely, to come true.

• The specific beliefs of the people praying for some outcome makes no difference to its probability. If there's one true religion, it seems likely that God would only answer the prayers of believers in that religion, or at least would answer their prayers more frequently than the prayers of heretics. But that would also be an easily testable effect. If prayer is untestable, there must be no such effect, and this means that people of all religions - Christian, Muslim, Mormon, Hare Krishna, Jain, Zoroastrian, Shinto - would see their prayers come true with roughly the same frequency.

• People who pray daily are no more happier, no more virtuous, and no more trustworthy than people who rarely or never pray. Some people claim that prayer doesn't produce miraculous effects in the world, but is intended to strengthen the faith and improve the character of the believer. But even this can't be true if prayer is untestable. If people who are otherwise alike in social standing are measurably different in any positive psychological trait, depending on whether or how often they pray, this would be a testable effect. We could measure it with the same kind of epidemiological surveys that measure the beneficial health effects of diet or exercise. If this kind of test wouldn't work, then it must be the case that prayer produces no detectable change in the character of the believer.

• Nations populated by people who pray frequently are no more socially healthy than irreligious nations. Building on the last point, if prayer has no measurable effect, this must apply to nations as well as people. This means that nations of fervent believers who pray frequently are no different from godless, atheist nations in every measure of social health: divorce rates, crime rates, number and severity of natural disasters, overall happiness of the populace, and so on.

Guest post by Peter Nothnagle

On June 30, someone stole a piece of the True Cross (you know the one I mean) that was enshrined in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston. It had been kept in a small compartment in the base of a crucifix hanging on a wall in a chapel. Someone walked in, pried it open, and helped himself. That was a mean thing to do.

The faithful are very attached to their sacred relics. They see these bits of bone, cloth, vegetable matter, and globs of goo as links to the times, places and persons of their spiritual forebears. Many of these items are supposed to have had extraordinary powers in the past — raising the dead and so forth — although modern church leaders are much more modest in their claims.

The most famous relics have been the most studied — and study has cast serious doubt on their authenticity. Yet the faithful cling fiercely to the idea that they are authentic, as if the debunking of, say, the Shroud of Turin or the painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe would undermine their faith. As for the True Cross, according to tradition (which will have to suffice in place of history), it was discovered after torturing witnesses, some 300 years after the (alleged) Crucifixion, and then repeatedly captured by invaders, held for ransom, concealed, rediscovered, divided into tiny pieces to be distributed among visitors and dignitaries — none of which gives much confidence in the authenticity of any surviving fragments.

The Bible is the most popular relic of all. Most Christians cherish the Bible as the foundation of their faith, considering it divinely inspired, but the poor thing has been cobbled together from many traditions over the centuries, redacted, amended, translated from translations and copied from copies, and cannot be an accurate record of any one faith tradition. In the 21st century, we have powerful tools for the scientific examination of historical claims, and we know things that should shake the faith of anyone who ascribes any more than the vaguest, metaphorical "truth" to the stories in the Bible: there was no Creation, no Adam, no Eve, no Fall, no Flood, no Moses, no Exodus, and on and on. The fact that all those stories are flatly contradicted by science and history must lead any rational person to be suspicious of all the other tales of angels, miracles, prophetic utterances, and even unimportant details like genealogies and place names, unless independent evidence should corroborate them.

Eventually the penny will drop for the faithful. Everybody has experienced that the provenance of an object, or the veracity of a story, is subject to being falsified. Everybody understands that, to paraphrase biologist Jerry Coyne, you can't be confident that you're right about something unless you can tell if you're wrong. When the faithful bolster their immaterial faith with evidence, they're playing our game, and unbiased examination of the evidence has only gone one way — badly for the faithful.

There is only one true and honest way to have faith, and that is to ignore evidence — to abandon it, even to flee from it. To base one's religious faith on evidence, even something as subjective as "I just feel in my heart that it's true", is to invite rational rebuttal, which should lead a sensible person to doubt.

The Case for a Creator, Closing Thoughts

The theory of evolution not only explains and unifies a vast range of scientific observations, it's given rise to an enormous, fruitful research program by predicting where we should look in order to find all kinds of phenomena of interest. One of the most famous examples is how Charles Darwin predicted that the earliest human ancestors would be found in Africa, which turned out to be 100% correct. Based on observing flowers from Madagascar, Darwin also predicted the existence of a moth species with a startlingly long proboscis, and a moth matching his specifications was discovered. Evolutionary theory led paleontologists to inspect rocks of a certain age in a certain location to find tetrapod ancestors, and lo and behold, we dug up Tiktaalik roseae. Evolutionary theory enabled us to predict the likely characteristics of an ant ancestor, and we found a species preserved in amber that matched our expectations almost perfectly. Evolutionary theory illuminated the similarities between birds and dinosaurs, and feathered theropods continue to turn up at a dizzying rate.

Even today, evolution continues to guide researchers who are expanding our knowledge of the human genome. Because of evolution, we looked in yeast to find genes that build bodies, and we looked in sea cucumbers to find blood-clotting genes. Because of evolution, we found viruses with similarities to crucial genes in our immune system, and bacteria with family ties to the mitochondria that power the metabolism of each and every cell in our bodies, and apes and monkeys whose vitamin C synthesis gene is broken in exactly the same way as ours. Based on evolutionary reasoning, the first scientists to crack the genetic code worked under the assumption that it would be universal among life, and this too was correct.

These are bold, surprising predictions, which expand our knowledge of humanity even as they reveal our deep and intricate ties to the natural world. And without the overarching assumption of evolution, there was no reason to suspect any of them to be true. Yet they are true, and no other theory or hypothesis accounts for them so consistently and so well. By letting the principles of evolution and the scientific method guide us, we've enjoyed enormous success, and reaped the bounty of a rich harvest of knowledge about nature. We've also found no evidence whatsoever which confirms the existence of a supernatural creator. And when some people are losing, it's little surprise that they want to change the rules of the game.

In chapter 9, Stephen Meyer sums up his argument as follows:

"Well, I say it's time to redefine science. We should not be looking for only the best naturalistic explanation, but the best explanation, period. And intelligent design is the explanation that's most in conformity with how the world works." [p.243]

Please note the major concession: Strobel and his fellow-travelers aren't doing science. They're doing something else, and they want to "redefine" science so that the new definition can encompass whatever it is they are doing.

What's curious about this statement is that although Meyer calls for redefining science, he never says what he wants the new definition to be. If they want to redefine science, how should the new definition differ from the old one? What activities will count as science that didn't before? And once you conclude that "design happened", then what? What predictions does the design hypothesis make about the structure of the world? Is there research that we can do to figure out the mindset, the abilities, the intentions of the designer? Can we know anything about him other than, perhaps, an inordinate fondness for beetles? If so, how?

Neither Meyer nor any other advocate of ID has ever attempted to answer these questions. If they're so eager to establish a new, non-natural kind of science, why don't they explain how it would work? More to the point, why don't they just go ahead and do it? They don't need anyone's permission. If they could use their method to make verifiable predictions, they wouldn't have to sit around trying to convince the rest of us. There would be incontrovertible evidence of their success.

The proof is in the pudding, but Meyer, Strobel and the rest are offering us nothing but thin gruel. They want us to discard the well-tested and massively successful framework of evolutionary theory and adopt their method instead, and promise vague but marvelous results at some unspecified future time. They come to us empty-handed, having done none of the necessary work, and expect us to take their claims on faith - even though the Discovery Institute's sizable budget could easily support a well-equipped research division, and groups like the Templeton Foundation are openly seeking pro-ID research to fund. Clearly, the only reason they're not doing science is because there's no science in their ideas to be done. Like all creationists, they are intellectually bankrupt, and the "redefinition" they seek is to redefine scientific failure as scientific success.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Closing Thoughts

It's been said that one of science's greatest virtues is that it's not dictated by a tyranny of the majority or guided by irrational human whims. After all, science is the search for the true nature of reality, and reality isn't decided by our preferences. No matter how many people prefer an experiment to turn out one way, it may in fact turn out another, and the scientific community will just have to accept that result. There's certainly much truth to this.

But of course, in another sense, scientific debates are settled by majority vote, because science is done by humans, and how else can a community of humans conduct business other than by consensus? When the evidence is unclear or lacking, we have no choice but to rely on the judgment of experts. The theory that wins the majority's support, by definition, will attract the most research, the most funding, and the most talent.

There's truth in both these views, but the reality is that they usually converge. Science works - it discovers verifiable truth about the world - and the implication is that, in any given dispute, the theory which attracts the most support from the majority of practicing, credentialed scientists is more likely than its competitors to be true. This is even more true of ideas that have survived decades of rigorous experimental tests. I don't know of a single case where a scientific theory that reigned for so long was utterly falsified and overthrown. Far more often, we just discover that although the old theory holds true in most cases, there are special circumstances where it doesn't; and it then becomes an approximation of its more precise successor.

The reason for this whole digression is that, in The Case for a Creator's appendix, Strobel offers a summary of his apologetics work in The Case for Christ. He summarizes one chapter as follows:

"Gregory Boyd... offered a devastating critique of the Jesus Seminar, a group that questions whether Jesus aid or did most of what's attributed to him. He identified the Seminar as 'an extremely small number of radical-fringe scholars who are on the far, far left wing of New Testament thinking.'" [p.295]

This is extremely perilous ground for Strobel to tread on. If some group's belonging to the "radical fringe" is a reason to reject their ideas, doesn't that apply all the more to the ideas presented in this book?

After all, the theory of evolution has the support of the overwhelming majority of the scientific community: state, national, and international scientific societies and academies; the biology faculties of dozens of accredited colleges and universities; and, of course, over a thousand scientists named Steve. By contrast, the intelligent-design movement is sorely lacking in intellectual firepower. As I've pointed out, the intellectual well of creationism is so shallow that Strobel was forced to pad out a ten-chapter book with theologians, philosophers and professional Christian debaters, and even then, he had to interview one of his subjects twice!

This lack of depth speaks to the true nature of the creationist movement: not a robust academic community doing real scientific research, but a small number of pundits, lawyers and religious evangelists underwritten by right-wing Christian groups for ideological and propaganda reasons. The difference between them is the difference between an ocean and a puddle. Given Strobel's dismissive description of the Jesus Seminar, wouldn't it also be appropriate to identify the Discovery Institute as "an extremely small number of radical-fringe creationists, most of whom are on the far, far right wing of religious thinking, and - to top it off - most of whom lack credentials in any scientific field related to evolution"? (This is in contrast to the the Jesus Seminar, whose members, no matter how bitterly Strobel denigrates them, have legitimate credentials in textual criticism, ancient languages, and biblical studies.) Strobel relies on the argument from authority when it's convenient, but disregards it when it's not convenient.

Granted, a Christian apologist might think to make this argument cut both ways - how can we atheists reject the Bible when so many prominent biblical scholars believe it's true? - but there are obstacles to doing so.

First of all, many of the theologians who express belief in biblical historicity and inerrancy work not for secular universities where the expression of diverse views is protected by tenure, but by religious schools and seminaries which force their members to affirm a statement of faith and cast out those who express unorthodox thoughts. This artificial barrier, which has no equivalent in the scientific community, makes it much more difficult for anyone who dissents in any significant way to express an opinion. (That said, there's a lot more diversity of opinion in the biblical studies community than most lay believers realize, and there's certainly no widespread agreement on the tenets of fundamentalism. The Jesus Seminar is just the most visible expression of methods and conclusions that have been established in the field for decades.)

Second, even disregarding the dogma and doctrinal vows, the mission of a religious college is fundamentally different. Science rewards people whose discoveries bring us closer to the truth of the world, even if those discoveries overturn established wisdom. But the purpose of religious groups is to maintain continuity - to defend orthodoxy, defend the creed, defend the beliefs that have always been held. There's no reward for those who challenge conventional wisdom. In religion, unlike in science, you can build a career on nothing but reiterating the thoughts of your predecessors. The absence of any method of self-correction means that in religion, unlike in science, we'd be well advised to listen to the so-called radical fringe. They're most likely to be the people who are on to something.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Closing Thoughts

After spending over a year on this project, we've come to the end of The Case for a Creator. Before bringing this series to a close, I have some closing thoughts on the overall message and tactics of the book.

First: Although Lee Strobel tries to pass Case off as a dispassionate examination of scientific findings that just happen to support the existence of an intelligent designer, the obvious truth is that it's a Christian apologetics book dressed in a thin gown of pseudoscience. No better evidence of this could be given than how he treats his interviewees differently based on their religious beliefs. Everyone he interviews in the book, save for one person, is a fundamentalist Christian of some kind, and he gives each of these people ample opportunity to preach and to expound on their religious beliefs without challenge or objection. But when he speaks to his sole non-Christian interview subject, he suddenly changes his tune and declares he's only interested in hearing about science, not religion. See for yourself:

J.P. Moreland:

"[Scientists] will come to believe in the reality of the soul and the immaterial nature of consciousness. And this could open them up personally [my emphasis] to something even more important - to a much larger Mind and a much bigger Consciousness, who in the beginning was the Logos, and who made us in his image." [p.271]

Michael Behe:

"Based on the empirical evidence - which is continuing to mount - I'd agree with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger that 'the great projects of the living creation are not the products of chance and error... [They] point to a creating Reason and show us a creating Intelligence, and they do so more luminously and radiantly than ever before.'" [p.216]

Jay Wesley Richards:

"Christians have always believed that God testifies to his existence through the book of nature and the book of Scripture. In the nineteenth century, science effectively closed the book of nature. But now, new scientific discoveries are reopening it." [p.189]

Robin Collins:

"Romans 1:20 tells us that God's eternal power and divine nature can be seen and understood through things that are made, and that this is the reason humanity is without excuse. I see physics as uncovering the evidence of God's fingerprints at a deeper and more subtle level than the ancients could have dreamed of." [p.149]

William Lane Craig:

"That afternoon Jan and I prepared a little handwritten version of the Four Spiritual Laws, which spell out how a person can become a follower of Jesus. When we sat down with her at the meal that night, we opened the booklet and read the first sentence... We described how she could pray to ask God to forgive her wrongdoing and to receive Jesus as her forgiver and leader." [p.122]

Stephen Meyer:

"I see this not only in cosmology and physics and biology, but also in the historical revelation of the Bible, principally in the revelation of Jesus Christ. He is so compelling!... I remember thinking at one point that if the Jesus of the Bible weren't real, I would need to worship the person who created the character." [p.90-91]

And the only non-Christian interviewed in the entire book, Jonathan Wells:

I hadn't come to Seattle, however, to seek spiritual wisdom from Wells. [p.34]

Strobel's single-minded focus on Christianity is even more apparent in this excerpt from chapter 7:

Astounded by the Earth's fine-tuned physical, chemical, and biological interrelationships, some writers have gone so far as to liken our biosphere to a "superorganism" that is quite literally alive. In fact, James Lovelock's pantheistic Gaia Hypothesis even seeks to deify our planet. However, Gonzalez and Richards said it's unnecessary to go that far.
    "Despite these admittedly incredible interrelationships, there's nothing that requires anyone to see the Earth itself as being an organism, especially a god or goddess," Richards said. [p.166]

This is not scientific evidence being examined to reach a conclusion. Rather, this is a conclusion being chosen in advance and scientific arguments being selected based on whether they support it. What test could you possibly run to decide whether the Earth itself is a deity or whether it was the handiwork of an external creator?

This happens yet again later on in the book. As I mentioned in a previous post, J.P. Moreland raises the possibility that, if human minds emerge from matter, a divine, godlike mind could also emerge from matter - only to have Strobel swiftly point out, "That wouldn't be the God of Christianity" [p.265], which Moreland concedes. Again, this is not just "the case for a creator", in the sense of a generic argument for the world having been created by some kind of intelligent being. Strobel has a very specific creator in mind, and is only interested in investigating science that he feels supports his belief.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

"A qualitative and quantitative study of the incidence, features, and aetiology of near death experiences in cardiac arrest survivors." Resuscitation 48 (2001): 149-156.

In my most recent post on Case for a Creator, I mentioned that Lee Strobel referenced a February 2001 paper which allegedly provided proof that people had conscious experiences during the time that their brains were not functioning. I have a copy of that paper now, thanks to several helpful readers, so in this post I'm going to dissect it.

The principal researcher, Sam Parnia, carried out a study in which he interviewed all survivors of cardiac arrest at his hospital over one year, asking them if they had any memories and, if so, to describe what they experienced. There were 63 such people over the course of the study. Here's the first important point: the vast majority of those who were revived from cardiac arrest had no memories or experiences of any kind:

During the 1 year period 63 patients survived and were interviewed. Of those, 56 (88.8%) had no memory recall of their period of unconsciousness; the remaining seven survivors (11.1%) had some memory.

Only seven people had any memories at all, and only four of those had enough of the "classic" NDE elements (feelings of bliss and peace, seeing a bright light, the sensation of traveling through a tunnel or entering some other world) for Parnia to classify them as such. The other three had only vague hallucinations (one reported a sense of peace but no other elements, one reported seeing deceased relatives but with no other accompanying experiences, and one just saw "some unknown people jumping off a mountain"). This is difficult to explain under theistic assumptions. If everyone has a soul, shouldn't everyone who suffers cardiac arrest have an NDE?

There's also this part, which must have made Strobel decidedly uncomfortable if he read the actual paper:

All the NDE group were Christians. However, none of them described themselves as practising members and nor did they see a figure during their NDE specifically related to Christianity. One of the four also described himself as a Pagan. [According to a table later in the paper, three described themselves as non-practicing Anglican, while one identified as non-practicing Catholic and pagan. —Ebonmuse]

How is it that non-practicing Christians - one who described himself as a pagan, no less - had the same blissful hallucinations that are the most common kind of NDE? If Strobel's born-again beliefs are true, shouldn't these people have had only the frightening, "hellish" NDEs that are sometimes reported?

Again, please note that every conclusion in this study is inferred on the basis of just four people's experiences. This is hardly enough to draw any kind of firm conclusion, and Parnia and his co-authors say so themselves:

In this study possible physiological causative factors could not be investigated adequately in view of the relatively small number in the study (NDE) group. Nevertheless it was interesting that patients in the study group had higher oxygen levels than those in the control group. This may simply be a skewed result due to the low patient numbers. Alternatively it may indicate that patients who had NDEs had better oxygenation during the resuscitation, allowing better cortical function.... However, it would be unwise, with such small numbers, to draw any significant conclusion from this finding.

Strobel, meanwhile, inflates this noncommittal, tentative statement into a clangingly unequivocal conclusion:

"About ten percent reported having well-structured, lucid thought processes, with memory formation and reasoning, during the time that their brains were not functioning. The effects of oxygen starvation or drugs - objections commonly offered by skeptics - were ruled out as factors." [The Case for a Creator, p.251]

Not only is this a ridiculous exaggeration of what the study claims, it's also factually inaccurate. Parnia says only that "all patients followed a standard resuscitation protocol", which includes the administering of emergency drugs. He says nothing about whether these could or couldn't contribute to an NDE. As for oxygen starvation, of course patients with cardiac arrest experience oxygen starvation! That's what happens when your heart stops. What Parnia says, and what Strobel misunderstands, is that patients who had NDEs had higher blood oxygenation levels while they were being resuscitated, compared to those who had no such experiences. And even though the small numbers don't allow for robust conclusions, this is a very suggestive detail. It raises the possibility that NDEs are the result of neural activity starting up again in the brain as it's being revived.

Despite their small sample size, Parnia and his co-authors do argue that NDEs happen while the brain is unconscious, not at the onset of unconsciousness or during the process of revival. Here's how they defend that conclusion:

An alternative explanation would be that the observed experiences arise during the loss of, or on regaining, consciousness. However, it is unlikely that the NDE arises either when the cortical modules are failing, that is, during the process of becoming unconscious, or when the cortical modules are coming back on line, that is, when consciousness is returning... The EEG data during fainting shows a gradual slowing of the cerebral rhythms with the appearance of delta activity before finally, in a minority of cases, the EEG becomes flat. In the case of cardiac arrest, the process is accelerated, with the EEG showing changes within a few seconds. The transition from consciousness to unconsciousness is thus rapid, appearing immediate to the subjects.

So, their argument is that people suffering cardiac arrest become unconscious too quickly for the entire NDE to take place during that time. But that's a weak argument: We know of drugs that can skew the sense of time, and Parnia himself points out that one of the elements of a classic NDE is a sense that "time [has] speeded up". Why is it not possible that a few seconds of activity in a dying brain can produce experiences which subjectively seem much longer when the person is later revived?

Even if the unconscious brain is flooded by neurotransmitters this should not produce clear, lucid remembered experiences, as those cerebral modules which generate conscious experience and underpin memory are impaired by cerebral anoxia... Experiences which occur during the recovery of consciousness are confusional, which these were not.

Now hold on, there - Parnia is treating this claim as a matter of fact, when clearly it's a matter of opinion. The classic NDE isn't dreamlike or confusional? The feeling that a person has left their body, is entering a mystical realm, and encounters religious figures and deceased relatives? I think an atheist would reply that that's as hallucinatory and dreamlike an experience as you could hope to get.

Furthermore, Parnia's very small sample size may have caused him to overlook the fact that many NDEs which otherwise conform to the standard definition have unambiguously hallucinatory elements. Keith Augustine's essay on the Secular Web, which surveys reports of NDEs, has many examples: people who saw living friends and relatives in the afterlife, people who met talking animals or fictional characters, and in one amusing case, a winged centaur Jesus. Even Parnia's study had one case that he dismissed as merely confusional in nature, a man who saw "some unknown people jumping off a mountain" - but the only reason he dismissed it is that it didn't fit the classic NDE description, even though the man went through a cardiac arrest and revival the same as his other subjects.

And how do we know that his NDE subjects didn't omit dreamlike elements when telling him their stories? Parnia and his co-authors say they didn't prompt their subjects with leading questions, but the possibility can't be overlooked that people who are familiar with NDEs from pop culture prune the discordant elements from their story to make their experience more of a coherent narrative, making it sound more like the way they thought it "should" be.

In sum, Parnia's study, despite Strobel's overblown and grandiose assertions, doesn't prove anything about the timing of NDEs or demonstrate that they occur while the brain is nonfunctional. The only conclusive way to prove that they result from the soul leaving the body would be for people in such a state to gain information they couldn't have accessed through ordinary methods - but as I said earlier, aside from unverifiable hearsay and anecdotes, this never happens. Every careful, controlled experiment set up to prove this has turned up empty.

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 10

I was going to wrap up my review of chapter 10 with my previous post, but looking back over my notes, I see that Moreland and Strobel made a few more claims I wanted to address. Mostly, these consist of assertions that there's evidence for the ability of the soul to leave the body and have thoughts and experiences in a disembodied state. Moreland doesn't dwell on these at length, possibly because these sorts of claims are usually more identified with New Age belief systems than with Christianity. But Strobel did promise us science, and this is one of the few times that this chapter comes close to offering that, so I thought it was only fair to give these claims full consideration.

In their journal article, physician Sam Parnia and Peter Fenwick... describe their study of sixty-three heart attack victims who were declared clinically dead but were later revived and interviewed. About ten percent reported having well-structured, lucid thought processes, with memory formation and reasoning, during the time that their brains were not functioning. [p.251]

The citation is to this Reuters article, which refers to a February 2001 article in the journal Resuscitation. I don't have access to this journal, but if anyone who does wants to get in touch with me, it'd be much appreciated. [EDIT: I have it now - thanks to everyone who contacted me!]

Still, going by the material as presented, I see a fairly obvious fallacy here: Conscious experiences don't have timestamps. Even if people revived from cardiac arrest reported having memories, how on earth could anyone know that those memories were formed while the brain was not functioning? How could you rule out the possibility that they were formed, for example, in the last few seconds of erratic neural activity before the brain's oxygen supply was cut off, or when the brain resumed functioning once the patients were revived? Strobel makes no effort to explain this, and I greatly doubt that Parnia and Fenwick do either.

He speculated that the brain might serve as a mechanism to manifest the mind, much in the same way a television set manifests pictures and sounds from waves in the air. If an injury to the brain causes a person to lose some aspects of his mind or personality, this doesn't necessarily prove that the brain was the source of the mind. "All it shows is that the apparatus is damaged," he said. [p.251]

This analogy would make sense if damage to the brain could do nothing more than selectively eliminate aspects of consciousness, much the same way as damage to a TV might eliminate its ability to show color or to pick up certain channels. But that's not what happens in human beings. There are countless cases where brain damage doesn't remove but rather changes a person's personality, giving them new personality traits, desires, beliefs, or habits that they never possessed before. To use Moreland's analogy, no matter what kind of damage I do to my TV, it's never going to show me a parallel universe where the New York Mets are a football team, or play an alternate version of Star Wars in which Darth Vader is the hero and Luke Skywalker is the villain. Something like that could only happen if the programming was being produced inside the TV and could be altered by specific kinds of damage. (Moreland's apologetic also doesn't explain cases where only part of a person's consciousness has access to some information, such as we see in split-brain patients.)

"This happens in near-death experiences. People are clinically dead, but sometimes they have a vantage point from above, where they look down at the operating table that their body is on. Sometimes they gain information they couldn't have known if this were just an illusion happening in their brain. One woman died and she saw a tennis shoe that was on the roof of the hospital. How could she have known this?" [p.257]

No source is given for this, but it's clearly the infamous story of Kimberly Clark Sharp, which I discussed in a previous post on OBEs. This story is pure hearsay, and no well-designed scientific experiment has ever shown that people can take in information while in a disembodied state. (Some researchers have tried putting LED screens in operating rooms where they could only be seen by someone floating near the ceiling, but to no avail.)

But even if these stories are all fictitious, Moreland has one more laughably desperate argument to make: the fact that we can even conceive of such things proves that they're true!

"And clearly these stories make sense, even if we're not sure they're true. We've got to be more than our bodies or else these stories would be ludicrous to us." [p.257]

Whenever I see an argument like this, that our ability to imagine X proves that X exists, I apply "the Santa test": Is there a real Santa Claus? Well, there are stories from many different cultures about saintly figures who give gifts to children during the winter holidays. And clearly, these stories make sense to us, even if we're not sure they're true. Does this mean there must be elven workshops and flying reindeer, just because we can form a clear conception of those things and don't instinctively find them impossible or absurd? Or does it just mean that humans have the capability to imagine states of affairs that don't exist in reality?

And lastly, Moreland favors us with another of his classic philosopher's apologetics:

"I had a student a few years ago whose sister had a terrible accident on her honeymoon. She was knocked unconscious and lost all of her memories and a good bit of her personality....
    Now, we all knew this was the same person all along. This was Jamie's sister. She was not a different person, though she was behaving differently...
    Now, if I were just my consciousness, when my consciousness was different, I'd be a different person. But we know that I can be the same person even though my consciousness changes, so I can't be the same thing as my consciousness. I've got to be the 'self,' or soul, that contains my consciousness." [p.260]

Moreland doesn't attempt to explain how this hypothesis is compatible with the TV-antenna analogy discussed earlier, even though this case raises some interesting questions. If damage to the brain can cause you to lose your memories, doesn't that imply that memory is stored in the brain and not in the soul? If so, how is it possible that people having an out-of-body experience can remember it when they're revived later? (For that matter, how can a disembodied soul have experiences of any kind, if it doesn't have sensory organs?)

To address the substance of his argument, let's consider a parallel case: Am I the same person now that I was when I was four years old? Most people would probably say yes, since there's an unbroken thread of physical and psychological continuity from me-then to me-now. But you could make an equally sensible and plausible argument that the answer is no. After all, if all my likes, beliefs and preferences are different now from what they were then - if even the atoms in my body have been replaced by the steady turnover of biological processes - then in what sense are we the same?

There's no fact that could resolve this question one way or the other. The answer is just a matter of definition and convention. And the same is true for Moreland's example: Whether Jamie's sister before the accident and Jamie's sister after the accident are the same person depends entirely on your definitions of "same" and "person". Moreland has fallen into the philosopher's trap of thinking that definitions create objective reality - that because we choose to call Jamie's-sister-before-accident and Jamie's-sister-after-accident the same person, this implies there must be some concrete, persisting thing for that definition to attach to. In fact, all it shows is how we choose to categorize objects in the world through our use of language. This is really a rather obvious and simple fallacy. Did Moreland the clever philosopher not notice it, or did he and Strobel just choose to overlook it?

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

On the flight back from my honeymoon, I noticed an ad on my airplane promoting this sweepstakes - and my attention was drawn to the grand prize:

Win a one-on-one meeting with the renowned author and mind-body expert, Deepak Chopra, M.D. and rejuvenate your spirit with his Seduction of Spirit Retreat at the Chopra Center. Dr. Chopra is a global force in the field of human empowerment and the prolific author of fourteen bestsellers on mind-body health, quantum mechanics, spirituality and peace. Time Magazine heralds Dr. Chopra as one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century and credits him as "the poet-prophet of alternative medicine."

If you're not familiar with Deepak Chopra, there's a detailed summary at the Skeptic's Dictionary. Suffice it to say that he's a physician who realized that peddling pseudoscience was much easier and more profitable than actually curing sick people. His repertoire includes generous doses of garbled nonsense that tries to connect quantum mechanics with ancient Indian superstitions, plenty of woo-woo New Age creationism, a healthy disdain for atheists, and most bizarrely of all, the claim that one can reverse the aging process by an effort of will.

So much for Chopra. But it occurred to me, why should one of his many credulous, worshipful followers win this award? Wouldn't it be great if the one-on-one meeting was with a knowledgeable skeptic who could take this pompous fraud to task? Granted, it probably wouldn't accomplish much; but the chance to prick Chopra's bliss bubble, to force him for once in his life to face genuine criticism, is too good to pass up. And the public embarrassment it would cause him could provide some welcome, entertaining press for the skeptic movement.

So, I'm seriously considering entering this sweepstakes. The contest is open until June 25, so there's plenty of time for skeptics to get on the bandwagon. Anyone else who'd relish the chance to confront Chopra want to throw their hat into the ring along with me?

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 10

Science is hard work. Normally, to make any significant contribution to human knowledge, a scientist really has to get their hands dirty - experiments in the lab, research in the field, long days and longer nights, and the meticulous testing of hypotheses. But J.P. Moreland must be an especially brilliant scientist, because he doesn't even need any of those trappings. In this chapter, Strobel interviews him not in a lab or an office, but at his own home:

When I pulled up to J.P. Moreland's house on a cool and foggy morning, he was outside with a cup of coffee in his hand, having just walked home from a chat with some neighbors. His graying hair was close-cropped, his mustache neatly trimmed, and he was looking natty in a red tie, blue shirt, and dark slacks.
    "Good to see you again," he said as we shook hands. "Come on in."
    We walked into his living room, where he settled into a floral-patterned chair and I eased onto an adjacent couch. [p.252]

I quote this passage not just to point out how cringingly bad Strobel's writing is, but to call attention to the setting of this interview. For in this chapter, Moreland claims to prove the existence of the soul - certainly a Nobel-worthy result! - without once doing an experiment, running any sort of test, or even leaving his floral-patterned armchair.

"...if physicalism is true, then consciousness doesn't really exist, because there would be no such thing as conscious states that must be described from a first-person point of view... if everything were matter, then you could capture the entire universe on a graph - you could locate each star, the moon, every mountain, Lee Strobel's brain, Lee Strobel's kidneys, and so forth. That's because if everything is physical, it could be described entirely from a third-person point of view. And yet we know that we have first-person, subjective points of view - so physicalism can't be true." [p.255]

Look, I realize there probably aren't many philosophical materialists on staff at the Talbot School of Theology, where Moreland teaches. I appreciate that this makes it slightly more difficult to do research for this interview. But really, would it have killed him to at least try to find out what we actually think?

I don't know where Moreland got the odd fantasy that materialists are committed to denying anything that can't be found on a map. Materialists believe in many things that have no physical location. I can name a few: justice, music, erosion, mathematics. What we really assert is not that there are no such things as abstract concepts, but that there are no abstract concepts that are not ultimately reducible to patterns of matter and energy. We deny that these concepts exist in their own right, independently of whatever arrangements of matter and energy happen to instantiate them at particular times and places. Just so with consciousness: it exists, but only as the product of brains. (This is the same thing I said in my Statement of Principles.)

"Nothing in my brain is about anything. You can't open up my head and say, 'You see this electrical pattern in the left hemisphere of J.P. Moreland's brain? That's about the Bears.' Your brain states aren't about anything, but some of my mental states are. So they're different." [p.259]

This argument, which Moreland apparently makes in all seriousness, betrays such an elementary confusion of terms that I scarcely even know where to begin. The whole point of science is that it's about reductionism: explaining the properties of a complex phenomenon in terms of simpler components, which come together to create that property but don't possess it themselves. A cloud of gas has the property of temperature, but the individual atoms that make up that cloud do not. That doesn't mean that the gas and the atoms aren't the same.

Or, for an example that hits even closer to home: a book. A book is about something, it contains thoughts, ideas; but the ink and paper that make up a book aren't about anything. (This is true even if no human being ever reads the book, so it can't be said that the meaning of the book exists only in the reader's mind.) Does that mean that books have souls, to contain the ideas that inhabit them?

This simple concept is one that Moreland apparently doesn't grasp. It should be obvious that, if we materialists are correct, the electrical pattern in your brain is the thought. The two are one and the same, just described at different levels of organization. Moreland is trying to turn a basic confusion of definitions into a sweeping conclusion about the nature of ultimate reality. A philosopher as renowned as Strobel describes him to be has no excuse for not understanding why this is fallacious.

"[If scientists believe that mind emerges from material processes] they are no longer treating matter as atheists and naturalists treat matter - namely, as brute stuff that can be completely described by the laws of chemistry and physics. Now they're attributing spooky, soulish, or mental potentials to matter... They're saying that prior to this level of complexity, matter contained the potential for mind to emerge... That is no longer naturalism," he said. "It's panpsychism.... the view that matter is not just inert physical stuff, but that it also contains proto-mental states in it. Suddenly, they've abandoned a strict scientific view of matter and adopted a view that's closer to theism than atheism." [p.264-5]

Again, Moreland has some bizarre notions about what materialists believe (and if I were feeling unkind, I'd say that he's the only one here for whom "proto-mental states" are in evidence).

Atheists believe that the mind emerges from the functioning of the brain. This isn't panpsychism - it simply means that matter arranged in certain ways has causal powers that matter arranged in other ways doesn't have. You can build a car out of metal, but that doesn't mean that metal had an ethereal notion of "transportation" inherent in it from the beginning. It just means that a set of atoms arranged car-wise produces an object which has certain causal powers that other arrangements of atoms don't have. Similarly, the mind arises from an arrangement of matter arranged so as to possess a sufficient degree of information-processing power.

"If a finite mind can emerge when matter reaches a certain level of complexity, why couldn't a far greater mind - God - emerge when millions of brain states reach a greater level of consciousness? You see, they want to stop the process where they want it to stop - at themselves - but you can't logically draw that line. How can they know that a very large God hasn't emerged from matter...?" [p.265]

Okay, and what's the evidence that this has happened?

As with the other sections of this chapter, Moreland mistakes armchair speculation for argument backed by evidence. The mere hypothetical possibility of a god emerging from matter is held to be "a problem for atheists". (Lest you think this represents a daring flirtation with unorthodoxy, Strobel immediately emphasizes that this "wouldn't be the God of Christianity", once again making it clear who his intended audience is.)

In fact, at no point in this chapter does Moreland get out of that armchair. Despite the fact that this is supposed to be a book about science, he acts as if philosophical arguments and thought experiments are all the proof he needs. Given that this is Strobel's last interview, you'd think he'd want to go out with a bang - but whimpers are all he has to offer.

UPDATE: As Siamang points out in the comments, Strobel declared in an earlier chapter that:

"I wasn't interested in unsupported conjecture or armchair musings by pipe-puffing theorists. I wanted the hard facts of mathematics, the cold data of cosmology, and only the most reasonable inferences that could be drawn from them." [p.95]

Yet this entire chapter consists solely of "unsupported conjecture" and "armchair musings". Did Strobel think no one would notice, or is it just that his "interests" have changed now that he's reduced to scraping the bottom of the barrel to find Christian fundamentalists with scientific credentials?

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

By Richard Hollis (aka Ritchie)

I thought I'd do a something a little different in this post.

Sometimes, when I read a science book explaining something new, I get a feeling when a piece of fascinating trivia just 'clicks' into place. I'm not sure I can better describe it, though I'm sure I'm not doing a good job of it. Like a minor epiphany where something previously unknown or unclear suddenly comes into sharp focus.

So I thought I'd throw the ball out there and ask everyone to share their favourite science facts. What incredibly cool facts do you know that make you proud to be a geek?

I myself have two I particularly love, so I'll just share them both.

Firstly, I have type B blood, which I got from my mother. My father is type A. Now, every specific gene in my body I inherited from only one of my parents, who inherited it from one one of theirs, and one of theirs, etc. So though I am an amalgamation of genes from two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, etc, each specific gene derives from only one person per generation as I trace it back. Now, bearing in mind all life has a common ancestor way back yonder, there must logically have been a time when blood types A and B were one, and simply diverged. We may not know how far back that time was, but we do know it was further back than the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees. So, to conclude, in terms of this one specific gene - my blood type - I am more closely related to a chimpanzee with blood type B than I am to all humans with blood type A, which includes my own father!

(I am choosing to ignore the fact that I inherited my RECESSIVE blood type gene from my father, since it was O - also his recessive gene).

The second fact concerns ants and bees (and wasps, I think, though not termites). Every hive/nest is mostly made up of females - the workers, soldiers, nurses, queen, etc, are all female. Males make up a small percentage of the hive. They just sit in a chamber doing nothing at all useful until the day they fly out, mate with the young, soon-to-be queens and drop down dead.

When a queen lays an egg (which she does pretty much constantly) she may or may not mix it with the sperm she collected when she mated - if she does, the egg will be female. If not, it will be male. This means that males have only half the number of chromosomes that the females do. Consequently, each sperm from the male will be a genetic copy of him - it will contain all the genes he has and no others (baring mutations, of course).

Now, your relatedness to either of your parents is 50%. You share 50% of your genes with each parent. Your relatedness to any full sibling is 50% too - since any gene you have has a 50% chance of being passed down to your sibling also. But that is because both of your parents had two sets of chromosomes. If, as is the case with ants and bees, the father only has one set which he passes on in full to any child, the relatedness you would have to any sibling would be 75%. In other words, any gene you have could have come from your mother or father. If it came from your mother, there is a 50% chance your sibling has it too. But if it came from your father, there will be a 100% chance your sibling has it.

In short, female ants and bees (ie, the majority of the nest/hive) are more closely related to their sisters than they are to their own mother - and the queens are more closely related to their sisters than to their own children.

I know this doesn't work exactly since the queen mates with many males, so the store of sperm she has will be from several males. So each daugther will have half-sisters, who will only be 25% related to each her. But others will be full sisters, and with them they will share a genetic bond closer than that between parent and child. Only identical twins are more closely related.

Both those facts made me take a mental step back and think 'wow' when I first thought them through. I hope I've done them justice in relaying them here.

So yes, I want to hear more fun science geeky facts! Something trivial, or something deeply profound. Something funny or something astonishing. Anything at all really. Go mad, show off! Let's all just throw our favourite science snippets into the mix and see what comes to the boil.

I eagerly await seeing what everyone comes out with.