(2026)
ABSTRACT: In “On Cross-Cultural and Historical Near-Death Experiences: A Secular Historian of Religions Answers a Critic” Gregory Shushan took issue with being addressed as a survivalist in an earlier Secular Web paper by Keith Augustine, doubled down on maintaining that an Augustine article in the Journal of Near-Death Studies advocates promissory materialism, and denied that his own work only addressed parapsychological evidence concerning survival after death at the exclusion of other kinds relevant evidence. In this reply Keith Augustine clarifies exactly how Shushan limits the type of evidence that he considers when writing about survival to evidence of a parapsychological sort, denies advocating promissory materialism, and charges that Shushan inflates the significance of using the term survivalist when referring to a group. Augustine goes on to emphasize that the overarching theme of his earlier Secular Web paper was to explore why critics of survival skeptics consistently resort to fallacious arguments instead of addressing the skeptical arguments themselves.
In a recent Secular Web response to my 2024 paper “Are Survivalists Unable to Answer Their Critics?,” Gregory Shushan makes three key complaints. First, he takes issue with being labeled a “survivalist,” a person who minimally leans more toward thinking that individuals/persons survive biological death than thinking that they don’t or being completely unsure about whether they do. Whatever its merit, this complaint overstates the significance of both the use of a single word in the paper’s title and a few leanings-associations under which Shushan is explicitly (and perhaps mistakenly) grouped. Shushan’s main semantic dispute, then, is over whether a particular label that’s appropriate for the other scholars discussed is also appropriate for him. While the incidental question as to whether he believes that survival occurs is worth clarifying, concentrating on it does not answer whether Shushan’s specific criticisms of my earlier Journal of Near-Death Studies (JNDS) article (Augustine, 2007b)—the focus of a mere two-paragraph section of my 2024 paper—accurately conveyed that JNDS article’s arguments. His second complaint, though mistaken, is that one of his sentences partially quoting that JNDS article in the International Review of Psychiatry (IRP) did indeed cite evidence that I there advocated what seminal philosopher of science Karl Popper pejoratively called “promissory materialism.” “Promissory materialism” refers the belief that whatever science discovers in the future, science will explain it solely in terms of matter in motion. Finally, he also complains about my characterization of him as yet another survival scholar who “only consider[s] potential parapsychological evidence for survival” (Augustine, 2024), evidently not recognizing that I was referring to the type of evidence that he considers when writing about “implications for the survival hypothesis” (Shushan, 2024, p. 1), not about the kind of evidence that he works with when doing historical work more generally. Moreover, where I noted that survival scholars consistently “ignore the available (and less ambiguous) evidence relevant to the survival question from other empirical disciplines” than parapsychology, I specifically named “cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology” (Augustine, 2024) to be clearer about my meaning, though perhaps I was still not clear enough.
My reply will be easier to follow if I reverse the order of my responses, I think, so let’s look at Shushan’s third complaint first. Given the way that Shushan frames the issues from the outset in his IRP article—invoking a dichotomy between “survival and materialist hypotheses” or “materialist and metaphysical perspectives” (Shushan, 2024, p. 1)—I suspect that he misunderstands what I mean by evidence relevant to the survival question from, say, cognitive neuroscience, for there is nothing in my meaning that should cause Shushan (or any scholar) to become perplexed “to see myself included among scholars ‘only considering potential parapsychological evidence for survival’ and ignoring evidence from ‘other empirical disciplines'” (Shushan, 2026). I called out out-of-body experience (OBE) researcher Harvey J. Irwin for making the same mistake (Augustine, 2022b, p. 423), for example, even though he explicitly repudiates the survival hypothesis (Irwin, 2002), and even though his exemplary long career in psychology and parapsychology have earned him a great deal of respect from everyone.
Shushan’s unhelpful dichotomy leads him to say things that simply aren’t true, such as: “Our binary choice [from Augustine], then, is either neuroscientific or sociological, which are both materialist explanations” (Shushan, 2026). In fact, invoking either of them does not invoke materialism. Take any definition of materialism—that everything that exists is physical, for example. Neither a neuroscientific nor a sociological explanation of near-death experiences (NDEs) provides any support for that position, so defined; mutatis mutandis for any other definition of materialism/physicalism. These sorts of explanations, if substantiated, would not provide evidence for materialism; they would simply remove one particular ostensible refutation of materialism, leaving any remaining ones intact—and thus not vindicating materialism, in any sense, either. All that a neuroscientific or sociological explanation of NDEs could do, in principle, is take away purported support for an otherworldly or survivalist interpretation of NDEs. These sorts of explanations would not establish materialism, but at most that NDEs are experiences of something other than survival, or more accurately, something other than soul-body separation.
So when I (accurately) said that Shushan “only consider[s] potential parapsychological evidence for survival,” ignoring “the available (and less ambiguous) evidence relevant to the survival question from other empirical disciplines” like “cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology” (Augustine, 2024), I didn’t mean merely that so-called survival phenomena like NDEs could theoretically be amenable to either hypothetical or established neuroscientific explanations. That is a trifle. Rather, I meant that there is independent neuroscientific evidence that has nothing to do with neuroscientific explanations of so-called survival phenomena. Survival scholars’ propensity to only look at “potential parapsychological evidence for survival” is their propensity to never look beyond the so-called survival phenomena. That is, when they evaluate “implications for the survival hypothesis” of empirical evidence, they tend to ignore evidence that’s highly relevant to whether discarnate personal survival occurs, but is also evidence other than reports of apparitional experiences, OBEs, NDEs, ostensible communications with the dead, ostensible past-life memories, and the like. The additional evidence that they neglect stands, independently, whether or not so-called survival phenomena have neurological explanations. That evidence includes the effects on individuals’ mental functioning—since that mental functioning is what is said to survive death—of the behavioral dispositions that they inherited from their parents, of how their brains developed during pregnancy or childhood, of hormonal changes during adolescence, of localized brain lesions on specific cognitive abilities like facial- or word-recognition, of the disappearance of characteristic personality traits (not merely their ‘expression’) during advanced dementia, of mind-altering surgeries like lobotomies, of chemically induced mental impairments or improvements, and the like. While I merely cite an earlier reference that already lists them (Augustine, 2022a, pp. 371-374) rather than listing them again at the end of the paper that provoked Shushan’s response, I was nevertheless explicit about what sorts of evidence I meant in the parts of that paper that don’t mention Shushan specifically.
To be fair, then, my meaning was likely obscured from Shushan by being explained in the sections on scholars writing on survival other than him. It wasn’t until the section after his on Andreas Sommer that I was more explicit about referring to “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). Sommer’s mischaracterizations in IRP forced that issue, but Shushan’s IRP criticisms did not. Similarly, when later addressing the arguments of the late thanatologist Robert Kastenbaum, I was more explicit that Kastenbaum consistently ignored “the neuroscientific evidence that brain functioning is needed to sustain human consciousness” (Augustine, 2024). So when I went on to talk about “the strength of the evidence itself” pertaining to “the scientific case against discarnate personal survival” in the Secular Web paper’s conclusion, this was the specific sort of neuroscientific evidence to which I was referring. And the significance of its neglect is that provides strong empirical evidence—evidence stronger than that provided by parapsychology—that discarnate personal survival could well be false, not simply unevidenced.
Recall that Shushan’s second complaint simply doubled down on his IRP accusation that I affirmed promissory materialism. This accusation was the sole focus of my section on Shushan specifically was whether (only the very first of) Shushan’s IRP criticisms of my earlier JNDS article (Augustine, 2007b) accurately stated any of the conclusions drawn in that article (or indeed, in any of my lead articles or responses to commentators across three consecutive JNDS issues that year—or anywhere else, before or since). In the section on Shushan I only aimed to show that, in virtue of mischaracterizing my position, Shushan’s first IRP criticism did not in fact address any of the actual arguments for positions contained in the JNDS article that he partially quoted. Since his first criticism erroneously painted my position as a methodologically pernicious one that would automatically exclude from consideration any evidence undermining my position, I simply set the record straight. (And Shushan’s other criticisms had already been adequately answered elsewhere in my 2007 JNDS contributions—Augustine, 2007c, p. 173 already answers the accusation in Shushan, 2024, p. 5, for example.) Since it was the section’s sole focus, whether Shushan did in fact strawman my JNDS position ought to have been the crux of his response. So this crux is the issue to which I will now turn.
My section on Shushan already put the point as simply as possible: it was the addition of the evidence of out-of-body discrepancies and NDErs’ failed predictions, among other things, that “would be much more expected of a brain-generated hallucinatory experience like a REM dream than of a literal journey to another world” [emphasis added] (Augustine, 2024). The REM dream analogy that preceded it, however, is sufficient to answer the promissory materialism charge. Dream researchers who investigate the possibility that REM dreams function as memory consolidation processes are not guilty of “promissory materialism” simply because they do not invoke the hypothesis that REM dreams are the experiences of a soul or astral body that has literally left the biological body. Particularly so when these researchers present evidence that REM dreams actually do consolidate memories. Evidence consistent with materialism is not evidence for materialism.
Perhaps this time around a different analogy will better illustrate the point. Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity posits an explanation for planetary orbits—the warping of space-time—that does not invoke the actions of angels alternatively or concurrently sustaining those orbits. But its failure to affirm angelic sustenance doesn’t render an affirmation of general relativity an instance of “materialism,” promissory or otherwise.
In fact, the year after Shushan’s book on indigenous NDE reports was published—from which his IRP article is derived (2018, pp. 227-236)—I wrote: “As a simple point of logic, that people hallucinate spiritual realms during NDEs cannot provide evidence that spiritual realms do not exist any more than that people hallucinate trips to Paris while dreaming can provide evidence that Paris does not exist. In other words, spiritual realms might exist even if no NDE is ever an experience of them” (Augustine, 2019, p. 594). And I have never claimed that evidence that either strongly favors or disfavors survivalist interpretations of NDEs “constitute proof” (Shushan, 2026) for or against those interpretations. My point was simply that the hallucinatory nature of (at least some) NDEs would be more expected of a hallucination than of a literal journey, even though literal journeys could involve a highly malleable “mind-dependent reality” (Shushan. 2024, p. 4). After all, it is precisely this feature of “numerous different dream-worlds” (Shushan. 2024, p. 4) that leads most people to take (at least most) REM dreams to be experiences of imaginary realms rather than real ones.
By not providing the full sentence, the view that Shushan attributes to me—”that if NDEs prove to be universal, they ‘would be best explained in neuroscientific terms'” (Shushan, 2024, p. 2)—mischaracterizes my actual position. And it does so in a particularly pernicious way, as if I had really taken the absurd a priori stance that “whatever might eventually be revealed by cross-cultural NDEs will inevitably reinforce a scientific materialist explanation” (Shushan, 2024, p. 2). Statements made throughout the original JNDS article (Augustine, 2007b)—as well in the subsequent exchange in that JNDS issue—are explicitly tentative throughout. They are made in light of a posteriori evidence of the hallucinatory aspects found in at least some NDEs (Augustine, 2007a). And Shushan’s Secular Web response even confirms both points, albeit contradictorily: “In other words, it is an a priori philosophical commitment, even if it is one that Augustine can support with philosophical arguments based on various kinds of evidence, such as the fact that some NDEs are hallucinatory” (Shushan, 2026). That “arguments based on various kinds of evidence” grounded my conclusion entails that it was an a posteriori one, the exact opposite of an a priori commitment. The fact that then-JNDS editor Bruce Greyson (2007) (or anyone else, for that matter) attributed promissory materialism to the article neither establishes its presence there nor resolves the contradiction (cf. Augustine, 2007c, p. 170). The irony of going on to lodge the complaint that survivalist leanings that he does not hold were attributed to him evidently escapes him.
Everything that Shushan goes on to infer from his partial quotation of me is wrong here: “Augustine evidently believes that NDEs have been adequately explained by materialist hypotheses, [and therefore] he also believes that the evidence from cross-cultural NDEs will inevitably support his preexisting materialist beliefs” (Shushan, 2026). Each of the underlined parts is false, and independently of each other. I do not think that NDEs have been adequately explained by any hypothesis (whatever “adequately explained” means); interpretations of so-called survival phenomena in terms of things other than survival (or even the paranormal) are not materialist hypotheses, nor instances of promissory materialism in Popper’s pejorative sense; whatever cross-cultural near-death research goes on to discover will not necessarily favor non-survivalist interpretations of NDEs; and I do not accept either materialism in general (Augustine, 2016, pp. 204, 222; 2022a, pp. 385-388; 2022c, pp. 796, 804n4) or what Popper particularly means by “promissory materialism.” The explicitly tentative conclusion of my evidence-based data review is hardly a “conviction” (Shushan, 2026).
So Shushan’s partial quotation of me, out of context, was indeed a “foil that he himself created” (Augustine, 2024). The original JNDS article that he cites advocates his point that “the mere fact of universality specifies neither a metaphysical nor a neuroscientific conclusion” [emphasis added] (Shushan, 2024, p. 2). By itself, any imagined universality of specific NDE elements across times and cultures could be interpreted in either neuroscientific or survivalist terms. But combining the imagined evidence of universality with other potential evidence about the nature of NDEs could tip the scales toward either a neuroscientific or survivalist explanation of NDE features since the totality of the evidence is what matters (cf. Augustine, 2022a, p. 371, among other places). It was Shushan’s introduction of the qualified phrase “mere universality”—not mine—that made his statement a straw man. I never claimed that universality alone would favor a neuroscientific explanation of NDEs, and Shushan’s 2026 response concedes that I don’t believe it, either. For he there acknowledges that my section on him had “agreed with [his] comment that the universality of NDEs ‘specifies neither a metaphysical nor a neuroscientific conclusion'” (Shushan, 2026).
Moreover, think about the only interpretation of Shushan’s partial quotation of my sentence that makes sense in the context of the JNDS article’s larger position. The abstract preceding the rest of the article reads: “In addition, stark differences in the phenomenology of NDEs from different cultures have been uncovered. Though nonWestern samples are too limited to draw anything more than tentative conclusions, the available data suggest that prototypical Western NDE motifs derive from a cultural source, consistent with the hypothesis that NDE content reflects social conditioning and personal expectation rather than the perception of an external reality” (Augustine, 2007b, p. 89). After summarizing the evidence that was actually discovered, I went on to write: “Such little crosscultural consistency hardly cries out for either a neuroscientific or survivalist explanation” (Augustine, 2007b, p. 109). What possible incentive could I have had to riskily take a position, for no compensating benefit, on an imaginary evidential scenario? Why would I stick my neck out to state that, no matter what, mere universality could only possibility support a neuroscientific explanation, while arguing that what best explains the actual cross-cultural diversity uncovered is not anything neuroscientific, but something sociological? Since near-death research has not uncovered such universality (even if some of its practitioners assume it), the issue is beside the point.
As for Shushan’s first complaint, that he does not hold the survivalist leanings that were incidentally (and evidently mistakenly) attributed to him: fair enough. If the man says that he neither knows nor cares whether survival occurs, I will take him at his word. Nevertheless, the amount of ink that he spilled on this issue unduly concentrates on the semantics of whether I should have substituted for the simple term “survivalists” a less affiliative but more cumbersome phrase like “critics of survival skeptics,” or a more generic and thus less informative phrase like “survival scholars” or “survival commentators.” In retrospect, “critics of survival skeptics” is the most accurate phrase that still conveys what unites Shushan, Sommer, Kastenbaum, and others when addressing them as a group, though “Are Critics of Survival Skeptics Unable to Answer Their Critics?” would have made for a rather awkward title. In any case, the concentration on what (if anything) Shushan believes about whether or not survival occurs deflects from whether he, like the other “survival scholars” addressed, de facto presented fallacious criticism of survival skeptics, which was the sole issue of the brief section of the paper specifically on Shushan.
I also implicitly included Shushan among spirit proponents when I wrote: “Those [plural] who are determined to find a place for spirits somewhere in the natural world often fail to see issues through any other lens.” This comment was a transitional hook connecting the end of the section on Shushan to the start of the section of Sommer, who of the three is the critic of survival skeptics that warrants that characterization the most (as Sommer’s mischaracterizations were legion). In retrospect, I concede that the comment, while warranted, would have been better placed elsewhere, somewhere that did not implicitly include Shushan specifically. That said, there’s no point in crying over spilled milk now.
The conjecture that Shushan is among those who at least have survivalist leanings would naturally explain why he, too, would repeat a mischaracterization of a survival skeptic, for that motivation fuels Sommer’s independent IRP contribution. But it is only a conjecture. And, admittedly, perhaps Shushan was simply looking for any foil that he could find that might support his point, whatever quarter it came from. If in fact Shushan does not believe in spirits himself, but simply caters to those who do through his imprint of White Crow Books—a publisher “dedicated to exploring extraordinary human experiences and the possibility that there is a greater reality beyond what our physical senses perceive”—then, again, fair enough. The point of view that happens to be held by any particular individual is immaterial to whether or not survival occurs, or to the cogency or lack thereof of specific arguments for or against survival.
Finally, apart from the paper’s title, the first time that I mentioned “critics” was when quoting Sommer, and then later Kastenbaum, using that term. I simply adopted their common term since it would also conveniently and appropriately apply to me. So when it comes to Shushan’s question about “what ‘critics’ I have allegedly been ‘unable to answer'” (Shushan, 2026), I had in mind those who criticize survivalist arguments. In particular, apart from myself, the unanswered critics that I had in mind were the likes of Corliss Lamont, Barry Beyerstein, Paul Edwards, Sam Harris, and even psychical researchers like C. D. Broad or Douglas M. Stokes. What these specific critics have in common is that they offered positive arguments that the totality of all of the relevant empirical evidence makes it quite likely that discarnate personal survival does not happen, even if it doesn’t “prove” that it doesn’t. Ex hypothesi, these specific critics have gone unanswered because survivalists (or at least “critics of survival skeptics”) are unable to answer their particular arguments, namely the arguments that appeal to all of the available evidence relevant to whether or not survival occurs (as opposed to just parapsychological types of evidence). This was tentatively hypothesized as the reason why critics of survival skeptics continue to resort to fallacious arguments (like straw men) in place of simply addressing the arguments that were actually presented by such survival skeptics. Ex hypothesi, these survivalist-adjacent scholars strawman survival skeptics’ actual arguments because they cannot defeat those arguments, and so seek to distract from that fact—despite the fact that they could simply ignore the arguments that they cannot defeat when they are unwilling to concede them.
References
Augustine, Keith. (2007a). “Near-Death Experiences with Hallucinatory Features.” Journal of Near-Death Studies Vol. 26, No. 1 (Fall): 3-31.
Augustine, Keith (2007b). “Psychophysiological and Cultural Correlates Undermining a Survivalist Interpretation of Near-Death Experiences.” Journal of Near-Death Studies Vol. 26, No. 2 (Winter): 89-125.
Augustine, Keith (2007c). “Psychophysiological and Cultural Correlates Undermining a Survivalist Interpretation of Near-Death Experiences’ Defended.” Journal of Near-Death Studies Vol. 26, No. 2 (Winter): 163-175.
Augustine, Keith. (2022a). “How Not to Do Survival Research: Reflections on the Bigelow Institute Essay Competition.” Journal of Scientific Exploration Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer): 366-398.
Augustine, Keith. (2022b). “When Will Survival Researchers Move Past Defending the Indefensible?” Journal of Scientific Exploration Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer): 412-435.
Augustine, Keith. (2022c). “Answering More of the Same: A Reply to Nahm.” Journal of Scientific Exploration Vol. 36, No. 4 (Winter): 794-808.
Augustine, Keith. (2024, December 8). “Are Survivalists Unable to Answer Their Critics?” The Secular Web. <https://infidels.org/library/modern/are-survivalists-unable-to-answer-their-critics/>.
Augustine, Keith, & Yonatan I. Fishman. (2015). “The Dualist’s Dilemma: The High Cost of Reconciling Neuroscience with a Soul” (pp. 203-292). In The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life After Death ed. Michael Martin and Keith Augustine. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Greyson, Bruce. (2007). “Commentary on ‘Psychophysiological and Cultural Correlates Undermining a Survivalist Interpretation of Near-Death Experiences’.” Journal of Near-Death Studies Vol. 26, No. 2 (Winter): 127-145.
Shushan, Gregory. (2018). Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Shushan, Gregory. (2024, October 3). “Diversity and Similarity of Near-Death Experiences across Cultures and History: Implications for the Survival Hypothesis.” International Review of Psychiatry online ahead-of-print, 1-7. <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09540261.2024.2402429>.
Shushan, Gregory. (2026, September 4). “On Cross-Cultural and Historical Near-Death Experiences: A Secular Historian of Religions Answers a Critic.” The Secular Web. <https://infidels.org/library/modern/nde-historian-answers-critic/>.
Copyright ©2026 by Keith Augustine. This electronic version is copyright ©2026 by Internet Infidels, Inc. with the written permission of Keith Augustine. All rights reserved.