Why the Anti-Science Creationist Movement Is So Dangerous

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Near-Death Experiences Without Being Near Death

I've written before about near-death experiences and what they can prove about the existence of the soul. Now another study has come to my attention, one that has an even more potent conclusion. (HT: Boing Boing)

It's long been known that the content of NDEs is influenced by religion and culture. People who have them consistently encounter the kind of afterlife they expect and meet the religious figures they've been taught to believe in. For example, while Christian NDEs often include Jesus or angels, Hindus report NDEs in which they meet Hindu gods, or a clerk in a celestial bureaucracy who says that there's been a paperwork error and someone else with the same name was supposed to die instead.

This suggests that NDEs, rather than a glimpse of another reality, are brain-generated experiences. Like dreams or hallucinations, they're shaped by people's background beliefs and expectations. And there's more evidence for this in a 1990 article in the Lancet, with the wonderfully sardonic title, "Features of 'near-death experience' in relation to whether or not patients were near death". (The abstract is online, as is full text.)

As the article says:

The medical records of 58 patients, most of whom believed they were near death during an illness or after an injury and all of whom later remembered unusual experiences occurring at the time, were examined. 28 patients were judged to have been so close to death that they would have died without medical intervention; the other 30 patients were not in danger of dying although most of them thought they were.

There were some differences between the two groups. People who were genuinely near death were more likely to report perceiving some kind of strong light (whether diffuse, at the end of a tunnel, or emanating from people they saw during the NDE). They were also more likely to report "enhanced cognitive function", including greater speed or clarity of thought or unusually vivid sensory perceptions. However, when it comes to the "classic" NDE elements, the sense of leaving one's body and of experiencing a "life review", there was no difference between the people who were actually near death and those who weren't:

Belief in having left the body and seeing it from above. The two groups showed no difference in this belief. 68% of both groups reported this belief.
Memories of earlier events in life. The two groups also did not differ in proportions reporting memories of earlier events in the subject's life (sometimes called "life review" or "panoramic memory"). 6 (27%) of 22 patients near death and 4 (17%) of 23 patients not near death reported some such memories. Most patients reported only a few memories; only 2 (9%) patients near death and 2 (9%) patients not near death reported a review or replay of his or her whole life.

Some of the patients who were not near death were judged to have no serious illness or injury; others had a serious illness or injury, but not one that put them in danger of dying. Regardless, they believed they were dying or near death, and they had NDEs that seemed indistinguishable from those of people who had serious impairment of vital signs and would have died without medical intervention. The conclusion is clear: NDEs are the product of imagination, of a brain that thinks it's dying, whether it actually is or not. As the authors of the paper say:

The psychological interpretation receives support from the evidence that persons who are not near death (from illness or injury) may have experiences that in all respects resemble those of persons who are near death. It would seem that among those who were not near death their experiences were precipitated by their belief that they were.

September 19, 2011, 5:45 am • Posted in: The ObservatoryPermalink19 comments

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200,000 Earths

[Think we're all ready to talk about something else for a while? —Ebonmuse]

In May 1987, astronomers witnessed a once-in-a-lifetime event: a supernova, the explosive death of a supergiant star, in the Large Magellanic Cloud approximately 170,000 light-years from Earth. SN 1987A, as it was named, was the first supernova to be studied using the instruments of modern astronomy (although not the first supernova witnessed by humanity), and produced a wealth of data for scientists.

Image via.

After the bright initial explosion, SN 1987A gradually faded over the next few months. But then, later in the year, astronomers got a second bonus: three large, glowing rings appeared around the star, lit up as if by a cosmic switch. The prevailing theory is that these rings are clouds of gas puffed off by the star earlier in life, and the intense shock wave of energy emitted by the supernova ionized and heated them to the point of becoming luminous. Among other things, these bright rings were large enough to use for a trigonometric calculation that yields the exact distance between SN 1987A and Earth, providing a useful cross-check for other methods of measuring cosmological distance. And the ongoing study of SN 1987A continues to yield new discoveries, including one just reported in the July 8 issue of the journal Science.

The European Space Agency's space-based Herschel observatory, which sees in far infrared wavelengths, was surveying the Large Magellanic Cloud and had a chance to observe the dead star. In Herschel's sensitive vision, the site of SN 1987A was glowing with dim, low-temperature radiation being emitted from a colossal cloud of cold dust surrounding the supernova remnant. This cosmic dust is made up of all the elements heavier than helium - carbon, oxygen, iron, nitrogen, silicon - that were synthesized in the nuclear cauldron of the star's later life and spewed into space in its death throes.

But what surprised the astronomers was the sheer size of the dust cloud. Being cold and dark, it would have been hard to detect with a less sensitive instrument than Herschel, which is why it went unnoticed until now - but, according to the researchers, there was enough dust blown out of the supernova to create 200,000 Earth-sized planets.

I hope, when you read that number, you feel the same faint tingle of awe that I do. That cold, dark dust cloud enshrouding the dead star potentially contains the seeds of tens of thousands of worlds.

As the supernova remnant expands, most of this dust will dissipate into the cosmic medium, become spread out into space. But some of it may enrich gaseous nebulae where new stars are born, and when the swirling protoplanetary disks around those young suns collapse, they'll form planetesimals that will be drawn to each other by gravity and coalesce to form new planets. When the fiery heat of their birth subsides, these new planets will have their own continents, their own oceans, their own mountains, their own rivers and seas - and perhaps in time their own life, all made, just as our world and we ourselves are made, of atoms forged millions of years ago in a star's stupendous death.

We are scions of the universe, and the cosmic process of creation that made us is still going on. Carl Sagan, of course, said it best:

"The Cosmos was originally all hydrogen and helium. Heavier elements were made in red giants and in supernovas and then blown off into space, where they were available for subsequent generations of stars and planets. Our Sun is probably a third-generation star. Except for hydrogen and helium, every atom in the Sun and the Earth was synthesized in other stars. The silicon in the rocks, the oxygen in the air, the carbon in our DNA, the gold in our banks, the uranium in our arsenals were all made thousands of light-years away and billions of years ago. Our planet, our society and we ourselves are built of star stuff."

170,000 years ago, a sun died in a distant galaxy, and the dispersal of starstuff began anew. The light from that cataclysm only reached our telescopes in 1987, which means that we won't know for another 170,000 years what's going on in that region today. It may well be that some of those precious atoms are already engaged in the processes that will one day lead to them becoming part of a living being on a rich and distant world.

July 11, 2011, 5:58 am • Posted in: The ObservatoryPermalink12 comments

News Flash: Psychics Still Useless


At first they found spots of blood on the porch, seemingly proving that the psychic tip-off was good as gold. But after obtaining a search warrant and examining the property in more detail, they found that the blood had a mundane explanation, and there were no bodies, no mass grave, and indeed no indication of any crime at all.

"With the assistance of various agencies out here at the scene," Captain Evans said, "we were able to search the premises after the arrival of a search warrant, and we have no indication that there are in fact any bodies located in the residence, the shed, or any property here at the scene."

(Some news agencies excitedly and mistakenly reported at first that bodies had been found, only to be forced to retract that claim subsequently.)

Are any of us surprised? Of course not, because as this story demonstrates further, all psychics are worthless frauds and con artists. Shame on the Texas police for not knowing that from the beginning and treating her "tip" as the useless hoax it was. How do they justify this colossal waste of time and resources chasing a wild claim from a posturing charlatan?

"Some of the information that was provided to us did specifically match information we found at the scene," Mr. Evans said.

Ah yes, of course. Because there was in fact a house at the location described by the tipster, that means that the wild claim of a mass grave was plausible? This reminds me of the Christian apologists who say that if the places described in the New Testament were real, that proves that Jesus really did walk on water and come back from the dead. You can't justify an extraordinary claim with merely ordinary evidence.

The obvious explanation for how the tipster was able to describe the house is that it's someone who knows the people who live there. That was in fact suggested by one of the homeowners, who believes the source was a mentally unstable neighbor with a vendetta against them. The Texas police say they plan to track down the tipster and charge her with filing a false police report, as they should, and I hope this embarrassment is an object lesson to them the next time some deluded person calls in with another wild story.

But the most comical part of it all is the "real" psychics claiming - wait for it - that this sort of thing makes them look bad!

"Oh my God, now we're all going to get a black eye," was Jacki Mari's first thought when she heard that a false tip from a psychic had led law enforcement officers on a fruitless search for a mass grave in East Texas on Tuesday night.

Ms. Mari, also known as Sherlockjackie, has, by her own reckoning, helped solve more than 400 murders and missing persons cases around the world -- all without leaving her office outside Chicago. Her own psychic powers -- she calls it "extrasensory intelligence" -- told her that the informant's tip was spurious, Ms. Mari said...

You'll also note that, once again, a credulous media has given a pretender unrebutted column space to claim they've "helped" in dozens of cases, without debunking this claim or even asking for follow-up details about which cases these were. The standard M.O. for psychics in a real police investigation is to provide dozens of tips, ranging from the absurdly specific but unverifiable to the uselessly vague ("The body will be found near water," "The body will be found near a church"), and then claiming that they "helped" if any of those statements turn out in retrospect to be true - even if many more of them are wrong, and even if the "psychic"'s advice played no role in actually helping the police find the body or catch the criminal. (Another classic example was the "remote viewing" company which wrongly claimed kidnap victim Elizabeth Smart was dead.)

When a psychic can provide a convincing demonstration of their powers in a controlled test, I'll believe there may be something to their claims. Until and unless that ever happens, the only reasonable conclusion is that psychics are all either self-deluded or deliberate fraudsters, and don't deserve to be taken seriously by the police or anyone else.

June 10, 2011, 12:22 pm • Posted in: The ObservatoryPermalink37 comments

Darwin's Long Regret

Since we've been reading a lot lately about scientists pandering to religion, it's worth remembering that there's nothing new under the sun. As long as there's been science, there have been believers who fought fiercely to prevent their god of choice from being dislodged from a gap, and there have been scientists who felt obliged to placate them. Even some of humanity's greatest scientists felt this pressure, and bowed to it on occasion. Here's one example, which I first read about in Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale.

The final page of the first edition of Origin of Species, published by Charles Darwin in 1859, concludes with this eloquent statement:


But the second edition, published a year later, makes one small but significant change, which you can see highlighted in the online variorum:


The phrase "by the Creator" was added by Darwin as a sop to religious people who were upset by the implications of his theory. But though the change persisted in later editions of Origin, he was never happy about it. In a letter three years later to his colleague Joseph Hooker, Darwin expressed regret for having inserted it:

But I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion and used the Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant "appeared" by some wholly unknown process. It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.

I can't help being reminded of similar scientific regrets, like when Albert Einstein added a fudge factor, the cosmological constant, to general relativity to counterbalance the force of gravity and accommodate the then-fashionable belief in a perfectly static universe. If he'd left it out, he would have been able to predict from his own equation that the universe was dynamic, as Edwin Hubble proved just a short time later with the discovery of galactic redshifts. He later called this his biggest blunder, and it seems Darwin viewed this change in a similar light.

In Darwin's writing, we see both of the threads that the scientific community has been wrestling with ever since: the desire to tell the truth, no matter what, and the desire to pay tribute to people's preexisting beliefs to make them see scientists as friends and not enemies. If there's a lesson to be drawn here, however, it's that this sort of clumsy pandering rarely works (as Darwin himself would have agreed). The theistic language Darwin added, of course, did nothing to placate the religious groups who saw uncomfortable implications for their beliefs in his theory. Neither did it stem the creationist backlash that's still going strong.

With that in mind, shouldn't modern scientists take the lesson that they should speak the truth as they see it above all else? Watering down a theory by finding gaps to insert God into will only decrease its scientific merit, without making any difference to the diehard fundamentalists who will never accept any idea that challenges their beliefs. It's better to disregard religion altogether: study the world and learn what it has to teach, and don't worry about the fleeting superstitions that cry objection when their self-proclaimed fields of sovereignty are infringed.

June 4, 2011, 5:59 am • Posted in: The ObservatoryPermalink7 comments

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The Language of God: Biologos: Epic Fail

The Language of God, Chapter 10

By B.J. Marshall







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