Science Expanded

I noted with some interest in Osis and Haraldsson’s book† a history of the study of deathbed visions. It shows a definite trend in culture, namely the very gradual establishment of at least one segment of paranormal studies, those dealing with survival. We really are entering a new age. It is, of course, barely discernible because the vast overhang of a dying secularism shades it from view.

For such studies to proceed, the meaning of science must also change and, indeed, is changing. And for that change to be successful, an even more basic doctrine will have to be revised. It is the assertion that our only possible source of knowledge is the sensorium, thus vision, hearing, smell, and touch. These four, of course, are directly traceable to physical causes and in due course yield materialism. To enlarge the concept of science, however, we need not really have to go too far into some kind of mystic fog. All we need do is base science on experience. The moment we do that, we immediately include as legitimate subjects for study those experiences that reach us by means for which no sensory pathways are discoverable. That would include the entire range of the paranormal: telepathy, clairvoyance, apparitions, near-death experiences, precognition, and more.

Arguably this range of experience is rare. Its systematic study, however, beginning in the nineteenth century, has painstakingly accumulated evidence that such experiences are not reducible either to chance, mental delusions, or bodily malfunctions. They can be studied. The disciplined collection of data and their rational analysis is no less science than the same activity massively deployed to prove the existence of the Higgs boson.

What emerges from such an “expanded” science is knowledge, if not control, but the knowledge, especially from the death-related experiences of humanity, also greatly expands our conceptions of the possible meaning of life, something that a science operating in the straitjacket of materialistic monism has quite failed to deliver.

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†Osis, Karlis and Erlendur Haraldsson, At The Hour of Death, Avon, 1977, Chapter 3, “Research on Deathbed Visions: Past and Future.”