$5 Million To Research Afterlife: Challenging The Academic Stigma

I can hear the complaining already from people who think it’s idiotic to study the possibility of life after death, since, as some academics like to say, such concepts are just “magic.” But why not encourage university researchers to study one of the biggest questions of existence. It’s puzzled some of the greatest minds, everyone from Socrates to the atheist British philosopher A.J. Ayer. Not to mention that various forms of immortality have been affirmed by people like the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King Jr.

But at least some of the century-old stigma against conducting research into parapsychology in North American academia may have been broken today, with scholars at the University of California, Riverside, accepting a $5-million Templeton Foundation grant. Kudos to the Templeton people.

Led by UC philosopher professor John Fischer, this new team of researchers will spend three years looking into near-death experiences, out-of-body reports, the psychological implications of believing in immortality and related phenomena.

The university’s Immortality Project is an encouraging effort, since our beliefs on life after death should in part be shaped by empirical evidence – and not by the often-irresponsible scenarios posed in popular entertainment.

Similar programs at Duke University and Princeton were shut down years ago, for no particular good reason. It’s also no coincidence British biologist Rupert Sheldrake, author of more than 80 scientific papers and ten books and a former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, was ostensibly ousted from the academy after he began experimenting in paranormal phenomena.

As the UC academics pursue their work I hope Fischer et al will take seriously the impressive investigations already been done in the field by several key people, including philosophy professor emeritus David Ray Griffin, of Southern California’s Claremont Graduate University (which, coincidentally, is only 50 kilometres from UC Riverside).

Challenging the outmoded materialistic philosophy that is still dominant in most university faculties, Griffin wrote a comprehensive book on the subject in 1997, when he put together Parapsychology, Philosophy and Spirituality: A Post-Modern Exploration (SUNY Press). This dense, clearly written classic includes chapters on studies into life after death, reincarnation and communication with the dead.

Read more here: http://blogs.vancouversun.com/2012/07/31/5-million-grant-to-research-life-after-death-taking-on-the-cynics/