The Floaters: A scientific-religious debate is shaping up over near-death experiences.

A look at the dangers for both sides.

By Marc Gellman
Newsweek

July 17, 2007 - The lines between science and religion are getting a little too blurry for my taste. Genesis is bleeding into Darwin in the creationist debate and this is damaging to both smart piety and smart science. One is about why we are here and the other is about how we are here. Both or either may be wrong or right, but they are not in conflict. There is a line that separates them into two domains of human thought and hope. Forcing them to be alternatives produces a false choice and a distortion of both our educational system and our theology.

As reported, scientific breakthroughs in medicine have now enabled doctors to revive people who seem to be dead, and to increase the time window in which sudden cardiac arrest can be treated before permanent brain damage occurs. Obviously a good and healing thing, these procedures were not possible just a few years ago. However, we must realize that these patients who were revived were not really, truly dead in the first place. Doctors have various definitions for death, but a clinical death or coma is not the same thing as brain death. There is no coming back from brain death. So no basic immutable rule of the universe was altered when doctors saved these heart-attack patients. This is not a miracle; this is just really good medicine saving people from really final death.

The near-death experiences of some of the revived patients are the fuzzy line blurring part of this story. The NDEs recounted in NEWSWEEK and on NEWSWEEK.com offer up everything from the traditional story of floating above the operating table to the unique account of being trapped in a room of rotting meat. Some scientists are now testing to see if NDEs are real by putting objects on high shelves above the operating table to see if the floaters can later recall what was on the shelf. This is a ludicrous perversion of medical science. It is like setting a trap for angels or taking night-vision goggles into a supposedly haunted house. These foolish experiments do not debunk religion, they trivialize science.

On the religious side of the NDE issue the dangers are also grave. The basic theological mistake in taking NDEs seriously is that they betray the true nature of faith. They pretend to offer empirical proof that death is not the end of us. If it is true that these people were really dead and they caught a glimpse of heaven or hell, then only a moron would deny that there indeed is a life after death for our souls. If NDEs are true, so this primitive theology implicitly argues, then denying that there is a place called heaven is as foolishly false as denying that there is a place called Cleveland. However, the proof for heaven is completely different in nature from the proof for Cleveland. It is different in precisely the way Genesis is different from Darwin. Cleveland is confirmed by maps and the Cleveland Indians’ home games. Heaven is confirmed for believers like me by an act of hope that love survives the grave. Heaven is confirmed by an act of hope that there is a divine providence at work in the world to come, in which the righteous and the wicked are finally given their just deserts. Heaven is confirmed by an act of hope that we will not be separated forever from those we love. Most of all heaven is a hope that goodness somehow has an edge over cruelty in this universe. To imagine that all these millennial hopes in life after death are nothing because some guy named Fred said he was floating over the operating table is both hysterical and pathetic.

Religious beliefs are not primarily sustained or confirmed by empirical evidence, which is evidence gained from what you can see, touch, hear, feel or smell. They are rather established by a freewill trusting in a God who can be truly inferred from our world, but who is not limited to our world. It is a trust born from our experiences of love, sacrifice, virtue and compassion.

In the meantime, let us be happy that because of the skill and wisdom of incredible doctors, some sort-of dead people were saved from being dead-dead people. If they want to float on their own time, God bless them.