Added Are Survivalists Unable to Answer Their Critics? (2024) by Keith Augustine to the Empirical Arguments section of the Life after Death/Immortality page in the Modern Documents section of the Secular Web Library.
In the last quarter of 2024 four articles on survival after death were published online ahead of print in the International Review of Psychiatry. Two of these included gratuitous attempts to discredit the work of a well-known survival critic. After correcting these misrepresentations, in this response Keith Augustine lays out how those who appeal to survival research to support their beliefs bungle their purportedly scientific assessments of the evidence concerning whether or not individual human minds survive death in a discarnate state (without a normal physical body). The response also lays out why the still-common arguments that the late eminent thanatologist Robert Kastenbaum offered in favor of a discarnate afterlife are fallacious. It canvasses erroneous tropes about discovering white crows and the supposed impossibility of proving negatives, how scientific facts are established as highly probable, how psychical research is grounded on fallacious arguments from ignorance, and when all else fails, how survival researchers resort to psychologizing their critics rather than address their critics’ arguments. Their collective failure to engage their critics’ actual arguments raises the issue of whether survival proponents are able to adequately answer them—and if not, why not. Augustine submits that they are unable to answer their critics because the scientific evidence against their afterlife beliefs is incredibly strong.
New in the Kiosk: Embellishments Inside and Outside the Gospels (2024) by Stephen van Eck
The components of written narratives of the life of Jesus were preceded by oral traditions that go back as far as one can imagine. These stories were undoubtedly embellished before their canonical versions were fixed, but we can find traces of such embellishments in the contradictions between the individual gospels. Later gospels add more detail than is provided in earlier ones, and sometimes the fallout is a confused mess of contradiction. In this essay Stephen Van Eck documents both embellishments within the canonical Gospels and those that postdate them, such as those found in Catholic hagiographies that went viral before and after the rise of Protestantism. Most telling are the Catholic saints whose ahistoricity is betrayed by the fact that the stories naming them give them names whose meaning pertains to the story itself.
Recommended reading: The Hypothesis of Undesigned Coincidences: A Critical Review by Michael J. Alter
The hypothesis of undesigned coincidences was first proposed by William Paley (1743-1805) and later popularized by J. J. Blunt (1794-1855). More recently, Lydia and Timothy McGrew have revived this hypothesis. McGrew defines an undesigned coincidence as “a significant connection between two or more accounts or texts that does not appear to have been planned by the individuals providing the accounts. Despite their apparent independence, the elements fit together like pieces of a puzzle.” Advocates use undesigned coincidences to argue that the Gospels are a compilation of independent and reliable sources. However, these advocates do not engage with biblical criticism and overlook relevant research on coincidences and casualness. The feeding of the five thousand is a prominent example discussed by proponents, who point to details such as the green grass, the location of Bethsaida, and the question posed by Jesus to Philip. These episodes are thoroughly reviewed and analyzed in The Hypothesis of Undesigned Coincidences.