Quote:
Quote by: Radarlove  Morality Games,
The word science comes from the Latin 'scientia' meaning knowledge.
According to Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, the definition of science is 'knowledge attained through study or practice.' What is the purpose of science? Perhaps the most common description is that the purpose of science is to produce useful models of reality. The NDE would fit into the study of social science.
Now, like yourself, I am not interested in belief or faith. I have absolutely no interest in religion, for example. As Marx famously said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses."
But, unlike you, I still hold to humanity's ability of intelligence and perception. If 1 person states they had an unusual non-scientific experience, I wouldn't be interested. 1,000, it becomes a little more interesting. The NDE has been experienced by tens of millions of people. In America alone, the 1992 Gallup Poll suggested 13 million. Add all the other countries around the world and I would suggest up to 100 million people living in the world today have experienced an NDE.
Surely, that is worth investigating? And surely the emphasis is placed on science to carry out this research. So, why aren't they researching this extremely important field? Why has science turned a blind eye?
It has been left to a few scientists and doctors with no grants or financial aid from the scientific community. And the more they suggest that the clinical evidence backs up the claims of those who have experienced an NDE; that there are other realities, other dimensions in time and space beyond our physical one, the greater the wall of silence and the more these researchers are treated like someone who has just farted in a crowded lift.
I would suggest science is not only acting irresponsibly but are also letting down, very badly, the general public. For science is about accruing knowledge and then expanding and improving on that knowledge. Mankind has placed their faith in science to gain a better understanding of reality. Yet, the scientific community show total disinterest in the NDE because the phenomenon does not comply to their restricted belief systems.
Therefore, it is not about lack of evidence, as some sceptics claim - as I have suggested, there is enough evidence out there to sink a small aircraft carrier - it is because the NDE does not fit into orthodox science's narrow paradym of reality. It would mean science doing a U-turn, holding their hand up and stating. "Sorry, we got it wrong, there is an afterlife after all." And no-one likes egg on their face - especially science. |
That's not a reasonable outlook. Science doesn't care about NDE because there is nothing to study -- what a person experiences is private and cannot be tested or controlled under any conditions. In science, you can't declare, "This is real," when you can't observe the process. One can inquire into the content of near-death person's experience and get a rough idea, but that is still scientifically useless, as any commonality in experience can be viewed as a result of common expectation or imagining due to cultural conditioning, not a genuine afterlife.
For you see, the scientifically plausible explanation is that if they exist at all, NDE are nothing except chemicals in the nervous system going berserk. This because all mental functioning is reducible to the brain.
Now, there is a remote
possibility NDE are representations of an afterlife, but it is still wrong to believe in them as if they were facts.