Wanna Do Research on the Afterlife? Here, Have $5,000,000

The world’s largest industry will always think of new ways to get more money from their poor brainwashed followers. I guess the many trillions they get a year is not enough. If they want to research that crap they should use their own money.

To an atheist who accepts the indemonstrable proposition that all existence, life, mind and reason itself are the result of undirected processes, the there is No Proof, even in principle, that they would logically need to accept.

I.E., and proof could be related back to the above proposition.

Can anyone give me an example of some proof that they would accept for, say, the existence of God, at least IN PRINCIPLE?

I suggest that they cannot.

Try.

I will show how your proof fails, because of the indemonstable proposition noted above.

 You mean like the Scientific/Military/Industrial complex?

There is nothing so foul that some scientist will not work on it for enough money.

“We will be very careful in documenting near-death experiences and other phenomena, trying to figure out if these offer plausible glimpses of an afterlife or are biologically induced illusions,” Fischer said. 
“…other phenomena….” 

Resurrections, perhaps?  I guess the failed Templeton prayer study wasn’t embarrassing enough.

 What was the Templeton prayer study?

So technically he is looking to confirm that murder isn’t really murder and the religious right can abandon their fight against abortion.

Well, I think I would have accepted the proof that Thomas got.

So–you would only believe in a god that only benefits people?

What sort of lesson would be taught if all forms of pollution instantly turned into clean air? That we’re free to make any sort of mess and God would just–clean it up for us?

As far as tsunamis–wouldn’t it just make more sense for people to just stop living where such things are prone to strike? It’s not as though they are something that just appeared out of the blue (as it were) a few years ago. We know what they are and we have a pretty good idea of where they strike and what they do, and we have since time immemorial.

And volcanoes do spew food–it just takes a few years and we have to put some work into turning that ash into crops. 

Would you really want to live in a world where food just rained out of the sky, the planet never changed, you were never surprised by a rainstorm, and God was nothing more than an indulgent babysitter to coddle you and give you everything you think you want, like a spoiled child holding his breath until given the shiniest toys?

Atheists are weird.

You mean like “Heaven”, asshole?

 I’m puzzled as to what they think will come of this. Proof of an afterlife? All I can see him doing is interviewing people about their “Near Death Expieriences” and trying to find commonalities in them.  Is the NDE of a Hindu similar to that of a Christian? Do they all see a tunnel of light, deceased loved ones and get to talk to a deity? Do Hindu’s see Krishna while Christians see Jesus?  Or do they just see a “being of light?”  And what does any of this prove?  What about people who have NDE and say they were about to be reincarnated before they were brought back to life as opposed to people who say they were on their way to Heaven or Hell?  Frankly I think this is just a stupid waste of money.

Is–is that what you think Heaven is?

Well, you’re welcome to it.

By the time I’m finished with my DVM program, I’ll be a quarter million in student loan debt. And I’m planning on going into lab animal medicine at a research facility. If they’ve five million in disposable cash to throw at research, send 1/20 of it my way.  I guarantee you I’ll do more good with it than this study.

I would gladly accept a $5 million three year grant to study the afterlife. And although my research may bare a strong resemblance to me playing Civilization 5 for 3 years, I assure you that in the end the research will be on the highest difficulty… I mean the “of the highest quality”. 

There’s nowhere to evacuate to to get away from disease, accidents, and bodily decay.

I would not be so hard on this. If I remember correctly it was a Templeton founded study that demonstrated conclusively that prayer don’t work. Therefore if that research is conducted well, there will be more indisputable evidence that there is on afterlife.

The sad part…? Alien abductions actually have a higher probability of happening!

That’s not Heaven; that’s life. You know what Heaven/afterlife is like? You see that big pile of non-existence? That’s what Heaven is like. That’s what the afterlife is like.

 Exactly.  I’m in the wrong business.

I would have gotten this done for $4.8 million tops, but I guess they lost my number.  In fact, I’m a simple man with simple needs, and I bet I could have done it for $4.5 million or so. 
But you get what you pay for, right?

Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zNdMc6wGtU
At least according to the Talking Heads.

Come on, tell us more about how people who live in areas with tsunamis and earthquakes and hurricanes should just move.

Oh come on, it’s Templeton money. It was going to be wasted anyway. Plus, the guy needs to make a living.
I like how he stresses the point, that he won’t research afterlife itself, but “the complexities involved in simple beliefs about heaven, hell and reincarnation”. I bet he’s thinking “hm, here’s a bunch of money from these nutjobs. I wonder how I could twist this research to get something useful out of it”.

It’s not like we believe “all existence, life, mind and reason itself are the result of undirected processes” just because we decided one day that that was what we really wanted to believe, and that we wouldn’t accept any evidence to the contrary.
It’s just that there’s never been any evidence to the contrary. 

Can you give me an example of proof you would accept for the existence of Zeus?
I’m sure you could think of a few things that might convince you, but it’s pointless because you already know he doesn’t exist. A huge, powerful god that interacts with humanity is hard to miss, yet somehow we missed him.

If God came down to me (and other people at the same time, so I knew I wasn’t crazy) and did a bunch of miracles or whatever, sure, I might believe. But he doesn’t do that. He can’t even manage simple things, like bringing rain to the Colorado fires. He hasn’t done what he’s specifically said in numerous verses; he doesn’t listen to prayers. Prayer makes absolutely no difference. The god described in the bible clearly does not exist, and I have never seen any proof that other gods exist either.

John 14:13 And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 
Lol Jesus, good one!

 Of course we want to “know.” So we need some evidence. The only kind that would be reliable is scientific evidence. So they’re giving this wad of cash to a philosopher?
.
And if did give money to a scientist to research life after death, could you please give some idea of how you think he would go about obtaining reliable scientific evidence?
.
Science also involves knowing what evidence is already available. The evidence we have already gives no reason to believe that there is life after death.

“philosophical evidence”

You made a funny. Ha ha!

If I remember correctly it was a Templeton founded study that demonstrated conclusively that prayer don’t work.

So did the Mayo Clinic study. And the Duke University study. And every other study of intercessory prayer ever done that was large enough to be statistically significant, designed well enough to find a relevant result, and not fraudulent. Part of science is knowing what evidence is already available before you design your own experiment.

I think if most people see some sort of light, the most it says about us is that our brains work in similar ways under a specific type of stress (eg, lack of oxygen when close to death). I find it interesting (not really) that most people who report religously-flavored NDEs “see” things that are common to the religion they are most familiar with (see the book “Heaven is for Real,” for example).

Also, I can’t help but think, “near-death” is not death. These people haven’t actually died. (My evidence: they are still alive to talk about it.) So they still don’t know what happens after death.

I have to go to work, but, briefly:

I never said anything about Heaven or an Afterlife (I’m agnostic about both). The most perfect place that I can imagine is the world that we have now and, yes, terrible things happen, but also wonderful things.

Anyone who lives cowering in fear of the bad things–or fails to understand that we’re just a small part of everything is going to be sad and angry all the time, and i don’t want to be like that. So I try and look for the good.

But go back, please–I never said anything about Heaven. I never said anything about a perfect place or anything–I just pointed out that I thought some of what the original poster said is a bit absurd. That is all.

 That’s freakin LAME

 The average for any vet student these days is about $150,000. I’m just one of the lucky thousands of us who couldn’t get into one of the 28 vet schools in the U.S. (yes, you read that correctly – only slightly over one school per two states) and had to find another option. Caribbean living for two and a half years and forever in debt, that’s the life for me!

In other words, there is conundrum when expanding the borders of already known science into an entirely new area, in that one can’t have a prior completely exhaustive definition of what counts as evidence for a given hypothesis, because there is no way prior to messy empirical exploration to know anything about what might confirm or falsify any hypothesis in the general subject. One might even say that the process of moving from protoscience to science is one of figuring out (from rather wilder empirical exploration) what those parameters are, so that falsification criteria and observational theories can be established under which a proper scientific hypothesis can be formed.

Personally in this particular case I wouldn’t even go so far as to say explorations into life-after-death qualify as protoscience (for a whole host of reasons), but it’s not entirely crazy to think that it does, and if a person thinks that it does it reasonably follows that the first order of business is to poke it with a stick in as many ways as one can think of and see what falls out, as a necessary prerequisite for more rigorous explorations down the road.

Whatever. You managed to confuse everyone here by arguing something that you actually have no opinion about.
Rob U was talking about a hypothetical perfect world and you mocked it…because it was too perfect. But that’s what a perfect world is. I don’t believe in a perfect world, but it seems strange to mock someone’s idea of what a hypothetical perfect world would be, unless of course they actually believe it, which Rob doesn’t.

If any of those things happened in my presence, I think I would suspect that I had become psychotic.  And then paranoia would make me think that everyone else was pretending to see it,  just to mess with my head.  I am not easily convinced, even by good evidence.  🙂

Wouldn’t it be easier just to go to medical school?

I wonder if they would take my own and also my mother’s accounts of near-death experiences in which we saw/heard/experienced absolutely nothing.

Except that without rigor you have no way to determine what constitutes evidence. And if all your doing is putting on a show to cover up an exercise in word games, what’s the point?

Are you sure you’re on the right post?

Except that without rigor you have no way to determine what constitutes evidence. 

Not so. At the beginning stages of a scientific paradigm, experimentation takes on the character of a “shotgun approach”, if you will. As a result of that rather less restrained and rigorous approach, and using a heuristic that philosophers and historians of science have been struggling to formally describe ever since science has existed, it becomes fairly intuitively apparent which approaches are likely to be fruitful and which ones aren’t. Then the next stage starts, with scientists harnessing these beginning leads by applying rigor.  Since science, the vast majority of the time, in the vast majority of its subdivisions, is being done in this second stage, sometimes it is easy to forget the stage that preceded it.

And if all your doing is putting on a show to cover up an exercise in word games, what’s the point?

It’s not clear what exactly you’re referring to, here. Can you be more specific?

What a great and awesome GOD he is!  Where can I sign up for a lifetime of blind servitude and groveling for this wonderful being?   I live in Texas… there must be a church around here somewhere….

 But GOD has suspended natural fundamental laws of nature — many times — haven’t you read the BIBLE?  Except for turning your shit and piss into delicious treats, he’s done a lot of other amazing things.  Isn’t the word of GOD proof enough for you?  😉

 If I had any interest at all in working on human patients, sure.

 He is. newavocation is taking the long view to the implications which would result from evidence that the afterlife is real

 To repeat: they are not giving the money to a scientist, they are giving it to a philosopher.

To repeat: I know that. See my comment further up the thread, esp. my original post, as to why the general point that Guest and I were making does not apply to this particular case.

And not for nothing, but you’re awfully snarky about philosophy, esp. laughing at the concept of philosophical evidence, which indicates to me that you don’t have a great handle on how evidence plays a role in philosophy. It plays a *different* role than it does in science, and not for nothing but the concept of evidence itself is more rigorously examined in philosophy than it ever is in science (who have more of a functional relationship with the concept).

Ah, yet another of these assholes who whine “you wouldn’t accept a miracle even if I showed you one”, then refuse to even pretend to show anything remotely resembling a miracle.  I’m so sick and tired of these lying sacks of shit.   I know there’s no chance of JDatty even pretending to address this honestly, but here’s my standard demand for divine evidence, complete with biblical citations.  It’ll be amusing to watch JDatty flee in abject terror from it while babbling incoherent nonsense.

JDatty, Matthew 21:22 says that ANYTHING a true believer asks for in
prayer will be granted, no exceptions. You claim to be a true believer,
you claim there are such things as miracles, you claim your god can do magic. So prove it.

Autoimmune diseases are painful,
debilitating, and currently incurable. They are not caused by a pathogen
but by a flaw in the immune system, causing it to attack the body’s own
tissues. They can lead to advancing disability, deformity, and death in
adults, and have been known to render infants permanently blind. We’re
talking about people in agony through no fault of their own, because
their bodies are betraying them, which if there truly were an
all-powerful god would imply it was grossly incompetent.

So, JDatty, pray that every person with an autoimmune disorder be completely
cured, and all damage to their bodies painlessly repaired, all within
one week of the appearance of this post. If you pray for this, and it
happens, then I will accept that your god is real, and consider the
possibility that it might not be wholly evil. But if you refuse to even
try, then you admit that even you don’t believe the book of mythology
you worship, and that you are a worthless sociopath, devoid of
compassion.

You have one week. Clock starts now, JDatty. Pray to heal the sick, or admit that prayer is a waste of time.  Current date is Sunday, August 5, 2012.  Current time is 1622 Eastern.  You have 168 hours to prove that you’re something other than a worthless, delusional, lying sack of shit.

Is there any plausible result from this “research” that would cause the people paying for it to alter their beliefs in the slightest respect?  If not, then they cannot possibly learn anything from this, because they REFUSE to. 

Keep in mind, there are people who have claimed to have visited the afterlives of NON-CHRISTIAN religious traditions, and these experiences are not treated as evidence that those religions are true by christians who insist that Near Death Hallucinations corresponding to christian myth prove christianity true.  So non-christian afterlife “evidence” has just as much support as what christians point to as proof of their delusions.  None at all. 

I’m sorry but in what way does dragging this poor old dead horse out of its grave and laying on another round of beating represent the beginning of a “new scientific paradigm”?

Umm…  Didn’t you see that winky smiley face thingy.  😉

Unless you forgot to put your own winky smiley face thingy at the end of it.  😉

You can buy or not whatever you wish. I clearly stated in the original post that I didn’t and don’t think the argument applies to the specific case. And where is the woo in Guest’s post? All he/she said, besides the square wheel metaphor, was that it is silly to think that this age has a monopoly on truth. He’s/She’s right about that too. Guest too was skeptical about whether this particular expenditure was reasonable.

What we are both addressing (apparently in vain) is the attitude that because something doesn’t match current understanding it is necessarily illegitimate. There are good historical and philosophical reasons to think that such a narrow approach to investigating reality is an extremely poor one.

I have to give Fischer some credit — how often do philosophy professors manage to bring in five million dollar grants?  And it’s a better reason for UCR (where I got my M.S.) to be in the news than the other recent event tangentially related to it: James Holmes, the Aurora mass-murderer, did his undergraduate work there.  Also, there’s at least a chance Fischer will produce a paper concluding that NDE’s do not offer any persuasive evidence of and afterlife, in which case the Templetonians will have wasted their five megabucks — and they won’t even be able to complain about it.

If anyone in the UCR philosophy department was going to get a huge grant like this, though, I’d rather have seen it go to the environmental ethicist and explicator of political liberalism Ernest Partridge.

“THERE IS NO EVIDENCE” is the worst cop-out of all. It means you haven’t sought it, nor accepted as ‘evidence’ prima faciae witness testimony, nor accepted, as evidence, knowledge that presents itself by different means than logic, ‘reason’ or black & white thinking.

 ‘Atheism’ is the worst cop-out of all; it is the easy road. Block it all out – and then you need not be concerned, nor look any further. I am not coming from a ‘religious’ perspective in saying that, BTW, just that my observation and experience tells ME thtat atheism is an easy, soft cop-out.

I agree with you when you say that you must “work hard to demonstrate that my proposals are based on credible evidence”, for that is the lot of the material scientist.

My complaint is that, in dealing with the subject of -say – consciousness, we are dealing with the immaterial; and you want your material rules to apply to that. What of the probability that your rules do NOT apply to that?

 Donaving, desperately fleeing from any suggestion that evidence is needed before mindlessly worshiping the invisible man in the sky: “Would you really want to live in a world where food just rained out of the sky”

Incidentally, according to the bible (chapter 16 of the book of exodus, specifically), we DO live in such a world.  According to the holy books of three religions, food WILL rain down out of the sky if god feels like making it happen.  Since it doesn’t do so, it looks like he just prefers to watch children starve to death.  What an asshole!  Lucky for everyone it’s not real. 

@Patterrssonn:disqus , from below.

The woo marker for me is the use of the new age phrase “other pathways to verify truth”. If Guest isn’t referring to woo, what are they referring to?

All the other ways everyone uses to determine truth to a reasonable degree of certainty in our lives. We don’t use science to determine whether our spouse loves us, or whether a movie is worth watching, or picking the aesthetic components of our meals, or which political ideology (if any) to support, or uncountably other realms of daily life. Science is a set of tools for a limited range of purposes; rigorous empirical investigation for the purposes of elucidating that which lends itself to quantitative analysis, such as the physical properties of the universe and the stuff in it, the physical mechanics of chemical reactions and life processes, the measurable qualities of societies and persons. Science is not a hammer for every nail, and nobody uses it that way.

Now, because of peculiarities inherent to science, in its effective range the conclusions produced using its method are highly reliable and yield an astonishing amount of instrumental efficacy (i.e. the conclusions are extremely useful). But it is fairly useless at producing reliable conclusions about any of the things I listed above and much more, and so we use “other pathways to verify truth” in those areas. I suspect that Guest would like to add religion to that list of “other pathways”, and I don’t really think I need to go into the many reasons why I think (and most others here think) that religion is a poor and painfully sub-optimal way to reach conclusions in any of those areas. If Guest thinks the argument opens significant space up for woo, then he’s/she’s wrong. But you are also wrong if you think there is no way besides science to reliably generate true observations and hypotheses.

Another day goes by, and JDatty is still too busy cowering in terror, pissing himself and crying, to even pretend to address any of the responses to his idiotic lies.  Four days, eighteen hours, and thirty-three minutes left!