(2024)
1. Introduction
2. Gregory Shushan
3. Andreas Sommer
3.1 The Irrelevance of My Work to Sommer’s Thesis
3.2 How My Use is Comparable to What Robert Kastenbaum Intended
3.3 Sommer’s Characterization of The Myth of an Afterlife
3.4 The Context of What Kastenbaum was Trying to Do
3.5 Where Kastenbaum Fell on the Survival Question—and Why
3.5.1 Fallacious White Crows
3.5.2 Proof, Certainty, and Proving Negatives
3.5.3 Causal Ignorance is not Causal Evidence
3.5.4 Psychologizing Opponents
4. Conclusion: A Belief in Search of Evidence, or Evidence-Driven Belief?
1. Introduction
The International Review of Psychiatry (IRP) was founded in 1989 to reach “a broad international readership including clinicians, academics, educators, and researchers who wish to remain up-to-date with recent and rapid developments in various fields of psychiatry,” particularly for “trainees by choosing topics of relevance to career development … [or] clinicians for continuing professional development” (IRP, n.d.). Well within the purview of IRP are excellent recent articles on cutting-edge topics like whether psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy practitioners should have personal experience of the subjective effects of psychedelics (Villiger, 2024), the need for better research on the occasional adverse effects of such substances (Palitsky et al., 2024), and how insights from such novel psychotherapy can improve outcomes in more traditional approaches (Kozak & Miller, 2024) without overstating its efficacy (Aicher, Wolff, & Herwig, 2024). But it’s difficult to see where four recent articles on life after death (Costa & Moreira-Almeida; Shushan, 2024; Sommer, 2024; Weiler & Acunzo)—apparently part of a forthcoming print “thematic issue” on parapsychological research into survival after death (Sommer, 2024, p. 4)—have a place among articles on maintaining or improving the health of a population, the causes and demographic distribution of health and disease, psychiatric disorders and their causes, “Therapeutics and rehabilitation,” the “Clinical relevance of cognitive and basic neurosciences,” “Psychiatric methodologies,” and “Psychiatry in medicine” (IRP, n.d.). One of these articles, at least, was able to find some connection to psychiatry by insinuating that instilling belief in an afterlife might be therapeutic in helping patients “cope with personal tragedies, experiences of loss, and diagnoses of terminal illness” when these misfortunes would otherwise be, at least for some, “devastating and crippling” (Sommer, 2024, p. 10).
Of course, questions about the relevance of articles on postmortem survival to a journal’s scope are less concerning than questions about their integrity, or at least their accuracy. I was thus rather disappointed to discover that two of these articles (Shushan, 2024; Sommer, 2024), published online ahead of print about a month apart, factitiously targeted my work for special comment when their theses really had nothing to gain for the extra effort. Perhaps setting the record straight will give their authors something to lose, hopefully serving to check their baser impulses in the future.
2. Gregory Shushan
In the earlier of the two articles, religious studies scholar and Afterworlds Press co-founder Gregory Shushan strawmanned an argument that I presented in the Journal of Near-Death Studies back in 2007. Particularly egregious was Shushan’s mischaracterization of this open-ended statement:
Given that at least some NDEs are known to be hallucinations (Augustine 2007[a]), should future cross-cultural studies uncover universal and well-defined NDE elements, such precise widespread commonalities would be best explained in neuroscientific terms. Alternatively, if extensive studies fail to uncover substantial cross-cultural consistency between NDE accounts, a sociological explanation for solely Western commonalities would be required [emphasis added]. (Augustine, 2007b, p. 116)
This is, of course, a perfectly reasonable thing to say about well-defined motifs found in reports of near-death experiences (NDEs) in the West, but peculiarly absent from the least contaminated non-Western NDE reports.[1] But it is rendered by Shushan as my supposed unqualified “statement that if NDEs prove to be universal, they ‘would be best explained in neuroscientific terms'” (Shushan, 2024, p. 2), selectively cutting the “Given that…” conditional that precedes it. It is combining NDE features like out-of-body discrepancies (Augustine, 2007a, pp. 4-9) or NDErs’ failed predictions (Ring, 1982, p. 66) with cross-cultural consistency that would tip the scales in favor of a neuroscientific explanation of such consistency, for seeing objects in a room that aren’t in fact there (Crookall, 1972, pp. 89-90; Lindley, Bryan, & Conley, 1981, p. 109), making predictions that fail to come to pass, and so on would be much more expected of a brain-generated hallucinatory experience like a REM dream than of a literal journey to another world.
After attributing to me the foil that he himself created, Shushan then shares the (correct) insight that “the mere fact of universality specifies neither a metaphysical nor a neuroscientific conclusion” about the nature of NDEs, as if I had ever argued from “the mere fact of universality” in the first place. And had I made a similar, equally reasonable comment about common reports of dreams of flying or falling, or of dreaming of arriving late to an important exam, presumably no one would take my comments to “fall back on Karl Popper’s ‘promissory materialism’, maintaining that whatever might eventually be revealed by [dream research] will inevitably reinforce a scientific materialist explanation” (Shushan, 2024, p. 2). Those who are determined to find a place for spirits somewhere in the natural world often fail to see issues through any other lens.
3. Andreas Sommer
Ever ready to “appeal to a million frivolous reasons to dismiss what an opponent has to say” (Augustine, 2022c, p. 794), less than a month later Shushan’s colleague, historian Andreas Sommer, had an online-ahead-of-print article published in IRP targeting my work in a similar hit-and-run attack. Never mind that the work of mine that Sommer cites is not about “the historical relationship of modern sciences and the occult” (Sommer, 2024, p. 4), whether “widespread but outdated views” on it or otherwise, let alone about anything else that Sommer’s article is supposed to address, such as “the implication that any belief in the mind’s persistence after death is only for the scientifically illiterate and those weak in character” (Sommer, 2024, p. 1). Like many survival researchers, Sommer would do well to tone down both the hyperbole and hostility toward opponents pervading his article. (None of us has a moral obligation to share Sommer’s conclusions, after all, and the most vitriolic opponents do not speak for everyone who merely disagrees with you.)
After naming examples of historical thinkers interested in parapsychological phenomena and scholars and “even some trained historians” said to have denied those thinkers’ interest (Sommer, 2024, p. 3), for reasons known only to himself, Sommer cites my work alongside contemporary writers who “have deemed it necessary to virtually write open-minded engagements with the occult by eminent intellectuals out of history” (Sommer, 2024, p. 4). It’s worth quoting Sommer at length here for context even though the misunderstandings and hasty assumptions quickly pile up:
In this regard I also wish to put certain widespread but outdated views on the historical relationship of modern sciences and the occult in their place. In an edited volume offering supposedly coercive scientific evidence against survival, for example, one of the chapters approvingly quoted psychologist Robert Kastenbaum—a pioneer in modern clinical and therapeutical approaches to death and bereavement—as stating that those ‘who confidently believe in an afterlife simply do not care about evidence’, appealing to the often-claimed inherent ‘self-correcting’ nature of science, and exasperating over the associated historical illiteracy of believers: ‘Four centuries of scientific history might just as well have not existed!’ (Augustine & Fishman, 2015, p. 273; citing Kastenbaum, 1986, p. 179).
But this quote of Kastenbaum, alluding to the accumulation of secular scientific knowledge since the Scientific Revolution which is widely supposed to render any belief in survival obsolete at best, is itself yet another example of how eminent intellectuals have been enlisted entirely out of context, and against their own convictions. Augustine and Fishman must have been well aware that the book they quoted is structured as a dialogue between two fictitious characters, a diehard disbeliever and a believer informed by the kind of research discussed in some articles of this thematic issue—mediumship, cases suggestive of reincarnation, near-death experiences, and visions of the dead. Kastenbaum’s disbelieving protagonist is quoted selectively to express the authors’ own stance, while in the concluding chapter of the cited book, Kastenbaum in fact comes out clearly against the critic and in favour of survival (Kastenbaum, 1986, pp. 193-209).
Kastenbaum had died before this misrepresentation of his views in the name of ‘science’ occurred and was therefore unable to put the record straight. But even if he had really held the dismissive stance of his disbelieving protagonist, it is hardly an accident that the authors did not quote an actual historian of science on the matter—let alone a historian who has taken pains to reconstruct the specific means by which ‘magic’ and the ‘occult’ have been rendered into the anti-figures of scientific modernity over the past four centuries. (Sommer, 2024, p. 4)
Because it’s hard to know where to start in responding to this morass of misunderstandings, I have underlined the key errors in Sommer’s characterization above. First, Sommer insinuates that my co-edited volume, The Myth of an Afterlife (Martin & Augustine, 2015), sought to ‘coerce’ readers (who could, after all, simply read something else) to simply ‘accept the science’ and set aside delving into the survival question any further, when in fact my aim was precisely to get them to look into the issue more deeply than they have before. Second, the Kastenbaum passage that I cited simply does not address the supposed “accumulation of secular scientific knowledge since the Scientific Revolution” allegedly rendering “any belief in survival obsolete.” The paragraphs preceding that passage show this below. Third, while Kastenbaum did merely take on the role of an ardent survival critic for the sake of argument where he was quoted, the quoted passage does in fact colorfully illustrate his actual views—though with a dash of rhetorical flourish for the role. To be clear, they don’t convey Kastenbaum’s views about whether or not the overall evidence supports discarnate personal survival (which, incidentally, I never claimed). Rather, they convey his findings about whether the afterlife/survival proponents (hereafter, survivalists) who completed his psychological questionnaire surveys and harbored no doubts that there is an afterlife respect the evidence—in particular, whether they were willing to even consider looking at evidence that contradicts their belief in an afterlife. I will explain why I quoted Kastenbaum’s succinct upshot on this after I provide the fuller context of the passage in question below. In any case, Kastenbaum was not “quoted selectively to express the authors’ own stance,” but rather to characterize the unscientific attitude of those survivalists who only cherry-pick potentially supporting evidence, while ignoring any discordant evidence, in order to bolster their preexisting belief in survival—an attitude that Kastenbaum himself did plead against, as we all should. Not all survivalists exhibit this attitude, but Kastenbaum called out the ones that do. Finally, no historians of science were cited in my chapter—apart from Thomas Kuhn (Augustine & Fishman, 2015, p. 279n15)—because the chapter that Sommer cites was not about the history of science, but about scientific reasoning or methodology.
3.1 The Irrelevance of My Work to Sommer’s Thesis
Let me take up the final point first. Since I initially wrote the chapter section in question—”The Dualist’s Dilemma: Reject Science, or Reject Personal Survival?” (Augustine & Fishman, 2015, pp. 271-276)—I take full responsibility for its content. But the co-written chapter “did not quote an actual historian of science on the matter”—presumably the matter of the social construction of a historical conflict between science and religion/magic/the occult—because it simply wasn’t about the conflict thesis or historical examples of it. The Kastenbaum passage that Sommer harps on, which constitutes three sentences in my chapter, isn’t about the conflict thesis, either. Rather, as shown below, it’s about the unscientific attitude that Kastenbaum discovered in the responses of contemporary true believers among survivalists (not all survivalists) before his book was written.
3.2 How My Use is Comparable to What Robert Kastenbaum Intended
To illustrate what the Kastenbaum passage is about, I’ll quote how I used it before ultimately quoting the paragraphs in his book that immediately precede and follow it. First, I cited Kastenbaum when comparing the evidence for the dependence of consciousness on brain functioning to the evidence that species have biologically evolved over time:
Similarly, the dependence thesis is consistent with our knowledge of the laws of physics and natural history, connects facts across comparative psychology, developmental psychology, and the neurosciences, is independently corroborated by novel findings in behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology, would have been falsified had any replicable positive results of direct tests of survival ever been obtained, or had any interactive traces ever been discovered in the brain[2], and has opened up a number of promising fronts in psychopharmacological research, among other things. When a hypothesis is supported by such overwhelming scientific evidence, it is easy to share thanatologist Robert Kastenbaum’s exasperation when it is dismissed without a hearing: “Those who confidently believe in an afterlife simply do not care about evidence. They do not even make a mental gesture toward a self-correcting, realistic scientific approach. Four centuries of scientific history might just as well have not existed!” (1986, p. 179). (Augustine & Fishman, 2015, pp. 273-274)
Note that the Kastenbaum passage concerns survivalists “who confidently believe in an afterlife,” specifically those questionnaire respondents that he categorizes as “true believers” because they self-rate their degree of belief if an afterlife as “completely sure” (Kastenbaum, 1986, p. 179). It does not concern fence-sitters or survivalists who still have their doubts. And I cited Kastenbaum in the context of those who dismiss without a hearing a hypothesis that is supported by overwhelming evidence. The overwhelming evidence that I had in mind is summarized at the beginning of the self-quote above (and detailed earlier in my chapter), and the specific hypothesis that I had in mind was the mind-brain dependence thesis. Kastenbaum’s comment was not specifically about either of those two things, but about how his questionnaire respondents who harbored no doubts that an afterlife exists (whom he took to be representative of the wider population of true believers in an afterlife) dealt with any evidence that contradicted their afterlife belief (of which the neuroscientific evidence is one sort). As philosopher Michael Sudduth has recently noted, I’m rather specific about how contemporary survival researchers, acting like true believers, “ignore or mishandle salient facts—for example, neurophysiological data or facts concerning their own failed experimental tests—which are potential evidence against the survival hypothesis, or which would otherwise weaken the inferences they wish to draw” (Sudduth, 2024, p. 515). And I’m specific about it because, with a few noteworthy exceptions like Douglas M. Stokes (1993) and Arthur S. Berger (1996), respectively, contemporary survival researchers often fail to even acknowledge the existence of such evidence, let alone how it undermines their conclusions.
The three-sentence passage from Kastenbaum, then, is aimed at true believers’ unwillingness to even consider evidence that there might not be an afterlife, which is an anti-scientific attitude to a disputed question. The “self-correcting, realistic scientific approach” to which Kastenbaum’s passage refers is one that considers the total available relevant evidence, not just the evidence that might be taken to support one’s existing views. The passage thus calls out true believers’ propensity to cherry-pick evidence that they think confirms what they already believe while ignoring contrary evidence. Their failure to consider all of the relevant evidence is just a tacit admission that the evidence does not matter to them—survivalist true believers are going to believe what they believe whatever the evidence.
After summarizing a Long Island University study on how anxiety about death (and other threats) affected college students’ degree of belief in an afterlife (Osarchuk & Tatz, 1973), the mouthpiece that Sommer calls “Kastenbaum’s disbelieving protagonist” (more on that below) refers to Kastenbaum’s real-life psychological research findings (whose key points I’ve underlined):
One of my own studies approaches this question from a different angle. I have put the following [thirteen] questions (in addition to age, sex and religious affiliation) to health-care professionals as well as to college students. …
What most interest us is the attitude of those who not only believe in an afterlife but who also declare that they are ‘completely sure’. Almost all of the ‘completely sure’ believers report that this belief has been with them since childhood, associated with their religious upbringing. They had not come to this belief out of careful, systematic examination (again: the phenomenon of people taking less care sorting the evidence for their beliefs on ultimate matters than they do when purchasing a used car!) The rare person who came to certitude about the afterlife ‘through philosophical anguish’ did so because life would seem to be ‘without purpose—without God’ unless such a belief could be held. Nobody has yet explained firm acceptance of survival in terms of evidence they have examined or logical analyses of the possibilities. Rather, they were ‘infused with a gift of faith at baptism’ or through ‘scripture—promise and proof of Heaven, everlasting life’.
How did these people respond to Question 6, which asks what kind of evidence or experience might lead them to question or reject the existence of an afterlife? Remember that this is purely a hypothetical question. A person could be strong in belief and yet imagine certain events or experiences that would lead them to rethink their position. Such an open attitude would seem to cost them nothing in emotional terms, since in fact they do have their beliefs and the discordant evidence would be highly unlikely to come forth. Willingness and ability to consider just the possibility of evidence against survival would also give the responder a place among the scientific-minded. From a scientific standpoint, a proposition has no substance, conveys no meaning, unless it is capable of both proof and disproof. When a principle or law has been established as scientifically sound, it has successfully resisted determined efforts at disproof. The scientist begins to feel confident only when rigorous attempts to disprove a theory have failed while at the same time positive findings have supported it.
Respect for evidence does not show itself in the responses of the true believers. They are unable or unwilling even to imagine any findings, events or experiences that might lead them to question that the afterlife is a sure thing. ‘I can’t imagine anything shaking me from my belief in an afterlife.’ ‘I really can’t bother myself to think about this. I can’t think of any so-called evidence that I would let upset my judgment on this.’ These are typical responses. Some are even more eloquent—answering every other question but leaving this one blank. The sound I have heard over and over again is the clank of a mind snapping shut. Those who confidently believe in an afterlife simply do not care about evidence. They do not even make a mental gesture toward a self-correcting, realistic scientific approach. Four centuries of scientific history might just as well have not existed!
A different attitude is expressed by those who believe strongly that life ends with physical death. These people have more often continued to examine their thoughts about life and death over the years, instead of simply carrying forward what was impressed on them in childhood. ‘I had all my beliefs shot down one by one, and life after death was no exception,’ is a typical response here. They are more aware of the difference between what they might like to believe and what they find is supported by reality. In fact, the nonbelievers have fewer ‘completely sure’ feelings of confidence because, in general, they are still reflecting on many of life’s questions. Even among the most confident, however, there is more ability and willingness to consider the possibility of discordant evidence. Most nonbelievers do work on the difficult question of events or experiences that might lead them to change their minds on survival. They suggest a variety of possibilities, some of which are similar to the phenomena investigated by the Society for Psychical Research and others (although this research was not known to the respondents). One respondent, for example, would consider changing her opinion if a deceased relative appeared to her in a dream and gave information she had not previously known and which could be demonstrated to be true. The most important point here is not the specific kinds of evidence that would be considered, but simply the fact that nonbelievers acknowledged the question to be relevant. Although, like some of the believers, they were ‘completely sure’, they could still bring themselves to think about the possibility of being mistaken and the kinds of experience that would bear on this. (Kastenbaum, 1986, pp. 177-180).
It is Sommer, then, who misrepresents/misunderstands Kastenbaum’s point here (or that of “Kastenbaum’s disbelieving protagonist,” if Sommer prefers). Kastenbaum’s allusion is not to “the accumulation of secular scientific knowledge since the Scientific Revolution” supposedly rendering “any belief in survival obsolete” [emphasis added] (Sommer, 2024, p. 4). Rather, the allusion is to reasoning scientifically—not to consulting the ‘verdict of science’ as a body of ‘settled’ facts, nor to the imagined “historical illiteracy of believers” about what those facts are.[3] Those who claim that their survival beliefs are evidentially validated are understandably loathe to admit that what survival critics call out is their inability or unwillingness to reason scientifically; too often empirical survivalists want to claim the mantle of science without doing the work of actually reasoning according to routine scientific principles.
3.3 Sommer’s Characterization of The Myth of an Afterlife
Before addressing how Kastenbaum’s perspective may or may not have differed from that of “Kastenbaum’s disbelieving protagonist,” it’s worth pausing to reflect on Sommer’s characterization of my multicontributor volume (Martin & Augustine, 2015) as “offering supposedly coercive scientific evidence against survival.” First, this characterization is explicitly contradicted by the very chapter of the volume that he quotes: “Though the probabilistic grounds for this conclusion are quite strong, they can never be coercive” (Augustine & Fishman, 2015, p. 208). Indeed, I ended the chapter asking the reader to consider merely what best explains “such difficulties” for the survival hypothesis (Augustine & Fishman, 2015, p. 278). Similar comments are scattered elsewhere throughout the volume. For example, the main possibility that I wanted readers to at least consider is that, when the total relevant well-vetted evidence is weighed, at least a preponderance of the evidence tips the scales against discarnate personal survival (Augustine, 2015, p. 5, 31; Augustine & Fishman, 2015, p. 277; Martin & Augustine, 2015, p. xxvii). That is, it’s at least more probable than not that persons don’t survive death as discarnates (cf. Sudduth, 2024, p. 492, bullet point #2). This is why I implored “readers to [minimally] set aside their personal predilections and, with an open mind, hear out the scientific case that our mental lives end in death” (Martin & Augustine, 2015, p. 50). The vast majority of the survival literature, having been written by survivalists, almost without fail concludes that discarnate personal survival is at least more probable than not, even if only slightly so. (And it is typically not even that modest.) So I knew that my thesis—however well supported—would be a hard pill to swallow for many survival readers, most of whom likely turn to survival research in the hope of confirming the existence of an afterlife.
Of course, that personal extinction is more probable than not is a more modest conclusion than what I think our best evidence warrants (cf. Augustine, 2022a, pp. 371-374)—but my point was to implore readers to consider the possibility that it is at least that. When all of the relevant evidence cited in the chapter that Sommer targets is considered—including the most reliable potential evidence against the dependence of consciousness on the brain (e.g., Augustine & Fishman, 2015, pp. 218-226, 248-251)—I don’t shy away from characterizing the mind-brain independence hypothesis as “one of the barest of possibilities” (Augustine & Fishman, 2015, p. 277). While a stronger conclusion is warranted by the evidence, in my view, my primary aim was to implore survivalists to simply consider the possibility that the balance of probabilities is at least somewhat against discarnate personal survival, even if they would balk at ever considering that it is strongly against it. Or, barring that, to get them to minimally engage with the evidential arguments undermining their views and tell me why the considerations that I bring to their attention fail to undermine the belief that human minds can persist independently of brain activity entirely. For in the absence of such engagement, neither I nor any fence-sitter persuaded by the considerations to which I draw attention will ever have any good reason to think that I’m mistaken. And if survival proponents are unable or unwilling to engage with the actual arguments of their opponents, then they shouldn’t engage their opponents at all.
All of this gives me the impression that what Sommer objects to is not that I state my conclusions too strongly, but rather that the cited evidence too strongly contradicts Sommer’s survival beliefs. After all, nothing is stopping Sommer from telling the world exactly why the cited evidence does not constitute “powerful scientific evidence … that the minds of human beings and other biological creatures almost certainly cannot exist in the absence of a functioning brain” (Augustine & Fishman, 2015, p. 277). Pointing out exactly where my mistake lies (if it lies anywhere) would be a much more convincing defense to a fence-sitter than simply attacking the person who presses the issue.
3.4 The Context of What Kastenbaum was Trying to Do
Let me turn to the other major accusation in Sommer’s hit-and-run attack, then. Sommer claims that in citing Kastenbaum at this particular junction of his book, Kastenbaum was quoted “entirely out of context, and against [his] own convictions.” Moreover, “Kastenbaum’s disbelieving protagonist is quoted selectively to express the authors’ own stance, while in the concluding chapter of the cited book, Kastenbaum in fact comes out clearly against the critic and in favour of survival.” Though Sommer conflates them, note that these are two different issues. Whether Kastenbaum was cited out of context against his own convictions is a separate question from whether or not he agreed with me on the answer to the survival question. Let’s consider each of these accusations in turn.
Whether the three sentences from Kastenbaum that I quoted represented Kastenbaum’s actual views is the more important of the two issues, so let me address that first. Ignoring the flourish in the final sentence, compare the Kastenbaum passage—”Those who confidently believe in an afterlife simply do not care about evidence. They do not even make a mental gesture toward a self-correcting, realistic scientific approach”—against ‘the facts’ that “Kastenbaum’s disbelieving protagonist” (Sommer, 2024, p. 4) cited when “playing fair with facts” (Kastenbaum, 1986, p. 9) (with different key points now underlined):
Respect for evidence does not show itself in the responses of the true believers. They are unable or unwilling even to imagine any findings, events or experiences that might lead them to question that the afterlife is a sure thing. ‘I can’t imagine anything shaking me from my belief in an afterlife.’ ‘I really can’t bother myself to think about this. I can’t think of any so-called evidence that I would let upset my judgment on this.’ These are typical responses. Some are even more eloquent—answering every other question but leaving this one blank. The sound I have heard over and over again is the clank of a mind snapping shut. Those who confidently believe in an afterlife simply do not care about evidence. They do not even make a mental gesture toward a self-correcting, realistic scientific approach. Four centuries of scientific history might just as well have not existed! (Kastenbaum, 1986, p. 179).
What’s important here, given Sommer’s accusation, is whether Kastenbaum’s actual views were in conflict with the views expressed by “Kastenbaum’s disbelieving protagonist” just in this passage. They are not. When speaking directly for his own views, Kastenbaum later (wrongly) claimed that evidence against an afterlife is not logically possible (1986, pp. 198-199). (More on that trope below.) If he was correct about that (he wasn’t), then maybe it’s moot that the survivalist “true believers” who answered his questionnaire surveys didn’t even try to imagine any evidence that might count against their beliefs. (On the final page before the back matter, Kastenbaum did seem to want to give the survivalist true believers a pass on what would otherwise be an inexcusable unwillingness to consider discordant evidence, in part presumably because he believed that such evidence cannot exist.) But none of this changes the fact that Kastenbaum discovered that the true believers among his survivalist survey respondents were unwilling to even consider that, hypothetically, there might be some sort of evidence against survival, which is the equivalent of being uninterested in where the evidence points entirely (since one cannot know where it points without considering all of it—including discordant evidence). What’s “most important,” Kastenbaum reported, is “not the specific kinds of [discordant] evidence that would be considered, but simply the fact that nonbelievers acknowledged the question to be relevant” (1986, p. 180). Clearly Kastenbaum himself considered the question to be relevant, and considered an unwillingness to even attempt to imagine contrary evidence to be unscientific. The part of questionnaire Question 6 addressed to survivalists asked: “If you believe in an afterlife, what type of research, personal experience or other happening could lead you to question or reject the existence of an afterlife?” (Kastenbaum, 1986, pp. 177-178). And the question about what could change the mind of either the survivalist or mortalist respondents had the same caveat: “It does not matter if the evidence or experience that might change your mind is something that is unlikely to come about. I am chiefly interested in the type of evidence or experience that might lead you to change your mind if it did happen and came to your attention” (1986, p. 178). Kastenbaum continued to ask slight variations of this question for decades in his “Survival of Death? A Self-Quiz” box (2016, pp. 431-432, Box 13.1, question #13) in multiple editions of his standard thanatology textbook, where a “disbelieving protagonist” never makes an appearance.
That my three-sentence Kastenbaum passage was “enlisted entirely out of context” isn’t quite right, then. Sommer also writes that I “must have been well aware that the book they [Yonatan I. Fishman and I] quoted is structured as a dialogue between two fictitious characters, a diehard disbeliever and a believer informed by the kind of research” that psychical researchers have engaged in (Sommer, 2024, p. 4). In truth, I had typed out and filed away the few paragraphs on Kastenbaum’s survey findings about committed survivalists that made an impression on me (and not his material on his position or his survival arguments) in the course of my research into the topic in the 1990s. I didn’t return to Kastenbaum’s work again until the 2010s, when I recalled their relevance to a specific point that I was making in the chapter of mine that Sommer cites. And that is the only point from Kastenbaum that I’ve ever commented on, without even going into what led him to make the point (though Sommer’s drive-by attack has now given me reason to make Kastenbaum’s context clear). It’s also worth clarifying here that Kastenbaum’s (1986) book is not literally “a dialogue between two fictitious characters” in the way that Plato’s Euthyphro is a fictional dialogue between the character Socrates and the character Euthyphro. In the Introduction, Kastenbaum explained:
For this book I am trying out a new method that might be called ‘experimental belief’. In other words, we will do our best to believe wholeheartedly in in every position that is examined. I will first present the position as though its most ardent advocate—although taking perhaps more care for accuracy than one might expect from a partisan. We will see its strengths and also examine its implications for our own lives and the structure of society. After this spell of enthusiasm, we will then do our best to undermine the position. We will be as ardent in our opposition as we have been in our advocacy but, again, playing fair with facts. (Kastenbaum, 1986, pp. 8-9).
So Kastenbaum’s aim was to present the best cases for both sides of the survival issue[4], as he saw them, were he the one advocating for their respective positions.[5] What was fictitious was not the points that he raised in support of a position, but the extent to which those points reflected his own views. The positions that Kastenbaum (1986) took on in all but the final two major sections of the final chapter (“Beyond Life There is Life” and “Awaiting the New Dawn” on pp. 193-209 and p. 209, respectively) represent what Kastenbaum regarded as factually accurate and representative belief and doubt positions on survival, and so pitted one faux-Kastenbaum against another. So the “experimental” positions taken on by Kastenbaum prior to those last two sections—which constitute 17 pages of a 209-page book, excluding the back matter—did not represent his actual, final viewpoint. But the facts offered in support of those viewpoints were not fictional. What matters here, then, is whether the factual grounds (not imaginary or hypothetical grounds) that Kastenbaum offered for the position taken on by “Kastenbaum’s disbelieving protagonist” were realistic as grounds that a real survival opponent (hereafter, mortalist) might have offered—for the three-sentence Kastenbaum passage that I quoted, at least.
3.5 Where Kastenbaum Fell on the Survival Question—and Why
What camp Kastenbaum ultimately fell under is not material to anything that I did argue, but since Sommer brings it up, it’s instructive to ascertain whether Kastenbaum “comes out clearly against the critic and in favour of survival” (Sommer, 2024, p. 4). Two issues are of particular interest here: the position that Kastenbaum affirmed on the survival question, and how strongly he affirmed it. And since the final two major sections of his book focus on the reasons for Kastenbaum’s ‘final verdict,’ a third issue is worth comment—how good or bad the arguments that Kastenbaum offered for his position on the survival question turn out to be.
Since the rhetorical flourish that Kastenbaum used throughout the book is also prevalent when he was no longer playing a role in his final two major sections, we can answer the first two questions rather quickly. Here is a sampling:
[P]eople such as the critic must arm themselves against any possibility that life might have a larger purpose. The universe must be as limited and purposeless as their own concepts of self. The prospect of survival is alarming because it suggests that they have only been going through the motions of life, functioning within a tight little mental construction rather than the greater realm of universal reality. This is a variety of the sour grape psychology, but one that exceeds the Fox’s simple rationalization. The dedicated non-believer cannot accept the possibility of any grapes or even of the vine itself. He must sharpen his mental tools into a weapon and slash about—chiefly at himself—when the prospect of survival comes into view. If what looks like a vine is a vine … and if what looks like grapes are grapes … and if those grapes should prove sweet! Ah! One would have to become a new sort of creature to be worthy of such a garden, no longer a cynical fox but something more nearly resembling an authentic human. Unfortunately, some find it more comforting to deny value and meaning than to dedicate themselves to actualization. (1986, pp. 193-194)
For those who have not fallen complete victim to alienation and timidity (the underside of technology), we can now conclude the case for survival. The critic’s arguments have been so strained and convoluted that we almost feel obliged to apologize for the simple clarity of what follows. (1986, p. 194)
As we have shown over and over again, there is good evidence for survival and the case is best presented with the simple formulation that our existence continues beyond death. (1986, p. 200)
Most of the critic’s ‘concerns’ about reincarnation do not touch on the data themselves, but only on his difficulty in opening his mind to a different view of the world. (1986, p. 204)
No matter how ample, how detailed, how validated the evidence, many people will fail to accept the reality of survival. It is not primarily a question of the facts, of the evidence (although it is sometimes presented in this light). No, it is simply the need to have an appetizing sauce spread over the facts [i.e., a theory that can explain how they are possible]. (1986, p. 207)
For our own generation, belief in survival seems to require some kind of ‘certificate of approval’ from science. This is the reason why we have given so much attention to empirical evidence as well as to the rules of good thinking. We have found varied and abundant evidences in favour of the survival hypothesis and have turned back the determined negativism of the critic.
However, it is also perfectly clear that some people have always possessed an unshakeable faith in survival. Such people do not need the services of this advocate [i.e., science] to establish or confirm their beliefs, and they may, indeed, have become impatient with the detail we have had to consider. And yet, isn’t it satisfying to know that logic and empirical evidence support what the ‘true believer’ has been maintaining all this time? (1986, p. 209)
Clearly, then, Kastenbaum not only affirmed discarnate personal survival, but affirmed it strongly. And this is a point that I had simply forgotten or overlooked since checking his book out from a library decades ago, for in quoting the three-sentence passage from him that I did, I was neither making an appeal to authority nor citing any specific arguments that Kastenbaum had made concerning the merit of parapsychological survival research (one way or the other). Most of the journal and chapter contributions that Kastenbaum had written (that I’m aware of), to the extent that they addressed personal survival at all, were (requisitely?) critical of both the methodologies and the conclusions of survival researchers, but noncommittal about whether or not discarnate personal survival occurs.[6] This is why I had mistakenly listed him as one of the noncommittal authors on the survival question (Augustine, 2022b, p. 415), though one still critical of the way that survival research is done. Given his status in thanatology, perhaps Kastenbaum the critic was simply fulfilling his professional duty of maintaining neutrality when speaking for the conclusions of the field as a whole rather than for himself. Maybe (as seems likely now) he also held a more nuanced position where only certain types of survival evidence are credible as evidence for survival (and perhaps only certain cases within those types). In any case, the biographical fact that Kastenbaum strongly affirmed discarnate personal survival is less interesting than the reasons that he offered for his affirmation.
3.5.1 Fallacious White Crows
So when he stated his personal opinion in the final two major sections of his concluding chapter, Kastenbaum (1986) clearly did come out unreservedly in favor of discarnate personal survival. And this is disappointing—but not because of the position that he took. Rather, it’s disappointing because the reasons that he offered for his final ‘verdict’ are not very good ones. That is, it’s rather easy for an undergraduate philosophy major to successfully counter them. (No wonder that I didn’t think that anything else from the book was worth filing away for future reference.) Take Kastenbaum’s regurgitation of the stock “white crow” cliché that psychical researchers have leaned on ad nauseam since the late 19th century:
Logically, proof of survival requires only one good instance (such as Uncle Fred levitating or one drowned man resuscitated). Only one of the thousands of apparitions that have been reported needs to be true, or only one of the thousands of communications through mediums, or only one person whose NDE was rooted in an actual post-death experience, or only one persuasive case for reincarnation. Two acceptable cases or two hundred thousand would add but secondary information. (1986, p. 195)
What stands out the most about this hackneyed argument is that its target is a straw man. That we might have a few white crows, but not enough of them to overturn the enumerative generalization that all crows are black, is not an objection posed by any scholarly critics of survival research. Think about it: what survival skeptic has ever argued, ‘Granted, Uncle Fred did levitate, or that ghost really did make any appearance at the séance, but all of the other levitations or apparitions are fakes, so we still don’t know that anyone has ever levitated or survived death.’ So the argument that all that it takes is the discovery of one white crow to “upset the conclusion that all crows are black” (James, 1896, p. 884) tilts at windmills. It thereby distracts from crux of the issue—whether a white crow (figuratively speaking) has ever been shown to exist. Of course, psychical researchers often believe so, or may be privy to encounters with them hidden from the rest of us. But that’s not the same thing as having their personal beliefs or potentially misinterpreted experiences scientifically validated. When this gem of an argument was lobbed at me by Steven M. Cooper back in 2007, its author even ended his letter to the editor: “My reading of the literature has not convinced me that we yet have that one irrefutable instance, but I remain hopeful that we shall” (Cooper, 2007). With this important concession at least acknowledged (to the author’s credit), one wonders: why then did Cooper raise the evidently obligatory “white crow” argument in the first place?
By adding his qualification, Cooper merely substituted one fallacy for another. Instead of sneaking in the unsupported assumption that we actually have demonstrated white crows, Cooper traded in begging the question for a red herring instead. No substitutions!
The white crow argument is just as fallacious today as it was in the 19th century. It’s long past due to put it to bed. If past experience is any guide, psychical researchers will therefore continue to pull it out of their bag of stock talking points. Apologists are typically satisfied with bad arguments when they can’t produce any good ones.
White crows are usually summoned to beg the question that we’ve already demonstrated their existence by the standards of long-standing scientific principles. But if we had done so, the very-much-alive survival debate would be over—Kastenbaum’s straw-man protest to the contrary notwithstanding:
Let us suppose that you have invited your family, friends and neighbours to join you for a little experiment. You are all together now—perhaps 50 people—in a well-illuminated room[.] ‘My experiment’, you announce, ‘concerns the principle of levity. I want to find out once and for all whether people can rise up off the ground and fly about the room, thereby proving that levitation is as real as gravity. All right, ready … set … rise!’ You give the command and everybody tries to obey. Alas! Family, friends and neighbours all remain earthbound despite a great flapping of arms and stretching at toe-point. Everybody, that is, except Uncle Fred. He is floating gracefully some 5 feet above the ground, supported by nothing except his nonchalance. You shake your head in disappointment. ‘There is no principle of levity,’ you conclude, ‘because only one person in 50 could rise off the ground like that, and that one is Uncle Fred, and you never can take anything he does seriously!’ (1986, p. 194)
This absurd argument is hardly an argument that any survival critic would actually make. Perhaps somewhere in the multiverse a lay Redditor has argued as Kastenbaum describes, but I seriously doubt that anyone can point to any instances where a survival critic has advanced such an argument professionally (e.g., in a journal or talk). If one in fifty people could actually levitate without using stage magic, an inordinate amount of government and corporate spending would be doled out to find out why. Scientists would be in a race to be the first to discover exactly how these rare birds take flight in the absence of parlor tricks.
3.5.2 Proof, Certainty, and Proving Negatives
Kastenbaum was also one of many superficial reasoners who still keep alive the stock trope that you can’t prove a (universal) negative like “no person can survive death” (1986, p. 198; cf. Carter, 2010, p. 239), no matter how many times it has been refuted. Here’s how Kastenbaum himself stated the argument:
‘There are no living creatures smaller than a flea’ is one possible universal statement. This statement continues to command respect until one day somebody produces a microscope. The repeated failure to discover sub-fleas could never—logically—prove the universal. It is always possible that we have been looking in the wrong place or with the wrong instruments. Furthermore, the world itself may change enough to convert today’s reasonable statement into tomorrow’s error.
The basic point here, as usual, is simple but powerful. Logically, it is always possible to make observations that will confirm survival beyond any reasonable doubt. Even if we had no evidence already, this could not be taken as proof for the finality of death…. As long as there is the possibility that more observations can be made, there can be no proof for the negative. It is a waste of energy for critics to gather negative cases, for these can never endow their negative proposition with certainty. (1986, p. 198-199)
Of course, positive cases cannot endow a positive proposition with certainty, either. The theory-ladenness of observation alone undermines the warrant for Kastenbaum’s confidence that “a single positive instance is sufficient to prove that there is a life after life” (1986, p. 199), even apart from the ambiguity of exactly what he means by “certainty” and “proof” in this context, let alone what evidence he thinks would or wouldn’t count as a clear “positive instance” of the activity of a deceased human spirit. Before addressing those matters, though, I want to get to the heart of his statement that “no mass of negative observations can possibly disprove survival” (1986, p. 199). Underlying this statement is the unstated (and unsupportable) assumption that “negative observations” are the only thing that could ever “disprove survival,” and since they are not up for the task, nothing could ever “disprove” it. Accepting that unstated assumption therefore unscientifically forecloses the possibility of acknowledging the existence of any actual evidence against survival, should there be any.
That you can’t prove a negative (in general) is not a logician’s trope. For one, any negative proposition can be made a positive one by simply changing your terms. But regarding Kastenbaum’s more specific claim that you can’t prove a universal negative, in fact it’s quite possible to substantiate a universal negative proposition by proxy when the negative proposition is a logical consequence of some other universal positive proposition that you can substantiate (Augustine & Fishman, 2015, pp. 227-228, 280n28), such as that all human minds are sustained by a functioning brain (and thus all human minds stop existing when their brains stop functioning). But the most understandable way to show that you can ‘prove’ a universal negative, I think, is to provide an example of a ‘proven negative’ that Kastenbaum would have had to have deemed impossible to prove on pain of inconsistency. Here’s a comparable example paralleling his line of reasoning: All that it takes is one observation (a white crow!) of a man jumping to the Moon to ‘prove’ that at least some men can use their legs to jump from the Earth’s surface to that of the Moon. But no matter how many occasions that you fail to observe Moon-jumpers, you cannot ‘prove’ that they don’t exist—for ‘No man can jump to the Moon’ is a negative universal proposition, and it’s a simple matter of logic that you can’t ‘prove’ those. No matter how many places you look at, at how many different times, though you might fail to observe Moon-jumpers, you’ll never observe their absence everywhere and at all times. Perhaps there were Moon-jumpers in places that you were not at, or at times that you were not at places, or both. And so it goes for every other human being who has ever lived, save for the Moon-jumpers themselves. So the absence of evidence of Moon-jumpers (like that of death-survivors) can never show that they do not exist.
The universal negative proposition above, one that takes the same form as Kastenbaum’s “no person can survive death” (1986, p. 198), provides a counterexample sufficient to show that you can ‘prove’ a universal negative. But it’s still important to spell out exactly why you can ‘prove’ one. The clearest way to explain this is to return to the other problems with Kastenbaum’s argument that you can’t do so. First, note that the “proof for the finality of death” that Kastenbaum sought cannot refer to a deductive ‘proof’ of some logically necessary truth that we cannot survive death. (To my knowledge Antony Flew is the only mortalist to have professionally argued that it’s necessarily true that one cannot ‘survive death’ [1984, p. 121], which obviously equivocates on the meaning of the terms used.) Kastenbaum said that we can’t rule out that future “observations” might “confirm survival beyond any reasonable doubt” (1986, p. 199). The very act of appealing to “observations” makes such confirmation fallible, not certain, since any confirmation must come inductively, not deductively.[7] And legally, proof beyond a reasonable doubt translates to establishing that a proposition is true “merely” with greater than 90% probability, not with 100% certainty. So asking whether “negative cases” can “endow their negative proposition with certainty” is asking the wrong question, since not even the “positive cases” can endow their positive proposition with certainty. In either case, the best that we can do is show that the proposition is highly probable. So conceptually, the survivalist cannot ‘prove’ that discarnate personal survival happens any more strongly than the mortalist can ‘prove’ that it doesn’t happen. The best that either can do, using Kastenbaum’s terminology, is prove their respective propositions “beyond any reasonable doubt.”[8]
If we tweak Kastenbaum’s claim to correct for the above and nothing else, the proper question becomes whether we can confirm beyond a reasonable doubt (i.e., with high probability) the “negative proposition” that discarnate personal survival either does not occur, or cannot occur (Kastenbaum addresses himself to the latter). And we clearly can, but it’s instructive to spell out exactly why Kastenbaum mistakenly thought that we cannot. He (wrongly) assumed that the only imaginable evidence against discarnate personal survival is the absence of evidence in its favor. The only “negative cases” that Kastenbaum had in mind were repeated failures to ‘observe’ signs of death-survivors. And it’s true that the mere absence of evidence of death-survivors, Moon-jumpers, or what have you cannot ‘prove’ beyond a reasonable doubt that they don’t exist. But their nonexistence can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in other inductive ways.
The best arguments against discarnate personal survival don’t appeal to the absence of evidence for it, but rather to (strong) positive evidence that a particular natural law holds true—namely, “a natural law that conscious states exist only in association with brain activity” (Lund, 2009, p. 19), at least for human minds and the minds of other enbrained organisms (e.g., Augustine, 2022a, pp. 371-374). In principle, this evidence could establish “beyond any reasonable doubt” that consciousness does not exist in the absence of the functioning of a brain or some other suitable physical substrate, and thus disconfirm discarnate personal survival “beyond any reasonable doubt.” And compared to the hypothetical white crows that Kastenbaum imagined, this (chiefly neuroscientific) evidence has the advantage of actually existing.
Now that we’ve seen that there can be “positive observations” of other things that, if true, would rule out discarnate personal survival ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ there’s one more ambiguity worth noting here. Kastenbaum’s argument that you can’t prove a (universal) negative is pitched in contrast to the idea that you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt a (particular) positive—namely, that this particular person has survived death, at least. But what does it mean to say that “a single positive instance is sufficient to prove that there is a life after life”? (1986, p. 199). A single positive instance of what, exactly? He clearly has in mind potential evidence of the activity of some deceased human spirit or other. But, in practice, what would evidence of spirit activity even look like? That is, how do we establish merely more probably than not (let alone beyond a reasonable doubt) that some particular event was caused by the activity of a deceased human spirit?
This isn’t some nitpick about the imperfections found in any body of evidence. Rather, it’s a question that speaks to an inherent shortcoming that’s rather unique to the survival evidence, one that makes it quite out of place for Kastenbaum to have talked about observations so straightforward that, in practice, they “will confirm survival beyond any reasonable doubt” (1986, p. 199). A person in the right place at the right time could capture a single white crow and put it in a zoo for ornithologists the world over the examine in all its glorious detail. But the evidence that survival researchers claim for death-survivors is never that rich. Unlike white crows, death-survivors have no color at all, being habitually invisible to the senses, as well as to our technological extensions of them (e.g., forward-looking infrared). Whatever death-survivors accomplish in other realms, their default behavior in the world of the living is inactivity. Whereas we could watch a white crow push an item off of a table, we can only guess that a death-survivor pushed an item off of a table. All that we see is the object move and fall; we don’t see what moves it. Perhaps a spirit “pushed” it; perhaps a living person on another continent unknowingly/subconsciously manifested psychokinetic powers to move it; or perhaps one of the interdimensional bulk beings depicted in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 movie Interstellar somehow moved it. Are the last two potential explanations for the item’s movement far-fetched? Absolutely! But explanations in terms of the potential activity of an equally elusive and invisible spirit are no less far-fetched. The only evidence we have for its existence is the item’s movement itself—unlike the evidence that we would have for a caged white crow.
There are, of course, more explanations still for the item’s movement, and more plausible ones at that. Here’s just one potential conventional explanation: perhaps the land that the table sits upon is slightly tilted relative to the horizon—not enough for those standing on it to notice, but enough to cause certain stationary objects subject to gravitational forces to start to roll. And, unlike the spirit hypothesis, this explanation (and others like it) has the advantage of actually being testable; for one, we can check how horizontally level the ground is. The main point here is that our inferences about the behavior of invisible and otherwise undetectable or barely detectable death-survivors are much harder to justify than our inferences about the behavior of literal white crows. Conceptually, we can directly observe the behavior of white crows (or other cryptids), after all. But we cannot observe the behavior of spirits. This makes Kastenbaum’s talk of hypothetical survival evidence that’s so compelling that it could confirm the existence of discarnates “beyond any reasonable doubt” just so much bluster. It’s rather difficult to justify characterizing activity that’s inherently elusive and interpretable as decisive.
The other problem, one which would apply to any body of evidence, concerns whether a particular observation really does constitute “a single positive instance” of a particular proposition (like “There is a white crow”). The truth is that particular positive propositions are just as fallible (uncertain) as universal negative ones (or any other logically contingent statements). Kastenbaum seems to have thought that particular positives like ‘At least one person has survived death’ can be ‘proven’ to a greater probabilistic degree than universal negative propositions like ‘No persons can survive death.’ But conceptually, neither kind of proposition can be known inherently more certainly than the other (though the total available relevant evidence that we discover can make one of our examples of them much more probable than the other).
Take Galileo’s law of falling bodies. In the absence of atmospheric resistance (e.g., in a vacuum), all objects (in our universe) dropped from the same height accelerate at the same rate regardless of their mass (i.e., heavier objects do not arrive at the ground more quickly than lighter ones). Here Kastenbaum presumably would have said that we can ‘prove’ multiple particular ‘black crow’ instances of objects obeying the law, and potentially some particular ‘white crow’ instances of objects deviating from it, but cannot prove that there are no particular ‘white crow’ instances of deviating objects somewhere at some time, as the truth of the law of falling bodies would entail. But this argument equivocates on the meaning of the term proof, switching between “proof beyond any reasonable doubt” and something closer to the idea of a mathematical proof. And what’s especially problematic about this is that scientific laws are the theses for which humanity has the greatest degree of evidential support (per scientists’ hypothesis-theory-law hierarchy)—which qualifies for Kastenbaum’s “proof beyond any reasonable doubt” if anything does. Both the apparent conformity of a falling object to the law and the apparent deviation of a falling object from it are at best apparent and thus can be mistaken. Perhaps a ‘white crow’ hammer arrives at the ground sooner than a feather because there was atmospheric resistance that the observer was unaware of. Or perhaps prior to its drop, the hammer’s hidden nanopropulsion system was activated, adding supplementary kinetic energy causing it to appear to violate the law.
So we don’t know with complete certainty that the law of falling bodies holds, but neither do we know with complete certainty that apparent deviations from it actually violate the law. Nor do we know whether a particular observation of a literal white crow really is a white crow; one’s observation could be of a black crow that was painted white, or of an abnormally illuminated crow that appears white under that illumination, or of a robotic white simulacrum of a crow, and so on. The uncertainty thus goes in both directions. We don’t need to observe every object that has ever fallen in the history of the universe to confirm by scientific standards that Galileo’s law of falling bodies holds, or to ‘prove the negative’ that no falling objects deviate from it. For the ‘proof’ in Kastenbaum’s ‘you can’t prove a negative’ trope refers to establishing the probability of a proposition to the same degree that other scientific ‘facts’ are established.
Nevertheless, Kastenbaum was emphatic: “The next fundamental point is that survival can never be disproved. Never” (1986, p. 198). By coating these fallacious arguments with a shiny veneer of false logic, Kastenbaum paved the way for survivalist true believers to rationalize their disinterest in where the overall evidence lies. Arguing that discordant evidence is not even possible only shores up true believers’ proclivity to solely consider evidence that already confirms their preexisting beliefs. This is benign for overtly faith-based religious beliefs or conspiracy theories, but pseudoscientific when claiming scientific support while ignoring any scientific evidence to the contrary. Those who refuse to even consider that there might be discordant evidence against their beliefs are not on the same playing field as those who weigh both supporting and discordant evidence in their evidential assessments.
So the ‘you can’t prove a negative’ gambit encourages survivalists to factitiously exempt themselves from an otherwise basic scientific requirement. After all, it’s impossible to consider evidence that logically cannot exist. The gambit only works, though, if in fact it’s true that there’s no way to “disprove” survival—and we’ve seen that it’s not true. It’s notable in this respect that, despite having called out (as the “disbelieving protagonist”) some survivalists’ unwillingness to even consider discordant evidence in his concluding chapter, neither of Kastenbaum’s two books (1986; 1995) on the subject even addressed the neuroscientific evidence that brain functioning is needed to sustain human consciousness (unlike, say, Braude, 2003, pp. 288-292, which at least attempts to answer such evidence). And survival researchers are generally silent about their past attempts to conduct direct tests of survival (or of mind-body separation), no doubt because their consistently negative results call into question the value of doing survival research in the first place.
3.5.3 Causal Ignorance is not Causal Evidence
Despite the above, appeals to considerations about white crows and proving negatives are the best arguments that we get from Kastenbaum’s final two major sections. The arguments only get worse from here:
The fact of the matter is that many observations of survival phenomena remain untouched by responsible criticism. These cases occur in all the realms of survival evidence that have been explored in this book, as well as in cases of the reincarnation type that so far have only been mentioned in passing. Investigators sometimes say, ‘Such-and-such a case must be dismissed because there is evidence of fraud’, and often we would agree. In cases where there is no basis for allegations of fraud, critics will sometimes conclude that ‘other and simpler explanations can be given to the phenomena’. Depending on the specific facts of the case, we will sometimes agree with this conclusion as well. In other instances, however, the so-called ‘simpler’ explanations are actually rather far-fetched and have no positive evidence on their behalf (such as the glib explanation of all survival evidence as some preposterous overextension of psi). But, finally, it is also characteristic of critics to shrug off certain cases that they cannot find anything against. They find problems with Case A and Case B, so there must be something wrong with Case C as well, even though they can’t say just what! Over the years, then, a residue of evidence favouring survival has built up that critics have shunted aside because it occurs among other cases that they find reasons for discarding. If any one of these strong cases is valid, then survival has been proven. (Of course, it is far more likely that a number of such cases, and not merely one, will be valid.) (pp. 195-196)
When French Enlightenment philosophe Baron d’Holbach said that “Theology is but the ignorance of natural causes reduced to a system” (1772/2003, p. 88), he might as well have been talking about the arguments made on behalf of survival research. The argument above committed Kastenbaum to a fallacious argument from ignorance. Imagine that a UFOlogist presents you with 100 cases of unexplained lights in the sky, and after meticulous investigation, you are able to identify conventional causes for ninety-six of them. ‘Aha!,’ he retorts, ‘there are four cases whose causes you cannot identify’ (perhaps merely because not enough evidence is provided to identify them). These four still-unexplained lights cases constitute “a residue of evidence” favoring extraterrestrial visitation, he tells us, that “critics have shunted aside because [they occur] among other cases that they find reasons for discarding.” But all that the investigator has done is sorted the one hundred unexplained light cases into “solved” and “unsolved” categories; he has not confirmed the extraterrestrial visitation hypothesis in the way that an analysis of an artifact beyond human technology and made from materials that are not present and cannot be synthesized on Earth would have confirmed it. (Compare this to how investigators seek direct evidence that a surface-to-air missile caused a plane to crash rather than merely try to eliminate as many alternative explanations to that hypothesis that they can think of [Augustine, 2022c, p. 798].).
3.5.4 Psychologizing Opponents
Kastenbaum’s verdict on the survival question was grounded in talking points about white crows, pseudo-logic, fantasies about critics’ onerous requirements that a phenomenon be reproducible under all conditions (rather than simply controlled ones), putative resistance to the obvious based on nothing more than preconceptions that certain phenomena are impossible (1986, p. 195) (rather than simply poorly evidenced), supposed demands that the survival evidence be perfect before it’s deemed good (1986, pp. 196-197)[9], and psychologizing that “the average scientist will have to conceal his terror as best he can” at the prospect of a confrontation “with direct reality” (1986, p. 198) rather than quantitative reasoning, whatever that means.
Perhaps the direct reality that Kastenbaum imagined arouses “terror” in the survival critic is the same one that Sommer conjectures:
If we axiomatically shut out the possibility of the mind’s persistence after death, we are (at least theoretically) liberated from a whole host of conscious or unconscious archaic fears associated with survival—for example, anxieties over the very uncertainty of the nature of a hypothetical afterlife, including unhelpful worries of hell or retributions for our moral shortcomings, and not least fears of evil spirits and ‘things that go bump in the night’. It may seem, then, that there are at least as many psychological and emotional motivations for some of us to categorically reject afterlife beliefs as there are for others to uncritically embrace them. (Sommer, 2024, p. 10)
Of course, human beings have a number of other “archaic fears” that would be no less assuaged if we “axiomatically shut out the possibility” of vampires, werewolves, dogmen, the Jersey Devil, Mothman, siren songs, extraterrestrial abductors, and the like. Whether or not there’s good reason to affirm the existence of any of these things is a separate issue. There are more than enough less remote anxieties about the one life that we definitely know exists to worry about—concerns about one’s health, crime, war, or crossing planetary boundaries, just to name a few—to warrant worry about purely hypothetical threats. And any socially instilled fears of postmortem punishments for earthly transgressions are quickly extinguished by the realization that any morally perfect entity would be understanding of our ignorance of the truth and forgiving of our past transgressions. Moreover, if anything, the “hypothetical afterlife” portrayed in the sorts of cases that survival researchers appeal to is one of freely chosen soul contracts, Earth as a kind of school where hardships are purpose-filled learning experiences rather than senseless tribulations, and a return to a “home” of unconditional love where, despite all red in tooth and claw appearances to the contrary, all is right with the world. Utopia—how “terrifying” for the unconvinced!
Unable to contain his condescension, Kastenbaum further psychologized those who hesitate to affirm survival:
Identifying themselves more with man made systems than with God or the human community at large, they [survival critics] see death primarily as the failure of physical apparatus. There is no clear sense of a transcendent purpose in life and—of even greater moment—there is no sense of worthiness for continued existence. ‘I am but a machine (though a rather clever one) and I must eventually fail and be scrapped.’ With this low self-esteem, the thoroughly modern person cannot imagine why the universe should care about him. Despite the brave noises he makes from time to time, fundamentally he does not care all that much for himself. (1986, p. 193)
Of course, for every Kastenbaum that sees “low self-esteem” in any “thoroughly modern person” who doubts survival, there are others who see conceit in the position that, out of the ~45,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual animals that have ever lived on Earth, Mother Nature would ensure that you do not perish as an individual when, presumably, nearly all of them already did.
Kastenbaum’s conjecture that “some find it more comforting to deny value and meaning than to dedicate themselves to actualization” (1986, p. 194), coupled with his affection for those with “an unshakeable faith in survival…. [who] do not need the services of [science] to establish or confirm their beliefs, and [may] have become impatient with the detail we have had to consider” (1986, p. 209), differs little from the attitude that “Kastenbaum’s disbelieving protagonist” complained about: “The rare person who came to certitude about the afterlife ‘through philosophical anguish’ did so because life would seem to be ‘without purpose—without God’ unless such a belief could be held” (1986, p. 179).
In short, the arguments that Kastenbaum appealed to in his final two major sections are objectively poor ones, and Kastenbaum’s prominent status as the founder of the seminal Omega: Journal of Death and Dying (Doka, 2014) does nothing to change that.
4. Conclusion: A Belief in Search of Evidence, or Evidence-Driven Belief?
By only considering potential parapsychological evidence for survival, Shushan, Sommer, and Kastenbaum all ignore the available (and less ambiguous) evidence relevant to the survival question from other empirical disciplines like cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology. Kastenbaum’s point (or that of his “disbelieving protagonist”) about survivalist true believers’ refusal to even try to imagine discordant evidence thus has an important corollary, one that’s notable because it infects nearly all contemporary survival research: even those who do ground their afterlife beliefs in survival evidence (rather than, say, religious tradition) fail to approach the survival question scientifically unless they move past simply cherry-picking evidence that supports what they already believe. There are, after all, just as many “varied and abundant evidences” (Kastenbaum, 1986, p. 209) for extraterrestrial visitation and the existence of Bigfoot as there are for survival, and yet most of us don’t take the former to have been scientifically established.
A scientifically minded approach would additionally take into account the empirical evidence against discarnate personal survival and weigh the one evidential research base against the other. Coming to conclusions about the survival of human consciousness by only looking at the subset of the evidence that might support what you already think while claiming that your conclusions are empirically grounded is practicing pseudoscience, pure and simple. That point bears repeating: by collecting evidence in this way, survival researchers de facto practice pseudoscience. Raising this issue is pointing out the presence of a characteristic of an ostensibly scientific discipline that needs to be corrected, not lobbing a pejorative at a group or an individual. Conflating the former with the latter is analogous to conflating internal patriotic criticism of Israeli administration policies with anti-Semitism. It is a rhetorical strategy designed to shut down conversation about the merits of the criticism so as to be able to deflect from having to answer it, likely because the criticism is valid (otherwise it would be answered rather than deflected). It injects politics into science when politics has no place in it. The appropriate reaction of my survivalist readers to this point should be ‘He’s not wrong.’
If you want to believe that intelligent extraterrestrial beings are visiting Earth, you’ll tend to interpret any merely unidentified aerial phenomenon as an extraterrestrial spaceship. The fact that you’ve ‘studied the UFOlogical evidence’ doesn’t make your belief scientific. You also need to independently consider the evidence that the unidentified thing is some conventional (perhaps classified) aircraft or drone, atmospheric effect, and so on, on their own terms. That is, you need to assess these conventional hypotheses independently of trying to vindicate the extraterrestrial hypothesis. It’s therefore better to investigate the survival question by having mainstream researchers who are not survival researchers (and thus are not trying to vindicate the survival hypothesis) investigate conventional explanations of ostensible ‘survival evidence.’ If you want to know whether biological evolution has occurred, you look to biologists who are not wedded to the creation hypothesis to investigate the biological evidence independently of trying to vindicate special creation. Anything less is warming up to pseudoscience.
To his credit, Kastenbaum (through his “disbelieving protagonist”) realized some semblance of this point in his book update about a decade later:
To be sure, a smattering of putative evidence is comforting for those who harbor some doubts or who fear that others might think them odd for believing in reincarnation. By and large, though, these people are not concerned with evidence as such, but simply with the legitimatization of a belief that they feel good about. The prevalence of this casual attitude toward critical examination and verification is the reason why this section started by exploring the knowledge base and attitudes of Western converts to reincarnation. A handful of researchers and several handfuls of scholars do concern themselves systematically with the truth value of reincarnation belief, but most people are satisfied with beguiling stories. We have the right and perhaps the obligation to ask: how do these stories stand up? (Kastenbaum, 1995, p. 217)
Where Kastenbaum’s point does not go far enough is in the naïve presumption that a “handful of researchers and several handfuls of scholars” are any less likely to fall prey to confirmation bias than the rest of us. (See Augustine [2022a, p. 379] for an example of how superficially a “Not likely fraud” verdict is supported for the Scole séances.) Regardless of what they say, I submit that the actions of survival researchers often betray that they “are not concerned with evidence as such, but simply with the legitimatization of a belief”—a belief in discarnate personal survival. Were it otherwise, they wouldn’t handle contrary evidence as badly as they do. That’s why those with no dog in this fight—fence-sitters who could go either way on the survival question—need to look at the arguments of at least two sides on this issue, and judge the merit of the positions based on the content of the verbatim arguments made for them from the mouths of their proponents. This minimizes the risk of mischaracterization or misunderstanding when the task of thinking about how to respond to them is at hand.
Unlike Kastenbaum, who seems to have thought that the absence of compelling evidence in favor of survival is the only possible evidence against it, Shushan and Sommer cannot claim ignorance of the law. They’re fully aware of—and even cite—sources that both present this evidence to them and explain in an accessible manner how that evidence constitutes evidence against discarnate personal survival. So what is their response to this discordant evidence? Deafening silence.
This is understandable if they cannot answer the evidential implications of that evidence. But when none of their survivalist brethren even attempt to do so, either, one must ask what explains their collective silence. I submit that what explains it is that survival proponents as a whole are not capable of credibly answering the scientific case against discarnate personal survival. Their inability to do so is simply a reflection of the strength of the evidence itself. But then the appropriate response of Shushan, Sommer, and others is not to straw man the messengers who simply deliver that evidence, or to shift the conversation to something less upsetting, but instead to change their conclusions about whether discarnate personal survival occurs—in a perfectly rational world, anyway.
All of their misdirection, after all, leaves the actual arguments presented by their critics untouched. And by ignoring such arguments, survivalists give readers no indication of where exactly the actual argument goes wrong. Again, I submit that their behavior betrays the fact that they are not able to show where the argument goes wrong, which in turn is a consequence of the fact that it does not go wrong. But again, if they genuinely care about being scientifically minded, then they ought to judge the position on the merits of the case rather than on how they feel about its conclusion. In science the issue in question is not whether you (or anyone else) like the way that the world is, but rather what way it is. And on the latter question, I’ve made my case in an open access article that anyone can review for themselves (Augustine, 2022a). Survival researchers are free to prove my point by continuing to ignore its arguments.
Truly scientific research on postmortem survival is hard to come by these days. But survivalist apologetics is alive and well—even in the International Review of Psychiatry.[10]
Notes
[1] The presence of well-defined cross-cultural NDE motifs would be clearer where studies include the verbatim written or oral narratives of NDErs from different, maximally isolated cultures, rather than just table summaries that claim that a particular motif was present without any elaboration or examples for readers to check (e.g., Zhi-ying & Jian-xun, 1992).
[2] The mind-brain dependence thesis would only be falsified by interactive traces if we added the (also testable) auxiliary assumption that there is also no separable part of human beings that could persist after death (Augustine & Fishman, 2015, p. 281n37). That technical qualification is needed because it’s possible to have a kind of interactionist substance dualism where it is the combination of a separable part with a functioning brain that enables a person’s conscious mental functioning (e.g., Broad, 1925, pp. 535-538; Swinburne, 1997, p. 310). In that case, both the separable part and the functioning brain would need to remain intact for a person’s mind to persist after death—and the functioning brain obviously does not survive biological death. So the detection of interactive traces by itself would not falsify that possible barrier to discarnate personal survival. There are similar caveats about the need to invoke additional auxiliary assumptions about the paranormal abilities (or lack thereof) of living persons in order for direct tests of survival to falsify the dependence thesis (Augustine & Fishman, 2015, pp. 224-225).
Some might therefore worry that a dependence thesis proponent could immunize the thesis from falsification—should interactive traces ever be discovered and/or direct tests of survival ever succeed—by simply rejecting the requisite auxiliary assumptions. It’s worth noting, then, that other kinds of data would straightforwardly falsify (better: disconfirm/reduce the probability of) the dependence thesis without invoking any auxiliary assumptions at all, and so the dependence thesis couldn’t even potentially be immunized from falsification by the discovery of such data: “if greater brain complexity had been found to yield lesser mental acuity, this would have falsified the dependence thesis and confirmed the filter theory. Less obviously, then, the data considered in this section constitute potential falsifiers of the dependence thesis that did not in fact falsify it (i.e., its confirmed predictions) no less than the explicit falsification attempts [i.e., direct tests of survival] considered in the previous section” (Augustine & Fishman, 2015, p. 281n33).
The previous sentence is actually an understatement; the neuroscientific evidence that could have been found (but wasn’t) would have more clearly falsified the dependence thesis than successful direct tests of survival or the detection of interactive traces precisely because the dependence thesis is less susceptible to being immunized from falsification by the neuroscientific evidence. My chapter only understates the point in order to engage unsympathetic psychical researchers that rarely investigate neuroscientific findings (since they self-selectively do psychical research instead of doing neuroscience). Psychical researchers standardly approach the survival question only by asking themselves what evidence might confirm discarnate personal survival (since parapsychological research itself only investigates the sorts of data that might be confirmatory here) (Augustine, 2022b, p. 423). They rarely ask themselves what else would have to be true (e.g., the independence thesis) in order for discarnate personal survival to be true, and thus rarely consider how one might go about testing such prerequisites for survival in order to ascertain whether or not discarnate personal survival is scientifically likely.
Thus for over a century psychical researchers have been focused on the wrong thing: whether or not we can find evidence that survival occurs, where even if we found none, survival might still occur. A scientific exploration of the possibility of discarnate personal survival would have instead asked whether all of the available relevant data favor or disfavor the mind’s independence from brain activity. That question leaves open the possibility of acquiring evidence both for and against the hypothesis, rather than pre-deciding the issue by only looking for confirmatory evidence, which is exactly what Karl Popper famously said made psychoanalysis a pseudoscience, for then (if accurately characterized) psychoanalysis would be unfalsifiable, which in turn would make it scientifically untestable, and therefore not scientific at all.
This failure of imagination on the part of survival researchers is a consequence of only looking for confirming evidence for one’s pet theories, rather than scientifically asking how you might go about testing them to see whether or not they are true. In the latter case there’s a possibility that the evidence might count against the theory rather than simply for it. After all, our confidence that a particular theory is true is the result of our having tested it many times over in instances when evidence against it could have turned up, but did not in fact turn up when we tested it.
[3] It’s also worth noting how Sommer completely disregards the context in which I quoted Kastenbaum. Sommer is evidently unphased by or uninterested in the real-life evidence that human consciousness requires a functioning brain, and thus stops when brain functioning stops—which exemplifies exactly the attitude that Kastenbaum (or at least “Kastenbaum’s disbelieving protagonist”) warned survivalists against!
[4] This consciously simplifies the issue to a binary choice between just two sides for pedagogical purposes. There are, of course, multiple sides divided over multiple issues in the larger literature.
[5] When I look at contentious issues in the classroom, I take a similar approach, only I pit actual proponents against actual opponents on a topic—because who else is going to be as invested in providing the best argument for a position than an informed author who earnestly believes that the position that he defends is true? Whenever possible, my two contenders are actually directly addressing each other, too (e.g., by responding to the other’s journal article, rather than independently talking about the same topic), as this decreases the chance of the two authors talking past each other. (For example, in biomedical ethics I pit Kenneth Kipnis [2006] against James Hodge [2006] on medical confidentiality, Sarah Conly [2012] against her book’s reviewers on coercive paternalism, John Lantos and colleagues [2012] against Douglas Opel and Douglas Diekema [2012] on vaccine mandates, Robert Sparrow [2011] against Art Caplan [2004] on individual eugenics, Jan Narveson against Gary Francione [Francione, Narveson, & Groubert, 2009] on animal rights, and H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr [1996] against Norman Daniels [2001] on whether health care is a universal human right.) This strikes me as the best way for an uninitiated person to get to the bottom of issues themselves, for an outside observer to a debate can get a decent sense of which side has the better arguments when their best representatives are forced to engage with each other directly. Observant outsiders can see which arguments are ignored or otherwise evaded in such interactions, raising the issue of whether the untouched arguments are untouched precisely because they cannot be plausibly refuted.
By comparison, in feigning taking on a position himself as devil’s advocate, Kastenbaum ran the (actualized) risk of presenting a weaker version of one side’s arguments than would be provided by an actual representative of that side, which did not do his book’s readers justice. Those who actually believe in what they are arguing will more often than not produce better arguments in favor of the positions that they defend since they sincerely find the reasons that they offer compelling. The relevance of this point to Kastenbaum’s book will become obvious in the penultimate section of this paper.
[6] For example, Kastenbaum concluded a Journal of Near-Death Studies book review with the question: “Will the once-promising realm of NDE research end up as fodder for campfire stories, or will there be investigators willing and able to take the long, slow, often frustrating road toward verified knowledge?” (1993, p. 57). And he certainly maintained neutrality on the survival question in the standard thanatology reference works that he edited, such as in the survival-related entries that he wrote for the Macmillian Encyclopedia of Death and Dying (s.v. “Communication with the Dead,” “Ghosts,” and “Immortality”). In his “Communication with the Dead” entry there, for instance, Kastenbaum devoted an entire section on the history of “Fraudulent Communication with the Dead,” only the last paragraph of which even mentioned the famous cross-correspondences and ended on the noncommittal stance: “A computerized analysis of cross-correspondences might at least make it possible to gain a better perspective on the phenomena” (Kastenbaum, 2003, p. 178). (Contrast this focus with that of deathbed visions researcher Karlis Osis in the “Life After Death” entry written for an earlier edition of an encyclopedia of death that Kastenbaum edited.)
Kastenbaum’s overall body of work has given others the same impression, too. Philosopher Michael Potts lists Kastenbaum among “critics of NDE evidence for survival,” writing:
Robert Kastenbaum (1996), for example, like other critics of NDEs as support for survival, noted that NDEs occur near death, not after death. He also discussed a number of other problems with the NDE evidence: why more people near death do not report NDEs, why some NDEs are frightening and others peaceful, why some people not near death have NDE-like experiences, and why individuals very close to death may actually be “less likely to report an NDE than those who were less endangered” (p. 261). But Kastenbaum is not a reductionist in the sense that he believes that a physicalist explanation of NDEs exhausts its value or meaning. Rather, he supports a phenomenological approach to NDEs, focusing on the experience as a whole and its functional value. Still, he remains skeptical when it comes to NDEs offering evidence of life after death. (2002, p. 248)
Similarly, suicidologist David Lester, citing Kastenbaum’s works on the survival evidence from the late 1970s to late 1990s, writes:
Kastenbaum [1979] concluded his review of the evidence with one puzzling question. If there is life after death, then why are the relevant phenomena so rare? Why don’t we see apparitions more often, and why don’t all of us see them? Why don’t we all remember previous lives, and why don’t those of us who almost die all have near-death experiences? (Lester, 2005, p. 5)
Kastenbaum (1998) [an earlier Allyn & Bacon edition of Kastenbaum (2016)] has suggested that the near-death experience may be a memory that is created on the way back to consciousness rather than being something the person experiences at the death crisis. The near-death experience may be an attempt by the mind to make sense of the events that have occurred, after their occurrence. (Lester, 2005, p. 70)
Kastenbaum was not convinced that NDEs are evidence for survival after death. He suggested that NDEs are mental states that occur when people can do nothing directly to improve their chances of surviving a crisis. The state serves to quiet the nervous system and conserve energy. In addition, he asserted, “People who have died and stayed dead have not necessarily had the experiences reported by those who have shared their extraordinary episodes with us” ([1996] p. 261). (Lester, 2005, p. 95)
[7] Kastenbaum did realize this: “The proposition that ‘no man can survive his own death’ is what logicians call inductive, that is, it requires observations from the specific in order to arrive at a general statement” (1986, p. 199). The old standby is deriving the conclusion that “all crows are black” from unfailingly observing that every particular crow that one has encountered has been black. But this simple enumerative induction does not exhaust the kinds of inductive reasoning available, and it is not one of the kinds of induction most often found in coming to scientific conclusions. More common are principled inferences from certain kinds of correlation to causation, inferences that the best explanation among the pool of live options at hand is probably the true one, or applications of Bayesian probability to hypothesis testing.
[8] I am adopting the legal evidentiary standard of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” only because Kastenbaum framed his argument in terms of it. Specifically legal standards of evidence are inappropriate here (Sudduth, 2024, pp. 471-473), though the more basic standard that underlies them, that of establishing that a proposition is true to a high degree of probability, is appropriate.
[9] Compare this to parapsychologist Stephen Braude’s recent concessions on the evidential status of the anecdotal (non-experimental) survival evidence: “So it may well turn out, especially in the absence of anything seriously approaching the ideal cases we can invent, that our conviction (or lack thereof) about the prospects of survival will rest on how personally compelling we find the evidence before us” [emphasis mine] (Braude, 2021, p. 10). And again: “it seems clear that no actual survival case is as coercive as the ideal cases one can easily imagine” (Braude, 2021, p. 12). The issue is that the evidence at hand falls well short of an ideal case, not the hyperbolic canard that it fails to be perfect in all respects.
[10] I want to be clear that I don’t hold the editors of IRP personally responsible for this oversight, as Shushan’s misrepresentation is subtle, and detecting Sommer’s multiple errors would require checking Kastenbaum’s original out-of-print, nearly 40-year-old book against immaterial comments thrown in to Sommer’s unrelated article solely to discredit a survival critic. Editors and referees typically give authors the benefit of the doubt that when they cite others’ works, they cite and paraphrase them accurately, checking only the evidence and arguments in the article at hand for accuracy. This is understandable since the job of an editor is to ensure that the arguments of the article itself are credible. At some point authors have to take responsibility for their own actions, including the responsibility of getting the facts that they cite right, rather than outsource that job to someone else.
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