EVIDENCE THAT CONSCIOUSNESS DOESN’T REQUIRE A LIVING PHYSICAL BODY

What if consciousness exists apart from a physical body? It signifies that there is a dimension of existence that affirms the Biblical worldview and lies beyond the grasp of naturalistic explanation. Many would then have to revise their worldview. They would have to acknowledge the existence of the world of spirits and surrender the worldview that they had held – naturalism, materialism, and perhaps even atheism. Instead, it is easier to dogmatically proclaim that spiritual realities are not within the purview of science.

However, it seems that science can speak to the question of consciousness existing apart from a body:

·       Of the 2,060 patients from Austria, the US and the UK interviewed for the study who had survived cardiac arrest, almost 40 per cent said that they recall some form of awareness after being pronounced clinically dead. http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/670781/There-IS-life-after-DEATH-Scientists-reveal-shock-findings-from-groundbreaking-study

·       Of those who said they had experienced some awareness, just two per cent said their experience was consistent with the feeling of an outer body experience – where one feels completely aware and can hear and see what’s going on around them after death.

One man was able to recall the events in the hospital with “eerie accuracy” after he had “died temporarily.”

This finding has often been reported but often ignored. Why? Perhaps Dr. Parnia’s response is illuminative:

·       “The detailed recollections of visual awareness in this case were consistent with verified events."

·       "This is significant, since it has often been assumed that experiences in relation to death are likely hallucinations or illusions.”

These findings are not unusual. Wikipedia reports:

·       In a review article B. Greyson refers to Van Lommel's study (as well as other sources) and mentions that there have been "documented and corroborated accurate perceptions by near-death experiencers of incidents that occurred during the time when the brain was fully anesthetized or deprived of blood flow, as during cardiac arrest or respiratory arrest". B. Greyson also mentions that apparently some patients reported events that occurred beyond what their sense organs could perceive and that would have been impossible for them to perceive even in a conscious state. (Greyson, Bruce (2015-11-09). "Western Scientific Approaches to Near-Death Experiences". Humanities. 4 (4): 775–796. doi:10.3390/h4040775.)

·       Another review article reports that 41 (12%) of the cardiac arrest patients interviewed provided accounts similar to the Sam Parnia's 2001 study. Also, the same review article. One patient had a conventional out of body experience where he reported being able to watch and recall events during the time of his cardiac arrest. His claims were confirmed by hospital personnel. “This did not appear consistent with hallucinatory or illusory experiences, as the recollections were compatible with real and verifiable rather than imagined events”. (Parnia, Sam (2014-11-01). "Death and consciousness--an overview of the mental and cognitive experience of death". Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 1330: 75–93. doi:10.1111/nyas.12582)

These findings point powerfully to another reality, a spiritual reality, outside of the physical. If this is so, then the existence of a supreme Spirit Being from which all the spiritual entities derive their existence, becomes very probable.

P. van Lommel concluded:

·       How could a clear consciousness outside one's body be experienced at the moment that the brain no longer functions during a period of clinical death with flat EEG?... (the) NDE pushes at the limits of medical ideas about the range of human consciousness and the mind-brain relation. (van Lommel P, van Wees R, Meyers V, Elfferich I. (2001) "Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A prospective Study in the Netherlands" in The Lancet, December 15; 358(9298):2039–45)

Raymond Moody published “Life After Life” in 1975 based upon 150 interviews with people who had claimed NDEs. Cardiologist and assistant professor at Emory University School of Medicine, Michael Sabom, had been highly skeptical. However,

·       Over a five year period he interviewed and compiled data on 116 persons who had had a close brush with death. Of these, 71 reported one form or another of near-death experience…Sabom conducted extended interviews with the ten who had detailed recollections, either of resuscitations or surgery. The results were astonishing. In every case, the accounts jibed with standard medical procedures; moreover, where medical records were available, the records of the procedures and the accounts of the patients perfectly matched. In all of these cases, [unconscious] patients observed details that they could not possibly have observed from their physical vantage point. (Patrick Glynn, “God: The Evidence,” 103-104)

Due to reported out-of-body-experiences, some of the subjects were even able to report what was transpiring in the next room. If even some of these many accounts can be trusted, they argue very persuasively for an extra-material existence.

However, such findings are ignored, because they do not fit into the prevailing materialistic paradigm that nothing exists outside of the physical world. To suggest otherwise opens the door to considerations about the existence of God – an inconvenient and uncomfortable truth. However, some evolutionists have even admitted that God must be resisted at all costs:

·       We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs . . . in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated commitment to materialism. . . . we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. (Lewontin, Richard, Review of The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan. In New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997.)

·       Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such a hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic. (Todd, Scott C., "A View from Kansas on the Evolution Debates," Nature (vol. 401. September 30, 1999), p. 423.)

Nevertheless, exploration of the physical world has provided evidence for the spiritual.  The dualistic claim is that the spiritual mind can plug into the physical brain much as sound and sight waves plug into a television to produce programming. Interestingly, the founders of modern neuroscience were dualists:

·       Dualism reigned unchallenged in Western thought until recent times, and the founders of modern neuroscience, Charles Sherrington, Wilder Penfield, and John Eccles, were all dualists (Dinesh D’Souza, “Life After Death: The Evidence,” 108)

Penfield would electrically stimulate the brain but noted that there were responses that seemed to be extra-physical:

·       Penfield would stimulate electrically the proper motor cortex of the conscious patents and challenge them to keep one hand from moving when the current was applied. The patient would seize this hand with the other hand and struggle to hold it still. Thus one hand under the control of the electrical current and the other hand under the control of the patient’s mind fought against each other. Penfield risked the explanation that the patient had not only a physical brain that was stimulated to action but also a nonphysical reality that interacted with the brain. (Lee Edward Travis)

Penfield found that his patients could distinguish between responses that had been electrically stimulated from those self-stimulated, suggesting that some actions, decisions, and beliefs lied beyond the strictly physical:

·       Invariably the patient would respond, by saying, “I didn’t do that. You did…No matter how much Penfield probed the cerebral cortex, he said, “There is no place…where electrical stimulation will cause a patient to believe or to decide.” That’s because those functions originate in the conscious self, not the brain. A lot of subsequent research has validated this. When Roger Sperry and his team studied the differences between the brain’s right and left hemispheres, they discovered the mind has a causal power independent of the brain’s activities. This led Sperry to conclude materialism and false. (J.P. Moreland, interviewed by Lee Strobel, “Case for the Creator,” 258)

If the brain is entirely a physical entity, we should expect that every type of mental activity could be stimulated, but this isn’t the case. In fact, the very notion of freewill contradicts materialism. It affirms the fact that our choices aren’t totally determined by chemical-electrical responses.

The freewill problem is so daunting for the materialist. If everything is matter and energy, there is no room for freewill, something self-initiated. Consequently, the materialist often opts to deny its reality.

To deny dualism is to deny freewill. Materialism comes at a prohibitively high price. It even denies many of the values that even the materialist seeks to retain, like human equality.

Without the God of the Bible, this concept is unsupportable. Why? Materialism can only see human differences in education, sex, strength, appearance, and contributions to society. Consequently, some represent a cost to society while others represent a contribution.

How does all of this address the question of God? Well, I know that there are lying spirits (demons). This firsthand knowledge is important, especially for someone like me, a skeptic by nature, imbued with the Western prejudice against the world of spirits in general.

I have two cousins who used to do the Ouija board when they were 10 and 12. It terrified them, but we adults pressured them to do it at a family event. The results were nothing short of amazing. The disc raced around the board, as the girls placed all four hands upon it, spelling out words as fast as we could record them. The words became sentences, and then thoughts and stories, communicating things that the girls were incapable of knowing and even beyond their ability to express them.

We skeptics then blindfolded them. This didn’t impede their performance in the slightest. Even today, my atheistic family has no natural explanation for what we saw.

I had been so impressed, that I persuaded my girlfriend into doing the Ouija with me. The spirits that we conjured were very liberal in their use of profanity, but answered all our questions. I had naively assumed that they could be trusted, assuming that these spirits were ascended, enlightened beings who had evolved past any interest in lying. We asked them the big question – “Is there a God?” To this, they answered “Ouija!”

My parents had also been burglarized, and so we asked the spirits to disclose the identity of the perpetrators. They gladly identified neighbors of my parents. Immediately, I decided that I would take revenge upon them, but fortunately, the police apprehended the real perpetrators before I could take action.

Since then, through Scripture, I have come to understand these spirit beings as evil, as I should have realized years before:

·       …for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve. (2 Corinthians 11:14-15)

I reasoned that if there are evil spirit beings, there must also be good spirit beings. More recently, a student told me of her own experiences:

·       As a teenager I often hung out with large groups of people varying in age, some my age and some adults and little children. One week, during the winter, we decided to perform séances for 3 nights. Incidences occurred, but for the first 2 days, I was stuck babysitting the little ones, so I couldn’t see what was happening. I was usually told the next day by someone in the group of by a boyfriend of mine at the time. He would tell me that he couldn’t remember because as soon as the praying or chanting started he would fall asleep and when it was over he would wake up to find that his cross hanging around his neck would be broken and on his lap. When the séances were on although I was in a closed room but I could still hear a lot of commotion going on and even some screams. I had to be at one of these things to see what was going on, so the last night of the séances I decided to speak up and say I didn’t want to take care of the kids that night. I sat with my boyfriend and the chanting/praying started. We were all in a circle sitting around the room I don’t remember holding hands. The person who was the medium was the same for all the nights of the séances. It was a woman and she would sit at the head of the circle in a chair and start the chanting and we all listened. Right away my boyfriend fell asleep and I knew something was going to happen. I looked at the woman and her face seemed darker so I left my chair and approached her out of curiosity. Why was it I could see her body but by her head it looks like a dark shadow was there, so when I came close I noticed her eyes seemed crooked and were looking straight ahead as if she didn’t know I was there. I called her name and she didn’t answer. Someone from the group told me to stay seated and they proceeded to talk to this woman but the voice that came out of her was a man’s voice and very deep. I was a little scared and tried to wake up my bf, but he wouldn’t wake up, so I sat next to him. All of a sudden out of nowhere, the woman started screaming and ran toward the kitchen. Some of the men that were there including her husband ran after her to try to calm her down but the voice kept saying he had to throw her out of the window. Finally after she was pulled to the floor and she was restrained one of the other people started praying over her. After that I decided not to partake in any of those things again, it was too scary. 

I have found that these experiences have been shared by many others, who were only able to find relief by calling upon Jesus. Jungleman, a Yanomamo shaman turned Christian, had been convinced that the spirits he was experiencing were divine god-like beings. However, in Spirit of the Rainforest, he finally confessed:

• “I wish I had known the truth about [Jesus] when I was a young man—it would have saved me so much pain and misery. But how could I? My spirits lied so much to me and tricked me. They were so beautiful, so wonderful, so hard not to want. They were the best at telling me split-truth. Now I’m at the end of this life, and I’m ready to begin my real life with [Jesus]. (Mark Andrew Richie, 238)

Spiritism comes with a high price-tag. In “The facts on Spirit Guides,” John Ankerberg and John Weldon sound the alarm about this often ignored world. They warn of the strong association between spiritism and mental illness:

• “One discovers many mental patients who are mentally ill precisely because they are demonized. This is born out by the research of German psychiatrist and parapsychologist Hans Bender who coined the term “mediumistic psychosis’; by theologian and psychologist Kurt Koch; and by clinical psychologist and Swedenborgian Wilson Van Dusen, who has examined thousands of patients and noted the parallels to spiritistic experiences and phenomena.” (27)

However, the spirits do not gain a foothold by advertising the costs, one of which is suicide. According to Ankerberg and Weldon, there have been,

• “…innumerable cases where the ‘loving’ spirits have deliberately induced emotional dependence upon their advice and then at a moment of weakness encouraged their contact to commit suicide. And this has been occurring for decades, probably even centuries. In the 1920 text The Menace of Spiritualism, case after case of tragedy is listed.” (37)

The authors have compiled their own list of horrors that have stalked mediums:

• “Arthur Ford became a morphine addict and alcoholic…Bishop Pike died a tragic death…The biography on [Edgar] Cayce by Joseph Millar reveals the extent of suffering Cayce’s occultic involvement cost him—from psychic attacks to mysterious fires…Many channelers seem to succumb to various vices later in life.” (39)

Although they describe the medium M. Lamar Keene as “fraudulent,” from his book, The Psychic Mafia, they cite:

• “All the mediums I’ve known or known about have had tragic endings. The Fox sisters, who started it all, wound up as alcoholic derelicts. William Slade…died insane in a Michigan sanitarium. Margery, the medium, lay on her deathbed a hopeless drunk….Wherever I looked it was the same: mediums, at the end of their tawdry life, dying a tawdry death.” (39-40)

Violence was another price to be paid:

• “Spiritist and guru Sri Chinmoy, a spiritual advisor at the United Nations observes, ‘Many, many black magicians and people who deal with spirits have been strangled or killed. I know because I’ve been near quite a few of these cases.’” (40)

• “Dr. Kurt Koch observed after 45 years of counseling the occultly oppressed that from his own experience ‘numerous cases of suicide, fatal accidents, strokes and insanity are to be observed among occult practitioners…Anyone who has had to observe for 45 years the effects of spiritism can only warn people with all the strength at his disposal.” (40)

These observations parallel our more global observations regarding the fate of spiritistic cultures. In Whence the “Noble Savage,” Patrick Frank, summarized the research regarding analysis of ancient burial sites of spiritistic cultures. The findings, for instance, demonstrate that the violent death rates of British Columbian Native Americans (27-33%) far exceeded even the violent death rate of 20^th century Europe and the US (1%). Frank also adds:

• “The Southwest is dotted with finds of people killed en masse…These indications of war, violent deaths, mutilations and cannibalism are from tribal societies that experienced no European or modern contact, thus contradicting the idea that peoples who were free from European influence lived relatively peaceful lives.” (Skeptic Mag. Vol 9, #1,2001, 54-60)

Spiritistic societies build no hospitals, establish no universities, and build no enduring institutions. Instead, according to their own reports, they have been spirit-ravaged. Ankerberg and Weldon have listed several books by spiritists who have found refuge in Christ:

1. Victor Ernest, I talked with Spirits
2. Ben Alexander, Out from Darkness
3. Raphel Gasson, The Challenging Counterfeit

They conclude, “What is amazing is that the evidence is there for all to see and yet it is ignored.” (38) This may be “amazing,” but it’s also frustratingly true!