A scientist's experience of heaven

While many see compatibilities between science and religion, many others see conflict. An Oct. 15 article in Newsweek, “My Proof of Heaven” by Eben Alexander, tries to bridge that conflict in a dramatic way.

Alexander is a neurosurgeon who has taught at Harvard Medical School and other universities. He tells of an experience he had four years ago when he awoke with an intense headache. “Within hours,” he writes, “my entire cortex—the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human—had shut down.” Doctors at the local hospital determined that he had contracted a rare bacterial meningitis that had penetrated his cerebrospinal fluid, and the bacteria were eating his brain.

For seven days he lay in a deep coma, and his higher-order brain functions were totally offline. Then, as his doctors weighed whether or not to discontinue treatment, his eyes popped open.

Alexander writes about his experience as a scientist because he knows how stories like his sound to skeptics. He notes that while he considered himself a Christian before this happened, it was “more in name than in actual belief.”

But his experience changed that. He writes: “There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well.” He describes “a larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, precoma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.”

Alexander is not the first to describe such an experience, but he is one of the few who does so as a scientist, and a neurosurgeon at that. And, as far as he knows, no one before him ever traveled to this dimension “(a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation.”

This is important because the chief arguments against near-death experiences “suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient or partial malfunctioning of the cortex.”

His cortex wasn’t malfunctioning; it wasn’t even functioning. “According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind,” Alexander writes, “there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.”

He goes on to describe his experience, with frequent disclaimers about language not being able to adequately capture what happened.

The message that “went through [him] like a wind” had three parts. He summarizes them thus:

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

Regardless of Alexander’s science credentials, most nonbelievers, I imagine, will simply deny the truthfulness of his experience, believing (yes, having faith) that some nondivine explanation will eventually emerge.

Many Christians, I imagine, will also deny his message because it’s too inclusive. It lets people off the hook. It doesn’t punish evildoers.

Alexander writes that the universe he experienced in his coma is “the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their (very) different ways.”

I’ve read (and heard) other accounts like Alexander’s, and each time I feel encouraged. But I also know it comes down belief. While science feeds our knowledge, what we decide about the universe and our place in it comes down to faith.

Questioning assumptions

Every year I choose my five top books of the year. I believe I've already read one of my top five for 2012.  When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, $24, 202 pages) collects 10 incisive essays on an array of topics, though common themes thread their way throughout, including education, religion and the nature of humanity. (Robinson is also an outstanding novelist; her novels Gilead and Home have appeared on previous top five lists of mine.)

When I read a book for review (and I've reviewed this book for the Wichita Eagle), I underline passages that strike me with their insight, the beauty of their language or their troublesome nature. Typically, by the end of my reading I’ve underlined a dozen or two passages at most. My copy of this book, however, is filled with such markings. There are few spreads without something underlined.

Such a plethora of insights and apt sentences make it difficult to do justice to the book. Any quotation will represent a small sample of what could be quoted.

In the book’s first essay, “Freedom of Thought,” Robinson notes what will become evident throughout the book, that she tries to free herself of constraints and not simply accept the standard approaches to certain areas of knowledge. She writes that the tendency of much of what she took from studying and reading anthropology, psychology, economics and cultural history “was to posit or assume a human simplicity within a simple reality and to marginalize the sense of the sacred, the beautiful, everything in any way lofty.”

Over and over, Robinson questions the assumptions made by so-called scholars that see human nature as simplistic, reductionist. She points out that often “the most important aspect of a controversy is not the area of disagreement but the hardening of agreement, the tacit granting on all sides of assumptions that ought not to be granted on any side.” One example, she notes, is “the treatment of the physical as a distinct category antithetical to the spiritual.”

She writes, “We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small.” Then, adopting her role as a teacher of fiction writing, she adds, “Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true.”

She challenges assumptions about religion or ancient peoples (“The Babylonians used quadratic equations.”) and points out the limits of science. She concludes that essay thus: “Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.”

In “Austerity as Ideology,” she applies this failure to see the mystery in humanity to current views of economics. She note that “market economics … has shown itself very ready to devour what we hold dear, if the list can be taken to include culture, education, the environment and the sciences, as well as the peace and well-being of our fellow citizens.” She also shows that “America has never been an especially capitalist country.” Meanwhile, “our wealth is finally neither more nor less than human well-being.”

In the title essay, we get a glimpse of what has already become evident: the wide and extensive range of Robinson’s reading. We also gain some insights into her fiction. She writes, “In a way Housekeeping [her first novel] is meant as a sort of demonstration of the intellectual culture of my childhood.” Remarking on her study of Latin in high school, she notes that her “style is considerably more indebted to Cicero than to Hemingway.”

She discusses her growing up in the West (Idaho) and the kind of individualism that often inheres there. However, she writes, “there is no inevitable conflict between individualism as an ideal and a very positive interest in the good of society.”

In “The Fate of Ideas: Moses,” Robinson defends the integrity of the Old Testament against critics who want to write it off. She pulls no punches in her interaction with Jack Miles’ God: A Biography, calling it a “dumbed-down pseudo-syncretism.” She calls some of the thinking behind such criticism “the flip side of fundamentalism” and concludes with: “Whether he was a rabbi, a prophet or the Second Person of the Trinity, the ethic [Jesus] invokes comes straight from Moses.”

In spite of these punchy quotes, Robinson’s style is more formal and florid, more—as she writes—Cicero than Hemingway. And she often includes a smile if not a laugh. For example: “I have never heard anyone speculate on the origins and function of irony, but I can say with confidence that it is only a little less pervasive in our universe than carbon.”

She questions accepted opinion and helps us think through its implications and its reasonableness. In “Cosmology,” her concluding essay, she takes on scientism and atheism: “The difference between theism and the new atheist science is the difference between mystery and certainty. Certainty is a relic, an atavism, a husk we ought to have outgrown. Mystery is openness to possibility, even at the scale now implied by physics and cosmology.” 

If you read When I Was a Child, be ready to have certain assumptions challenged and think through important issues while enjoying a master of prose.