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The book A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely-Tuned Cosmos by cosmologists Luke Barnes and Geraint Lewis discusses the incredibly precise fine-tuning of the forces, parameters and constants that comprise the structure of the universe.
Here's a video trailer that introduces the theme of their book:
The trailer suggests that there are four possible explanations for this incomprehensible level of precision, but for reasons I'll explain in a moment, there really are only three.
The first is that something about the universe makes it a logical necessity that the values cosmologists find are in fact the only possible values a universe could have. There is no reason, however, to think this is the case. There's nothing about the universe, as far as we know, that makes it impossible for gravity or the strong nuclear force, to take just two examples, to have slightly different strengths.
The second explanation is that even though it's astronomically improbable that any universe would be so fine-tuned that living things could exist in it, if there are other universes, all with different parameters, universes so abundant that their number approaches infinity, then one like ours is almost bound to exist. This option goes by the name of the multiverse hypothesis.
The difficulty with this idea is that there's no good reason to believe other universes actually do exist, and even if they do why should we assume that they're not all replicas of each other, and even if they're all different whatever is producing them must itself be fine-tuned in order to manufacture universes, so all the multiverse hypothesis does is push the problem back a step or two.
The third explanation is that our universe is the product of a very intelligent agent, a mathematical genius, which exists somehow beyond the bounds of our cosmos.
There are actually two varieties of the third option. One is to say that the designer of the universe is a denizen of another universe in which technology has advanced to the point that it allows inhabitants of that world to design simulations of other universes.
The trailer treats this as a fourth option but since it posits a designer who resides in some other universe it's actually a combination of the second and third options and suffers some of the same difficulties as the multiverse hypothesis. It also assumes that computer technology could ever simulate not only an entire cosmos but also human consciousness, which is certainly problematic.
The other version of the third explanation is to assume that the designer of our universe is not some highly accomplished computer nerd in another universe but rather that it is a transcendent, non-contingent being of unimaginable power and intellectual brilliance who is the ultimate cause of all contingent entities, whether universes or their inhabitants.
Which of these options is thought most attractive will vary from person to person, but philosophical arguments won't settle the issue for most people. Human beings tend to believe what they most fervently want to be true, and what they most want to be true is often whatever makes the fewest demands upon their autonomy and their lifestyle.
Like many great artists, American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow experienced a lot of tragedy in his life. At the age of fifty seven (1863) he wrote to a friend, “I have been through a great deal of trouble and anxiety.”
Indeed he had. His first wife died in 1835 from complications from a miscarriage:
28-year-old Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was devastated by the death of his beloved young wife, Mary. The couple had been traveling in Europe as the poet prepared to begin teaching literature at Harvard.
The distraught Longfellow gave vent to his grief, resolving to dedicate himself to a life of "goodness and purity like hers." He vowed to abandon "literary ambition . . . this destroyer of peace and quietude and the soul's self-possession," but by the time he returned to Cambridge in 1836, he had begun writing again and eventually remarried.
Suffering from grief, Longfellow plunged into study and spent the following winter and spring in Heidelberg perfecting his German.
Henry met Fanny Appleton eight months after Mary died, while summering in Switzerland. Fanny captivated Longfellow, but she did not show the same interest in him.
Longfellow proposed marriage in 1837 but Fanny refused him.
The young professor left soon after for America and his duties at Harvard. Longfellow persuaded Elizabeth Craigie to accept him as a boarder at her home overlooking the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His first writings were published during these years.
Resuming his friendship with Fanny Appleton, Longfellow was crushed by her rejection of his marriage proposal in 1837, but he was determined to win Fanny’s heart.
In July 1839, he wrote to a friend: “[V]ictory hangs doubtful. The lady says she will not! I say she shall! It is not pride, but the madness of passion”. His friend George Stillman Hillard encouraged Longfellow in the pursuit: “I delight to see you keeping up so stout a heart for the resolve to conquer is half the battle in love as well as war.”
After seven years of courtship, Fanny married Longfellow on July 13, 1843. Her father purchased the Craigie House later that year, and presented it and the surrounding grounds to the Longfellows as a wedding gift.
Well-educated, Fanny was a perceptive critic of art and literature who happily shared her husband’s pursuits. Henry and Fanny were seldom apart.
The home, well-known even then as George Washington‘s headquarters during the early days of the American Revolution, would be their residence for the rest of their lives. Fanny never changed the room where George and Martha had celebrated their 17th wedding anniversary amid the sorrows and uncertainties of war.
The family home was a favorite gathering place for artists, philosophers, writers and reformers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens and Charles Sumner. An active abolitionist, Longfellow contributed money to help freedom-seeking and former slaves and to support the anti-slavery cause.
The Longfellows were blessed with the birth of six children – Charles (1844), Ernest (1845), Fanny (1847, who died in childhood), Alice (1850), Edith (1853) and Allegra (1855). Alice was delivered while her mother was under the anesthetic influence of ether – the first time it was used in North America.
Fanny was a skilled artist, art collector and insightful commentator on 19th-Century Boston literary culture, well-traveled, and well-read in many subjects. She was a loving and attentive mother and had much influence on the intellectual growth of the Longfellow children.
At Craigie House they formed the warm family circle that became a kind of national symbol for domestic love, the innocence of childhood and the pleasure of material comfort.
By 1854 Longfellow was able to resign from Harvard. He had become, at age forty-seven, one of America’s first self-sustaining authors.
For the next seven years, Henry was able to pour his energies into his writing, unimpeded by teaching duties and supported by the love of his family.
But tragedy was to strike again:
On July 9, 1862 after trimming some of seven year old Edith’s beautiful curls, Fanny decided to preserve the clippings in an envelope. While she was melting a bar of sealing wax with a candle to seal the keepsake in the envelope, a few drops fell unnoticed in her lap. A breeze came through the window, igniting Fanny’s dress – immediately wrapping her in flames.
In her attempt to protect Edith and Allegra, Fanny ran to Henry’s study in the next room, where Henry frantically attempted to extinguish the flames with a throw rug. Failing to stop the fire with the rug, he tried to smother the flames by throwing his arms around Frances – severely burning his face, arms and hands.
Fanny Longfellow died of her injuries the next morning, July 11, 1861, at the age of 43, and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.
Too ill from his burns and grief, Henry did not attend her funeral. His facial scars and the difficulty of shaving caused him to grow the beard that gave him the sage and distinguished look reproduced in so many paintings and photographs.
A month after Fanny’s death, on August 18, 1861, Longfellow wrote about his despair in a letter to his late wife’s sister, Mary Appleton Mackintosh:
"How I am alive after what my eyes have seen, I know not. I am at least patient, if not resigned; and thank God hourly – as I have from the beginning – for the beautiful life we led together, and that I loved her more and more to the end."
Longfellow continued to reside in the house they had shared and served as both father and mother to the children. The first Christmas after Fanny’s death, he wrote, “How inexpressibly sad are all holidays.” The entry for December 25, 1862 reads: “A merry Christmas’ say the children, but that is no more for me.” The Christmas of 1863 was blank in his journal.
His troubles weren't over. Justin Taylor recounts that in March of 1863 his oldest son Charles ran off to join the Union army without his father's permission. In November he suffered a severe shoulder wound – the bullet passing within an inch of his spine.
His father traveled to Washington, D.C., to consult with doctors. Charles' survival was in doubt.
One doctor said the wound could result in paralysis. Another surgical team provided more promising news, saying the young soldier would survive but would require months of healing.
They returned to their home in Cambridge by Christmas 1863. That morning Henry listened to the bells ringing. Taylor writes:
He heard the Christmas bells that December day and the singing of 'peace on earth (Luke 2:14),' but he observed the world of injustice and violence that seemed to mock the truthfulness of this optimistic outlook.
At this moment in which the widower with six children was languishing in the midst of a terrible war and a life of grief and suffering, he found hope in those bells and penned a wonderful poem titled "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day." The poem has been recited and set to music ever since.
It closes with these stanzas (You can read the whole poem here):
And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."
That last stanza should be bring hope to those suffering today in China, Iran, Ukraine, North Korea and everywhere that men of blackened and hate-filled souls are torturing and murdering the weak and the helpless.
In a recent study the Pew Research Center discovered something interesting about American "nones," i.e. those who claim no religious affiliation.
They found that the "nones" in the U.S. are at least as religious as Christians in several European countries, including France, Germany, and the U.K.
This is on the face of it a startling result, although I'm not sure how much it actually tells us. One difficulty with surveys of religious beliefs is that the term "religious" lacks a clear definition.
We're pretty sure Christianity, Islam and Judaism are religions, but what about Buddhism, Daoism or Confucianism which are non-theistic? Are these latter systems religions or are they merely guides to living, like Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking?
To get around this problem Pew specifically asked respondents if they "believed in God with absolute certainty." They found that whereas only 23 percent of European Christians say they believe in God with absolute certainty, 27 percent of American nones say this!
More American nones say they believe in God with absolute certainty than do European Christians?
Of course, this raises another difficulty. What is the concept of God whose existence the respondent either rejects or accepts?
Some people think of God as simply "something out there," a "higher power," "the universe," "the totality of being," "humanity," "science" or "nature." Since different people have different concepts of God, the question whether they believe in God, without specifying what's meant by "God," is quite meaningless.
Perhaps the next time Pew poses the question they might sharpen it up a bit by asking whether the respondent believes in the existence of a personal, transcendent being who is maximally good, spaceless, timeless, immaterial, and non-contingent, and which possesses the properties of both omnipotence and omniscience.
That's the traditional concept of God in the Judeo-Christian West, and if people were asked whether they believe that that God exists the results might be considerably different and more useful.
Let us for a moment assume that naturalism, the view that nature is all there is, is correct and that humanity is the product of a long process of blind evolutionary development. If so, let's further consider the question of what men and women are for.
That is, given the assumption that we're just evolutionarily advanced mammals what "purpose" do we fulfill? Of course, I put "purpose" in quotes because on the view we're considering there actually isn't, nor can there be, any genuine purpose for humanity, but let's play along with the idea anyway.
Well, speaking purely biologically, male humans have evolved to serve two primary purposes: First, to spread their genes as far and wide as they can, and second, to fight for territory and resources. Any reading of history will confirm that these have always been, and still are, the two main drivers of male behavior.
In modern times, in what we call the civilized world, these behaviors have been sublimated somewhat by sports and other competitive endeavors, but they still underlie most of male behavior.
What about females? Speaking purely biologically - and on naturalism that's pretty much all there is - women have evolved to attract males for mating and to bear and raise the young that result.
This is, of course, a horrid claim in today's cultural climate in which any suggestion that the sexual subordination and oppression of women is natural is guaranteed to provoke howls of outrage, but it's nevertheless correct all the same. That is, it's correct if naturalism is true, and there's a piquant irony in this.
Many of those who would be most repulsed by this description of male and female roles hold to a naturalistic worldview. They reject the only metaphysical position which could undergird a greater dignity and purpose for both men and women.
They dismiss the traditional theistic view that we are created not solely by natural forces for natural ends like the perpetuation of the species, but by a God in whose image we are and who grants equal dignity to everyone.
Having rejected this view they're left with naturalism and are therefore left with the evolutionary view whose consequences they paradoxically deplore.
Moreover, on naturalism, there's no basis for charging any behavior with being immoral since there's no moral law to be violated. Thus no matter how distastefully men may behave toward women, the most we can say about that behavior is that it offends certain social conventions. We can't say that it's morally wrong.
So, if naturalism is true, men who sexually exploit women are simply following an unpleasant evolutionary imperative. Modern women may not like it, but it's hard to see what grounds they have for complaint as long as they themselves continue to adhere to the naturalistic, evolutionary paradigm.
Here's a problem to which no one has ever provided a satisfactory answer, or any answer at all, apparently: Which came first, mammals, specifically humans, or mammalian pregnancy?
Throughout the development of the human fetus it's constantly interacting with the mother via chemical signals and feedback systems, but until and unless all these interactions are in place and operational a fetus could never develop and there would be no next generation.
Yet Darwinian evolution holds that biological development occurs gradually, step by step, over eons of time with neither guidance nor foresight, but how could this be if all these systems have to be in place simultaneously and fully operational in order for the fetus to be viable?
So, either there's a gradual evolutionary pathway that mammalian pregnancy followed that has so far eluded all attempts to elucidate or all of the systems between mother and child were set in place from the beginning.
Believing the latter is at least as rational as believing the former, unless one has a priori ruled it out because it would require an intelligent, purposeful engineer at the outset of life and the skeptic has concluded that no such being has ever existed.
But why conclude that? It's simply a metaphysical preference lacking any evidential warrant.
The co-author of the book Your Designed Body, engineer Steve Laufmann, addresses the pregnancy problem in this short video:
It's not uncommon to hear human beings referred to as hairless apes. We look a lot like apes, after all, and according to Darwinism apes and humans have descended from a common ape-like ancestor.
Nevertheless, neuroscientist Michael Egnor isunimpressed by the morphological similarities. According to Egnor,
We are more different from apes than apes are from viruses. Our difference is a metaphysical chasm. It is obvious and manifest in our biological nature. We are rational animals, and our rationality is all the difference.
Human beings, Egnor argues, have mental abilities or powers, that animals simply do not.
Systems of taxonomy that emphasize physical and genetic similarities and ignore the fact that human beings are partly immaterial beings who are capable of abstract thought and contemplation of moral law and eternity are pitifully inadequate to describe man.
Nonhuman animals such as apes have material mental powers. By material I mean powers that are instantiated in the brain and wholly depend upon matter for their operation. These powers include sensation, perception, imagination (the ability to form mental images), memory (of perceptions and images), and appetite.
Humans also have these same material powers, of course, but they have additional powers that are immaterial:
Human beings think abstractly, and nonhuman animals do not. Human beings have the power to contemplate universals, which are concepts that have no material instantiation. Human beings think about mathematics, literature, art, language, justice, mercy, and an endless library of abstract concepts.
A universal is an abstract concept like humanity or treeness to which particular humans or trees belong. Egnor continues:
Human beings are rational animals.
Human rationality is different because it is immaterial. Contemplation of universals cannot have material instantiation, because universals themselves are not material and cannot be instantiated in matter.
Universals can be represented in matter — the words I am writing in this post are representations of concepts — but universals cannot be instantiated in matter. I cannot put the concepts themselves on a computer screen or on a piece of paper, nor can the concepts exist physically in my brain.
Concepts, which are universals, are immaterial.
Nonhuman animals operate on the purely material plane. They experience sensations like hunger and pain, but they don't contemplate abstractions like the injustice of suffering or the meaning of their lives.
It is in our ability to think abstractly that we differ from apes, Egnor argues. It is a radical difference — an immeasurable qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference. It's a difference that creates the metaphysical chasm between humans and other animals.
Egnor concludes with this:
The assertion that man is an ape is self-refuting. We could not express such a concept, misguided as it is, if we were apes and not men.
All of us have seen dragonflies around ponds and lakes, but there's a lot more to these fascinating creatures than perhaps we realized. They really are amazing and their anatomy and behavior is unique as the video below illustrates.
It's a bit long (18 minutes), but if nature is an interest of yours, once you start watching you'll probably want to watch the whole thing. It's certain that you'll never look at dragonflies quite the same way again, and you won't take them for granted.
One question you might keep in mind as you watch is how such amazing engineering ever could've evolved through chance genetic mutations.
Saturday I urged readers to consider my novel In the Absence of God (2012) as a Christmas gift for friends and family and mentioned in passing its companion novel Bridging the Abyss which came out three years later.
Bridging is, in part, the story of the search for a young girl who has disappeared off the streets of Baltimore, MD and is believed to have been abducted. Members of the girl's family as well as those involved in the search are forced to confront the tension between a secular view of life which offers no ground for thinking any act "evil" and the obvious evil of which some men are capable.
Here's an excerpt from the Prologue:
In 1948 philosopher W.T. Stace wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly, a portion of which serves as an appropriate introduction to the story which follows in these pages. Stace wrote:
"The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called "final causes" …[belief in which] was not the invention of Christianity [but] was basic to the whole of Western civilization, whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth century ….
They did this on the [basis that] inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events.
"…The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated around the world….
"The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless.
A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends - money, fame, art, science - and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center.
"Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values….If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions.
"Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative."
This book, like my earlier novel In the Absence of God, is a story of people living in the wake of the revolution of which Stace speaks. It's a portrait of a small slice of modern life, a glimpse of what it is like to live in a world in which men live consistently, albeit perhaps unwittingly, with the assumptions of modernity, chief among which is the assumption that God does not exist or is in any case no longer relevant to our lives.
A world that has marginalized the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is a world which finds itself bereft of any non-arbitrary basis for forming moral judgments, for finding any ultimate meaning in the existence of the human species as a whole or the life of the individual in particular, and for hope that the human yearning for justice could ever be satisfied.
Modern man dispenses with God and believes that life can go on as before - or even better than before - but this is a conceit which the sanguinary history of the 19th and 20th century confutes. A world that has abandoned God has abandoned the fountain of goodness, beauty and truth as well as the only possible ground for human rights and belief in the dignity of the individual.
Modernity has in some ways of course been a blessing, but it has also been a curse. History will ultimately decide whether the blessings have outweighed the curse. Meanwhile, Bridging the Abyss offers an account of what I believe to be the only way out of the morass into which widespread acceptance of the assumptions of modernity has led us.
If you'd like to read more about either novel click on the link at the top of this page, and if you're looking for a gift for someone who likes to read and who thinks like W.T. Stace, both Absence and Bridging might be just the thing. I hope you'll give them a look.
They're available at Hearts and Minds Bookstore, a great little family-owned bookshop, and in both paperback and e-book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Is there someone on your Christmas shopping list you think might enjoy reading a novel which blends philosophy, religion, and a crime story all together on a college campus during football season? If so, you might consider giving them a copy of my book In the Absence of God.
I know the foregoing sounds like a shameless plug, but Absence encapsulates a recurring theme throughout our seventeen years here at Viewpoint. It's a fictionalized argument for the proposition that naturalism affords little or no basis for either moral obligation or ultimate meaning and renders a host of other human needs and yearnings absurd.
Naturalism, to put it succinctly, is an existential dead-end, for unless there is a God, or something very much like God, then life really is, as Shakespeare described it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
In the Absence of God is set on a mid-sized university campus in New England at the beginning of the fall semester sometime in the early years of the last decade.
The main plot line involves a professor named Joseph Weyland who's forced by the events swirling around him, as well as the challenge presented by a young nihilist in one of his classes, to come to grips with the implications of his materialistic worldview. As he wrestles with the issues his materialism raises he's engaged in an ongoing series of dialogues with a colleague and friend named Malcolm Peterson, and also with the pastor of his father's church, Loren Holt.
Meanwhile, the campus has been terrorized by an apparent serial rapist, and several young student-athletes find themselves thrust into the role of both victim and pursuer of the individual perpetrating these crimes.
Over the course of three weeks in late August and early September the lives of these students become intertwined with those of Weyland and Peterson in ways none of them could have foreseen when the semester opened.
In the Forward to the book I write this:
This is not a book about football, though it may at first seem to be. Neither is it a crime novel, though it ends that way. Nor is it just a book about people sitting around talking, although I'm sure some readers will think so.
In the Absence of God is a novel about ideas concerning the things that matter most in life. It's a tale of three different worldviews, three different ways of seeing the world and of living our lives in it. It's the story of how for a few short weeks in September these three views come into conflict on a college campus in New England and how that clash of ideas forces people on campus to think seriously about the implications of their deepest convictions.
It's often said that ideas have consequences, and nowhere is this more true than in one's personal philosophy of life - one's beliefs about God.
It's my hope that in reading this book you'll be stretched to think about things you perhaps hadn't thought about before, or that you'll at least think about your own beliefs in new and different ways. I hope that whatever your convictions about the matters taken up in this book may be, by the time you close its covers you'll agree that those convictions matter, and matter more profoundly than any other opinions you hold.
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You can read more about In the Absence of God by following the link at the top of this page. It's available at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds, and also at Amazon (paperback and kindle), where reviewers have given it 4.5 stars, and at Barnes and Noble (paperback and nook).
I hope you'll consider putting it and/or it's companion novel Bridging the Abyss (about which more on Monday) on your Christmas shopping list.
Every year since 1961 the Wall Street Journal has been running an account of the departure of the Pilgrims from Holland for the New World where they believed they could be free to worship without being threatened by an oppressive state church.
The recorder was a man named Nathaniel Morton, and he introduces his history with these words:
Here beginneth the chronicle of those memorable circumstances of the year 1620, as recorded by Nathaniel Morton, keeper of the records of Plymouth Colony, based on the account of William Bradford, sometime governor thereof:
What follows is Morton's recollection of the Pilgrims' departure:
So they left that goodly and pleasant city of Leyden, which had been their resting-place for above eleven years, but they knew that they were pilgrims and strangers here below, and looked not much on these things, but lifted up their eyes to Heaven, their dearest country, where God hath prepared for them a city (Heb. XI, 16), and therein quieted their spirits.
When they came to Delfs-Haven they found the ship and all things ready, and such of their friends as could not come with them followed after them, and sundry came from Amsterdam to see them shipt, and to take their leaves of them.
One night was spent with little sleep with the most, but with friendly entertainment and Christian discourse, and other real expressions of true Christian love.
The next day they went on board, and their friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other’s heart, that sundry of the Dutch strangers that stood on the Key as spectators could not refrain from tears.
But the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away, that were thus loath to depart, their Reverend Pastor, falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery cheeks commended them with the most fervent prayers unto the Lord and His blessing; and then with mutual embraces and many tears they took their leaves one of another, which proved to be the last leave to many of them.
They originally departed in two ships but one leaked badly and they had to turn back to England.
The leaking ship was found to be unseaworthy so some of the pilgrims abandoned the idea of trekking the ocean and returned to Holland. The rest, plus some others who wanted to accompany the pilgrims, boarded the one remaining ship, the Mayflower, and finally set sail six weeks after leaving Leyden.
One hundred and two men, women and children plus 30 crew made the voyage. They originally intended to land in northern Virginia and make their way to the Hudson river valley, but landed first near Provincetown on Cape Cod and later moved inland to establish their colony.
Morton goes on to write about what the company found upon their arrival in the New World:
Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour; and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts.
Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.
If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.
These were doughty men and women. It's hard to imagine what must have gone through their minds when they faced the prospect of winter in a land where they had to start a civilization almost from scratch.
The hardships they endured seem almost unimaginable to those of us accustomed to the comforts of modern life, comforts which we take for granted and for which we should be thankful to God.
The Thanksgiving holiday which Americans observe today is a beautiful celebration, not least because it reminds us of the importance of gratitude in our lives - gratitude to family, friends, neighbors, and God.
It's been said that gratitude is the most fragrant of the virtues and ingratitude one of the ugliest of character defects, and that certainly seems true.
Those who are grateful for what others have done for them have about them a sweetness and loveliness not exuded by any other personality trait, while those who take all their blessings for granted, or think of them as things to which they're entitled, or who are otherwise unappreciative for what others have done for them, project a self-centeredness or ignorance that's thoroughly unpleasant to be around.
Anyway, here are a few quotes for your contemplation that reinforce the significance of gratitude:
“Entitlement is such a cancer because it is void of gratitude.”
— Adam Smith
“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but the parent of all others.”
— Cicero
"It's not happiness that brings us gratitude, it's gratitude that brings us happiness."
- Anonymous
“Showing gratitude is one of the simplest yet most powerful things humans can do for each other.”
— Randy Rausch
“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.”
— William Arthur Ward
“Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.”
— Aesop
“The more grateful I am, the more beauty I see.”
— Mary Davis
“When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.”
— Elie Wiesel
“Make it a habit to tell people thank you. To express your appreciation, sincerely and without the expectation of anything in return. Truly appreciate those around you, and you'll soon find many others around you. Truly appreciate life, and you'll find that you have more of it.”
— Ralph Marston
“In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I hope that for all our readers (including even those outside the U.S. who don't celebrate the holiday) today will be a day filled with gratitude, love and joy.
Ever since the presidency of George Washington Americans had been celebrating days of thanksgiving, but they had been declared mostly by the states for the states. However, on September 28th, 1863 a 74 year-old magazine editor named Sarah Hale wrote to President Abraham Lincoln urging him to declare a nation-wide observance.
During his administration President Lincoln had issued many orders similar to this. For example, on November 28, 1861 he had ordered government departments closed for a local day of thanksgiving. Hale, though, wanted him to have the "day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival," an observance for which she had campaigned in her magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, for 15 years.
She explained, "You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritive fixation only to become permanently an American custom and institution."
Prior to this, each state scheduled its own Thanksgiving holiday at different times, mainly in New England and other Northern states.
President Lincoln responded to Mrs. Hale's request immediately, unlike several of his predecessors, who ignored her petitions altogether.
According to an April 1, 1864 letter from John Nicolay, one of President Lincoln's secretaries, the actual proclamation was written for President Lincoln by Secretary of State William Seward. A year later the manuscript, in Seward's hand, was sold to raise money to benefit Union troops.
Here's Lincoln's proclamation:
Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863
By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation.
The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.
Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.
Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things.
They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.
I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.
And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.
In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.
By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward,
Secretary of State
In some respects the proclamation reads quite as if it could have been written today.
I hope we all give thanks tomorrow for our many blessings, remembering especially, as we express our gratitude to God and to each other, those who suffer and grieve.
Physicist and writer Brian Greene does a fine job of explaining the concept of the multiverse in a column at The Daily Beast which appeared some years ago.
In the piece he quotes the late Carl Sagan reminding us that in science extraordinary claims must be supported by extraordinary evidence and then tacitly acknowledges that there's not much evidence for the multiverse theory, so we're left to wonder why it has enjoyed so much popularity among some cosmologists.
Perhaps one reason is that our universe is comprised of forces and constants whose values are calibrated with unimaginably exact mathematical precision.
If any of dozens of forces, like gravity, for instance, deviated in their strength from the tiniest amounts - one part in 10^60 in the case of gravity - the universe could not exist, or if it did it would not be the sort of place where living things could emerge.
It's mind-bendingly improbable that such precision would have emerged by sheer chance and there are thus only two viable explanations for it. Either the universe is the product of an intelligent engineering process or there are so many different universes, an infinite number, that one like ours would have to exist as a consequence of sheer probability.
Just as the probability of a blindfolded rifleman hitting a postage stamp half a mile away is increased as the number of bullets fired increases, so, too, the chance of a universe as improbable as ours increases as the number of different universes that exist increases toward infinity.
It seems odd that scientists would posit an explanation which requires the existence of so many entities for which there's so little evidence, but consider that the only viable alternative is that the universe is the creation of an intentional agent, a God, and it's easier to understand why they do so.
It is, at least for some of them, an act of metaphysical desperation.
As physicist Bernard Carr once put it, "If you don't want God you better have a multiverse." They're the only two live options.
Anyway, it would be good to read Greene's article. It's written by a physicist who's sympathetic to the multiverse theory, and, like much of his work, it's very lucid and accessible to the layman.
Richard Swinburne is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Oxford University and one the most prominent of contemporary philosophers. In his recent book, Are We Bodies Or Souls? he takes up Descartes' argument for the existence of the soul and amends it slightly to remove one of the classical objections philosophers have made to it.
The result is a succinct argument for the existence of the soul in human persons. His argument goes like this:
I am a substance which is thinking.
It is conceivable (i.e. logically possible) that while I am thinking my body is destroyed.
It is not conceivable (i.e. not logically possible) that 'I am thinking and I do not exist.'
I am therefore a substance which, it is conceivable, can continue to exist while my body is destroyed.
It is not conceivable (i.e. not logically possible) that a substance can lose all its parts simultaneously and yet continue to exist.
Therefore, I am a soul, a substance, whose only essential property is the capacity for thought.
How does the conclusion follow from the rest of the argument? According to 4. it's logically possible that I exist when my body ceases to exist, but according to 5. it's logically impossible that anything can continue to exist when every part of it is destroyed.
Therefore, there must be more to my existence than just the existence of my body. There must be something about me that can continue to exist when every part of my body is destroyed.
That other part of me must be, from 1. and 2., that part of me which thinks, i.e. a soul (or mind), and which I identify as myself.
Swinburne gives a cogent defense of this argument in the book, which, though he claims it to be written for a broad audience, would be rather hard going for someone with little background in philosophy.
Nevertheless, in an age in which the reigning view on these matters is a philosophical materialism which denies the existence of a soul or mind, Swinburne's book is refreshing.
Scanning the news we're often confronted with stories of mistreatment of women. Stories about campus rape culture, sexually hostile workplaces, spousal abuse, and other examples of violence and degrading behavior perpetrated against women seem to abound, and the question this all raises is "why?"
Why does it seem that more men today, more than in previous generations, hold women in such low esteem? Why are women so much more likely to be objectified and treated with disrespect today than in our grandparents' day?
I think a strong case can be made for the claim that the problem is a result of the moral revolution that took place in the 1960s and 70s concerning our attitudes toward sex and violence.
During those decades pornography was mainstreamed, and with the advent of the internet it became easily accessible to adolescents. Three generations of young men have thus been raised on ubiquitous pornographic images. It can be argued that this has had several undesirable effects.
First, it has desensitized men to sexual stimuli. A hundred years ago a glimpse of a woman's lower leg was stimulating. It no longer is because now there's much more to be seen anywhere one looks than merely a shapely ankle.
Consequently, men require stronger and stronger stimuli in order to achieve the same level of arousal as someone who's not exposed to the constant barrage of sexual images. Because of this need for ever more erotic stimuli many men want their women to be like the women they encounter in movies, magazines, and online - they want their women to be sexually voracious playthings, and that desire often has a dehumanizing effect on women.
A lot of women simply don't feel comfortable in that role, and that incompatibility can create tension in their relationships. The man feels cheated, the woman feels cheapened, and trouble results.
At the same time that pornography exploded, sex was disconnected from marriage and commitment. Many women were perfectly willing to live with men and give them all the benefits of marriage without demanding of them any kind of permanent commitment.
This suited many men just fine. When men could have sex without having to bond themselves to a woman, women were more likely to be objectified and used by men who reasoned that there was "no sense in buying a cow as long as the milk was free."
People who give us what we want may be popular as long as the benefits keep coming, but they're not respected. Respect may be feigned, of course, as long as the benefit is imminent, but when the benefit no longer seems all that novel or exciting a diminution of respect often follows and this results in the woman being treated accordingly.
Men are naturally promiscuous, they have to be taught to subordinate their natural impulses and to value instead hearth and family, but our entire culture has conspired in the last fifty years to minimize and deride that lesson. So, when many a modern man, unfettered by any profound commitment to a particular woman and children, grows accustomed to the woman he's with she'll eventually begin to bore him, and it won't be long before his eye is cast elsewhere in search of another potential source of sexual excitement.
Along with the decline of traditional sexual morality in the 60s and 70s was the emergence of a radical feminism that castigated the old Victorian habits of gentlemanly behavior. It became quaint, even insulting, for a man to give a woman his seat on a bus or to open a door for her.
Men who had been raised to put women on a pedestal - to care for them, provide for them, and nurture them - were told they were no longer necessary for a woman's happiness. In Gloria Steinem's famous phrase "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."
The more radical feminists also made it clear that women no longer appreciated being treated differently than men. Thus, our entertainment culture began depicting women in movies as just as raunchy, coarse, and proficient at killing and mayhem as men, and the idea of a woman being an object of special respect and courtesy because she needed male protection and care became risible.
This, too, dehumanized women by eroding the esteem in which their gender had formerly been held among men.
As with sex, so with violence. The inclination to violence in the male population follows a bell curve distribution. At some point along the tail there is a line to the left of which lies the segment of the population which represents men who are violent.
Most men sublimate and control their natural inclination to violence, but when they're exposed to it over and over as young men, when they amuse themselves with violent movies and video games, when they immerse themselves in violent imagery and themes, they become desensitized to it and tolerant of it.
When they're no longer horrified by violence the population of males along the bell curve undergoes a shift in the direction of that line, spilling more men onto the other side of the line than would have been there otherwise.
This affects women as much as men, if not moreso, because women are often the victims of male violence. As men become more inclined to violence, as they lose respect for women, as our culture portrays women as sexually insatiable playthings, women become increasingly the victims of male lust, anger and aggression.
It would be well for any young woman who is beginning to get serious about a young man to find out how much of his time he spends on violent movies and computer games and what he thinks about pornography. She'll learn a lot of very valuable information about him if she does.
Bruce Greyson is a psychiatrist and author of the book After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond. He has spent decades studying NDEs and his work has challenged the materialism he grew up with.
In an article about Greyson's work in The Guardian, he's quoted as saying that,
I grew up without any kind of a spiritual background....I am convinced now, after doing this for 40, 50 years, that there is more to life than just our physical bodies. I recognise that there is a non-physical part of us.
If you're interested in NDEs I recommend the entire article to you. The lede is so fascinating it's worth copying in full:
When Gregg Nome was 24 years old, he slipped into the churn beneath a waterfall and began to drown, his body pummeled against the sandy riverbed.
What he saw there surprised him. Suddenly, his vision filled with crystal-clear scenes from his childhood, events he had mostly forgotten, and then moments from early adulthood. The memories, if that’s what they were, were vivid and crisp.
Was he reliving them? Not quite. They came at high speed, almost all at once, in a wave. And yet he could process each one individually. In fact, he was able to perceive everything around him: the rush of the water, the sandy bed, all of it brilliantly distinct.
He could “hear and see as never before,” he recalled later. And, despite being trapped underwater, he felt calm and at ease. He remembered thinking that prior to this moment his senses must have been dulled somehow, because only now could he fully understand the world, perhaps even the true meaning of the universe.
Eventually, the imagery faded. Next, “There was only darkness,” he said, “and a feeling of a short pause, like something was about to happen.”
Nome recounted this story at a support group in Connecticut, in 1985, four years after the experience. He had survived, but now he hoped to understand why, during a moment of extreme mortal crisis, his mind had behaved the way it did.
The meeting had been organised by Bruce Greyson, now a professor emeritus in psychiatry at the University of Virginia. (Some of the group’s members had responded to an ad Greyson placed in a local newspaper.) As Nome spoke, Greyson sat in a circle of 30 or so others, as if at an AA meeting, listening intently, nodding along.
Greyson had been hearing of events like these for years. A month into his psychiatric training, in the 1960s, he had been “confronted by a patient who claimed to have left her body” while unconscious on a hospital bed, and who later provided an accurate description of events that had taken place “in a different room”. This made no sense to him.
“I was raised in a scientific household,” he says, over Zoom. “My father was a chemist. Growing up, the physical world was all there was.” He felt certain someone had slipped the patient the information. He also thought, “What does that even mean, to leave your body?”
For years, he tried to put the account behind him, but repeatedly he faced heady stories of people experiencing other-worldly events, either when they had been pronounced clinically dead or thought they were close to it, before being wrestled back to life.
".... It occurred to me for the first time that this wasn’t just one patient,” Greyson says. “It was a common phenomenon.”
He became fascinated by the qualities of the episodes and the questions they raised, including perhaps the biggest of all: what actually happens when we die? “I plunged in,” he says. “And here I am, 50 years later, trying to understand.”
One thing seems pretty clear. As science progresses the physicalist dogma that we're just material beings seems to be getting harder and harder to maintain.
Philosopher Patrick Grim offers a Lecture for the Great Courses series in which he asks by way of introduction what kind of knowledge ethical knowledge is.
In other words, is our knowledge that it's wrong to abuse children like our scientific knowledge - subject to empirical verification? Or is it more like the intuitive knowledge we have upon reflection, like the axioms of geometry? He begins his query with this:
We do know things about ethics. We know that human life is important and valuable. We know that people have rights; rights to take their own paths in life. We know it is ethically wrong to violate those rights.
We know we have obligations to our family, to our friends, to humanity at large. I take that to be an important kind of knowledge, but a normal kind of knowledge.
The question, as I see it, is not whether we have that kind of knowledge. The question is a reflective question about what kind of knowledge that is.
Not having heard the lecture series, I don't know where Grim eventually comes down on this question, but I'd say two things about it here.
First, I'm not sure we do know the things Grim says we know, although it's certainly true that many of us believe those things.
Secondly, in order for those beliefs we hold to be knowledge they have to have some warrant or justification, and that leads us to a crucial question: What warrant do we have for thinking that our beliefs - for example, that others have rights - are true beliefs, i.e. knowledge?
If someone claims that other people have rights then we might ask where those rights come from. If our rights are inherent in us because we're human then it'd be wrong for anyone to deprive us of them, but where do "inherent" rights come from, and what do we mean when we say that depriving someone of an inherent right is "wrong"?
If the human species is nothing other than the end-product of a blind, naturalistic process of development that occurred over eons of time then to say something is wrong is to say little more than "I don't like it", but if "wrong" is just what someone else doesn't like then why should anyone care about refraining from doing what others don't like if it doesn't suit them to do so?
Philosopher David Hume in his book The Treatise of Human Nature came to the conclusion that right and wrong are simply whatever wins the general approbation or disapprobation of one's fellows, but if that's all we mean by right and wrong then the terms are synonymous with "socially fashionable".
To accuse someone of doing wrong is like accusing them of gaucherie because they slurp their soup. Such behavior may be unconventional and distasteful, but it's not morally wrong. When we say that child abuse is wrong, however, we surely want to say more than that it's unconventional and distasteful behavior. We want to say that it's evil.
Ethics are indeed self-evident, and we do have intuitive knowledge of right and wrong, but only because, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, we've been endowed by our Creator with a law "written on our hearts" (St. Paul). That law, being the gift of a perfectly good and wise being who will ultimately hold us accountable to it, is the source of all our moral understanding.
It's binding upon us only because it's bestowed by a personal being. If it were merely the product of impersonal evolutionary forces we would be no more obligated to obey it than we are obligated to refrain from flying in an airplane because it flouts the law of gravity.
If, as Grim says, we know that human life is important and valuable, that people have rights; rights to take their own paths in life, that it's ethically wrong to violate those rights, and that we have obligations to our family, to our friends, and to humanity at large, then we are tacitly acknowledging that there must be a God who has bestowed those rights and obligations upon us.
Either that or we're trying to hold on to the belief in right and wrong while discarding the only suitable foundation for that belief. It's like pulling the table out from under the dinner setting and expecting the dishware to all remain in place.
The earwig is an insect that inhabits almost every damp crevice and corner of your patio and lawn furniture in the summer. They're not big, about an inch long, but they look intimidating with two large but harmless pincers at the rear of their abdomen.
One fascinating aspect of these common creatures is the amazing way in which they fold their wings. They rarely fly, but when they do their wings unfold and refold in an astonishingly complex fashion.
We're told by evolutionary biologists that this folding evolved through blind, purposeless processes in which just the right series of genetic mutations accidentally resulted in this folding ability, but it takes more faith than I can muster to believe random chance could've produced this extraordinary piece of "origami."
In our experience an ability this complex doesn't just happen through a series of accidents, it requires intelligent engineering - a mind.
According to exit polls, 63% of voters ages 18 to 29 voted for the left in the 2022 midterm elections. I don't think these younger voters actually favor most of the policies (inflationary spending, open borders, covid restrictions, higher taxes, defunding the police, repression of free speech, racial division, and late-term abortion) they voted for, but I do think they were venting their dislike of Donald Trump, the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, and anti-abortion absolutism.
Democrats have become the party of the educated elite and Republicans have become the party of the less educated working class. Republicans used to be associated with big business, but that's no longer true. Union leadership is still Democratic, but rank and file blue-collar workers are moving toward the GOP.
The same is true of black and Hisapanic voters. The Democratic Party can no longer take their loyalty for granted. A large minority of them are thinking for themselves and realizing that the Democratic Party has abandoned the values they hold dear.
David Brooks at the New York Times states that both parties are fundamentally weak. The Democrats are weak because they've become the party of the educated elite. The Republicans are weak because of Trump. If Republicans get rid of Trump, they could become the dominant party in America. If they don’t, they will decline.
It's certainly true that they're in decline now. A party that can't pick up seats in a mid-term election when the incumbent party has produced record inflation, chaos at the border, shortages of consumer goods, a refusal to address crime, hugely unpopular covid restrictions, "cancel culture", racial animosity, and a failing education system, is a party that has achieved peak impotence.
Some are blaming Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for not spending more to help Republican candidates, but this blame is largely misplaced. As The National Review editors note:
All this said, even by the harshest reasonable evaluation, McConnell’s midterm performance isn’t in the same universe as Donald Trump’s.
The former president chose poor candidates based on their fealty to him and his fevered and destructive 2020 delusions, spent hardly anything, made himself the center of attention to the extent he could, and conducted himself with his characteristic selfishness and lack of judgment.
For him to turn around and blame McConnell requires chutzpah even by his shameless standards.
Imagine a professional football team that has a marquee player on their roster. He excels at the sport, but he's constantly bad-mouthing his teammates in public. He behaves like a spoiled brat on the field and his presence in the locker room is corrosive to team morale.
Consequently, the team, which is loaded with talent, nevertheless fails to defeat even mediocre opponents.
Would not the management unload that player as soon as they could? Is not Donald Trump just such a player?
Back in 2012 Salon excerpted a piece from Mario Beauregard's book Brain Wars. The excerpt is a very interesting look at NDEs (Near Death Experiences).
The whole article is fascinating, bearing as it does on the question whether materialism is an adequate explanation of human cognitive experience, but I'll just give a couple of excerpts here.
It opens with the story of Atlanta-based singer and songwriter Pam Reynolds who, in 1991,underwent a surgical procedure in which her brain was completely shut down. She was clinically dead:
At this point, Pam’s out-of-body adventure transformed into a near-death experience (NDE): She recalls floating out of the operating room and traveling down a tunnel with a light. She saw deceased relatives and friends, including her long-dead grandmother, waiting at the end of this tunnel.
She entered the presence of a brilliant, wonderfully warm and loving light, and sensed that her soul was part of God and that everything in existence was created from the light (the breathing of God). But this extraordinary experience ended abruptly, as Reynolds’s deceased uncle led her back to her body—a feeling she described as “plunging into a pool of ice.”
NDEs are more common than one might think and they seem to be very cosmopolitan:
Surveys conducted in the United States and Germany suggest that approximately 4.2 percent of the population has reported an NDE. It has also been estimated that more than 25 million individuals worldwide have had an NDE in the past 50 years.
People from all walks of life and belief systems have this experience. Studies indicate that the experience of an NDE is not influenced by gender, race, socioeconomic status, or level of education. Although NDEs are sometimes presented as religious experiences, this seems to be a matter of individual perception.
Furthermore, researchers have found no relationship between religion and the experience of an NDE. That is, it did not matter whether the people recruited in those studies were Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, or agnostic.
Another very interesting case is that of a woman named Maria whose case was first documented by her critical care social worker, Kimberly Clark:
Maria was a migrant worker who had a severe heart attack while visiting friends in Seattle. She was rushed to Harborview Hospital and placed in the coronary care unit. A few days later, she had a cardiac arrest but was rapidly resuscitated. The following day, Clark visited her. Maria told Clark that during her cardiac arrest she was able to look down from the ceiling and watch the medical team at work on her body.
At one point in this experience, said Maria, she found herself outside the hospital and spotted a tennis shoe on the ledge of the north side of the third floor of the building. She was able to provide several details regarding its appearance, including the observations that one of its laces was stuck underneath the heel and that the little toe area was worn.
Maria wanted to know for sure whether she had “really” seen that shoe, and she begged Clark to try to locate it.
Quite skeptical, Clark went to the location described by Maria—and found the tennis shoe.
From the window of her hospital room, the details that Maria had recounted could not be discerned. But upon retrieval of the shoe, Clark confirmed Maria’s observations. “The only way she could have had such a perspective,” said Clark, “was if she had been floating right outside and at very close range to the tennis shoe. I retrieved the shoe and brought it back to Maria; it was very concrete evidence for me.”
This case is particularly impressive given that during cardiac arrest, the flow of blood to the brain is interrupted. When this happens, the brain’s electrical activity (as measured with EEG) disappears after 10 to 20 seconds. In this state, a patient is deeply comatose. Because the brain structures mediating higher mental functions are severely impaired, such patients are expected to have no clear and lucid mental experiences that will be remembered.
After considering a number of possible materialist explanations for NDEs Beauregard's article concludes with this:
The scientific NDE studies performed over the past decades indicate that heightened mental functions can be experienced independently of the body at a time when brain activity is greatly impaired or seemingly absent (such as during cardiac arrest).
Some of these studies demonstrate that blind people can have veridical perceptions during OBEs [Out of the Body Experience] associated with an NDE. Other investigations show that NDEs often result in deep psychological and spiritual changes.
These findings strongly challenge the mainstream neuroscientific view that mind and consciousness result solely from brain activity. As we have seen, such a view fails to account for how NDErs [Near Death Experiencers] can experience—while their hearts are stopped—vivid and complex thoughts and acquire veridical information about objects or events remote from their bodies.
NDE studies also suggest that after physical death, mind and consciousness may continue in a transcendent level of reality that normally is not accessible to our senses and awareness. Needless to say, this view is utterly incompatible with the belief of many materialists that the material world is the only reality. [Italics mine]
