>>14017840Continuing:
"People have put forward direct evidence for life after death, in the form of near-death experiences or even cases of reincarnation. Often it is claimed that patients near death saw things that they couldn’t possibly have seen, or that young children remember events from past lives that they couldn’t have known about. Upon closer inspection, the large majority of such testimony proves to be less dramatic than originally suggested. One famous case is that of Alex Malarkey (his actual name, honest), who wrote the book The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven with his father, Kevin. After reaching bestseller status and being made into a TV movie, Alex admitted that his tale of visiting heaven and meeting Jesus during a near-death experience was a thorough fabrication.
No cases of claimed afterlife experiences have been subject to careful scientific protocols. People have tried; several studies have been conducted trying to find evidence for out-of-body experiences in patients who have near-death encounters. Researchers will visit hospital rooms and, without specific knowledge on the part of patients or medical staff, hide some kind of visual stimulus in a place where the patient would have to be floating freely of their own body to see it. To date, there has been no case where such a stimulus has been clearly seen.
When judging the veracity of such claims, we need to weigh them against the scientific knowledge we have acquired in much more controlled conditions. It’s possible that the known laws of physics are dramatically wrong in such a way as to allow human consciousness to persist after the death of the physical body; however, it is also possible that people under the extreme conditions of nearly dying are likely to hallucinate, and that reports of prior lives are exaggerated or faked. Each of us must choose our priors and update our credences the best we can."
