The Rev Dr Peter Mullen is a priest of the Church of England and former Rector of St Michael, Cornhill and St Sepulchre-without-Newgate in the City of London. He has written for many publications including the Wall Street Journal
What are we to make of the claim by Dr Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon, that, while in a coma for seven days, he experienced the afterlife? The first reaction should be one of scepticism as “There’s more faith in honest doubt than you’ll find in half the creeds.” Dr Alexander has written a book on his experience and its imagery is nothing if not conventional: “a beautiful, blue-eyed woman … in a place of clouds …. big fluffy, pink-white ones … and shimmering beings.” I’ve had nice dreams like that myself. But then I woke up.
Scientific orthodoxy declares loftily that such experiences are generated by the brain around the time of death and therefore they have a physiological base and have no connection with objective reality, with what’s actually going on. But hang on a minute, every experience we have has a physiological base and this is because we are creatures of flesh and blood. No one would claim that my thoughts about my wife or, if it comes to that, about the fifth Test in 2005, England and the Aussies at the Oval, have no root in reality merely because they have a physiological basis.
The word for this interpretation of mental and spiritual experiences as wholly physiological is “reductionism” and as such it is no more than a blind prejudice. As Chesterton said, “The men of the 19th century did not disbelieve in Christ’s resurrection because their liberal theology allowed them to doubt it, but because their very strict materialism did not allow them to believe it.”
When we consider, we discover that many of those things which matter most to us are intangible. Love, beauty, loyalty, friendship, longing regret and so on. Of course we use our own tangibility to make contact with and express these experiences. But it is only the bigot and the hidebound materialist who says that, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, all these things come to an end. How does he know?
The idea that the world is a closed materialistic and deterministic system is only a supposition. It ain’t necessarily so. The dogma of cause and effect will take you a long way, but enter the world of quantum mechanics and the concept of causes and effects is meaningless. Materialism died with the coming of Planck, Bohr and Heisenberg.
For what it’s worth, I am sustained by the belief that the God who made me and loves me will not allow me to be finally annihilated. Of course, I haven’t a clue as to what the afterlife will be like – pink white clouds and beautiful blue-eyed women or not. But we shall continue to be after death in some fashion which is presently beyond our ken.
A word of caution. I had a parishioner who was dying slowly of some dreadful cancer. When I went to see him, he told me he no longer had any fear left in him, because he had received a glorious vision of Paradise. I visited him again in a couple of weeks and he was in despair, “I was in a sulphurous hell in all kinds of unimaginable torture, malevolence and pain, punishment for sin.”
In other words, the character of the afterlife is not neutral: it has a moral connection. As ye sow, so shall ye reap. Thinking of the afterlife? It’s there all right, waiting for you.
So, mind how you go!
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