Scripture Mark 10 The Little Children and Jesus 13 People were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuked them. 14 When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. 15 Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it. 16 And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them. 1 Corinthians 3 New International Version (NIV) The Church and Its Leaders 3 Brothers and sisters, I could not address you as people who live by the Spirit but as people who are still worldly mere infants in Christ. 2 I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. 3 You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere humans? Hebrews 5 Warning Against Falling Away 11 We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. 12 In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! 13 Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. 14 But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. 1
Bless the Lord oh my soul When Pastor Greg last asked me to speak last time it was to answer the question about what Jesus and the Apostles sang after the Last Supper before heading out to the Mount of Olives. This time he asked me whether there is an empirical basis for the soul. Whether he asked this in reaction to my requests for empirical evidence whenever faced with dubious social, environmental or economic claims or out of curiosity I did not ask as the question coalesced some of my thinking. The question arose at a time my own reading had taken an interesting turn. One was a book by Rupert Sheldrake entitled Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery and another introduced to me by my good friend Henry Klassen was The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary. The authors are both Christian believers and true scientists. 1 Sheldrake provides the intellectual basis for thinking outside the rigid box that science has gotten itself into and Beauregard and O Leary present specific examples from research that I then investigated further in their original form. I won t be reviewing all of the evidence but will use examples from the research evidence provided. I am working out a conceptual model of how the soul, mind and body interact and function but I will avoid getting into that speculative area and focus on just the empirical evidence and what it may mean to us. However, first I want to address our scriptures to set a context for the evidence. We need to square the circle between Christ saying that we must become like little children remember he told Nicodemas that he had to be born again and Paul telling people that they need to spiritually grow up and stop being like infants and little children. We refer to what we in the evangelical tradition call 1 The late Steven Schneider put the issue succinctly that when a scientist turns advocate he/she faces an ethical choice and risks not being a true scientist even though he himself argued for the advocate position on climate change: On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This double ethical bind we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both. http://climatesight.org/2009/04/12/theschneider-quote/ 2
conversion as being born again. The decision to believe, to accept Christ as our Lord and Savior requires us to recognize our complete dependence on God as an infant is totally dependent upon its mother. That is the first step of becoming a Christian; acknowledging that God is supreme and that we exist and have our being solely due to Him. Paul, on the other hand, is talking about being a Christian and the need for spiritual growth and development demonstrated by the fruit of the Spirit which he identified to the Galatians as love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Becoming a Christian is step 1; being a Christian requires our continual spiritual development from that point on. This is a key concept. Likewise C.S. Lewis admonition that we are not a body with a soul but rather a soul with a body is also critical to keep in mind. Why we would identify the impermanent body as having the permanent soul is just odd and when we think we are a body with a soul we fall into the secular materialism way of thinking. We are souls with a body and we need to vest our identity in our permanent self not the one that will pass away. And this leads directly into defining for the purposes of this discussion what I mean by soul. Simply stated my soul is the me that persists after my body dies. In which case empirical evidence for the existence of the soul requires the persistence of a person s identity and consciousness when there are no observable signs of life. This brings us to the research on what are called Near-death experiences (NDE). NDEs occur with increasing frequency because of improved survival rates resulting from modern techniques of resuscitation. The content of NDE and the effects on patients seems similar worldwide, across all cultures and times. 2 Many NDEs have been reported of varying degrees of credibility and some outright fabrications like The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven by Alex Malarkey which really was malarkey. The most credible cases documented are when the person is fully instrumented under medical observation and known to be clinically dead. Clinical death is the state in which vital signs have ceased: the heart is not beating, there is a flat EEG, and the pupils are fixed and dilated. The 2 Cardiologist Pim van Lommel quoted in The Spiritual Brain page 152 Kindle version. 3
term clinical death is a modern term because before this there was just death with no resuscitation. 3 There have been anecdotal accounts and recollections of experiences long after the event and while these can be entertaining they are by no means empirically valid evidence. The systematic study of NDEs was started by van Lommel in Holland in 1988 when over 13 years he interviewed 344 heart-attack survivors within a week of resuscitation. This research was published in THE LANCET Vol 358 December 15, 2001 4. But I am going to quote from the results section of his April 2007 paper on the Continuity of Consciousness. 62 patients (18%) reported some recollection of the time of clinical death. Of these patients 41 (12%) had a core experience and 21 (6%) had a superficial NDE. In the core group 23 patients (7%) reported a deep or very deep experience. And 282 patients (82%) had no recollection of the period of cardiac arrest. In the American study of 116 survivors of cardiac arrest 11 patients (10%) reported a core NDE and the investigators did not specify the number of patients with a superficial NDE. In the British study of 63 survivors of cardiac arrest only 4 patients (6.3%) reported a core NDE, and 3 patients (4.8%) had a superficial NDE, a total of 7 patients (11%) with memories from the period of cardiac arrest. To sum up: Of a total of 523 patients documented in a state of clinical death studied in Holland, US and the UK 38 had an extensive NDE slightly more had some NDE experience and the remainder reported no NDE. Those experiencing NDE did not differ from those who did not in terms of fear of death, knowledge of NDE, religion, education, medical condition or treatment. Those experiencing NDEs come from different religious backgrounds but have very similar experiences. 5 The depth of the experience is measured by what is called the Greyson scale 6 which helps standardize the way experiences are categorized. We performed a longitudinal study with taped interviews of all late survivors with NDE 2 and 8 years following the cardiac arrest, along with a matched control group of survivors of cardiac arrest who did not report an NDE. This study was 3 The Spiritual Brain page 155 Kindle version. 4 http://pimvanlommel.nl/files/publicaties/lancet%20artikel%20pim%20van%20lommel.pdf 5 The Spiritual Brain page 155 Kindle version. 6 http://iands.org/research/important-research-articles/698-greyson-nde-scale.html 4
designed to assess whether the transformation in attitude toward life and death following an NDE is the result of having an NDE or the result of the cardiac arrest itself. In this follow-up research into transformational processes after NDE, we found a significant difference between patients with and without an NDE. The process of transformation took several years to consolidate. Patients with an NDE did not show any fear of death, they strongly believed in an afterlife, and their insight in what is important in life had changed: love and compassion for oneself, for others, and for nature. They now understood the cosmic law that everything one does to others will ultimately be returned to oneself: hatred and violence as well as love and compassion. Remarkably, there was often evidence of increased intuitive feelings. Furthermore, the long lasting transformational effects of an experience that lasts only a few minutes was a surprising and unexpected finding. 7 The research evidence indicates that almost every person experiencing NDE loses the fear of death. There are not many reports of distressing NDEs and studies on the effect of experiencing an NDE are that the cultural values of wealth, status, and material possessions become less important and the values of love, caring for others and acquiring knowledge about the divine increase in importance. One might expect that all people who have had a brush with death would place more emphasis on relationships but follow-up studies on those with and without an NDE found a significant difference between those with and without an NDE in terms of love and compassion for self, others and nature and more of an emphasis on relationships. Also typically showing an increase in faith, sense of meaning in life, capacity for love and involvement with family greatly exceeding that of post-op non-nde patients. 8 In Lommel s study about 50% of the patients with an NDE reported awareness of being dead, or had positive emotions, 30% reported moving through a tunnel, had an observation of a celestial landscape, or had a meeting with deceased relatives. About 25% of the patients with an NDE had an out-of-body experience, had 7 http://iands.org/research/important-research-articles/43-dr-pim-van-lommel-md-continuity-ofconsciousness.html?start=2 Note: Quote has been edited for presentation. 8 The Spiritual Brain page 159-160 Kindle version. 5
communication with the light, or observed colours, 13% experienced a life review, and 8% experienced a border. 9 I need to insert a note of caution. While I use the research on NDEs to demonstrate that consciousness does appear to continue even while our body is - by all measurements - lifeless I am not endorsing what people claim to experience as being real. Fanciful stories of seeing heaven and/or Christ and/or friends and family that have passed on may be indeed what people claim to have experienced but that does not make that experience true. It may be an illusion. What is not an illusion is that they had a clear conscious personal experience and that in and of itself is sufficient to demonstrate that we are more than just our body and that we do continue to exist after the death of our body. This meets the empirical requirement I previously laid out. As Christians we should not be surprised that consciousness persists after death - in fact we should expect that. What I find surprising in the research is the number of people who report not having had any experience while being clinically dead. There is no ready answer for that as all the observable factors appear not to differ between NDE persons and those that don t under the same near death conditions. For me the relevance of the empirical evidence from NDE research is not so much that some people have a clear consciousness at the moment the brain no longer functions during a period of clinical death. It is more the impact on their approach to life in terms of their attitudes and behavioral change when compared to those not having that experience. But what does it matter? As Christians we know we all have an earthy mother and father from whom we get our body. We understand the mechanisms of procreation and our current understanding is sufficient to explain the process. We do not understand, in the same way, the mechanism by which we acquire a soul but we are pretty sure we don t inherit it like our physical characteristics from our parents. We know by faith that we also have a Spiritual Father who has given us our soul and on our 9 http://iands.org/research/important-research-articles/43-dr-pim-van-lommel-md-continuity-ofconsciousness.html?start=2 6
conversion being born again - accepts our soul and gives us entry into eternal life. However, we often say that we have a soul but notice how that very statement sounds very much like saying we are a body with a soul. It s almost as though once we take the first step of being born again we park our souls in a waiting for death nursery while we get on with our lives in the here and now. We are at this moment body and soul, actively engaged in life and worship. It may just be me but thinking about being a soul with a body changes my perspective on how I see things. I don t, as some thinkers in the past have, believe that the body is irrelevant and only the soul matters. Both are gifts from God and as such we are to take care and nurture each. How the soul and body interact gets into the realm of speculation and while I am more than happy to do so in a discussion situation this is not the appropriate time. For our purposes this morning we need to understand that starting from the position that it is only our brain which is experiencing our life, that is only our brain that is learning, growing and developing is starting from an incorrect position if we are Christians. Paul s criticism of the Corinthians and in his letter to the Hebrews is that they are not maturing spiritually. How does he know? He knows because they are not giving evidence of what he calls the fruits of the Spirit. They took the first step by becoming a Christian but then seem to have not gone on to being a Christian by developing spiritually - in effect parking their souls in the waiting for death nursery and gone on with life focused on the material needs and desires of their earthly body. When we reflect on Paul s writings we realize that much of it hits at this very point. In closing, let s just think for a moment, how would our approach to everyday life be impacted if we accepted that we are body and soul actively engaged at each moment in time? How would our reading of the Bible be transformed by understanding that what the writers, and in particular Christ, is speaking to is our soul and not our brains used to read the words? How would our relationships with others and within this body of believers be changed by understanding that we all are souls and bodies in the process of growing and maturing? How would our prayers be changed when we understand that it is the eternal us that is praying and not just words generated by our brains? When the psalmist says 7
Bless the Lord oh my soul he is making plain how we are to pray. When Christ taught us to start with Our Father He is making plain the declaration of our soul to our spiritual Father. We are souls with a body; let us not forget that in our daily life. Amen 8