Preparing for the Miraculous

idge across the afterlife 153years. Its subjects were 344 patients who had been successfullyresuscitated after suffering a cardiac arrest. The articlereported that 18% of the patients told interviewers that theyexperienced what is commonly termed a ‘near-death experience’,with 12% having what Van Lommel termed a ‘coreexperience’ – an elaborate perception of the beginning of anafterlife. This result mystified both Van Lommel and his assistants.Van Lommel argued that if there is a purely physiologicalor medical reason for the experience then ‘mostpatients who have been clinically dead should report one’.”(Anthony Peake in Is There Life After Death?)The problem of the strange and immaterial thing that is“consciousness,” and the way immaterial consciousness canrelate to a material brain and have an impact on it, hauntsthe biological and neurological sciences since Descartes. Hehad tried to get rid of it by declaring consciousness an “epiphenomenon”of matter, thus sticking a label on a bottlewithout known contents. Neurology in the present day hasnot advanced much further. Consciousness is now declaredto be “a function” of the material brain. “Most psychologistsnow believe that consciousness is tied to the activity ofneurons in the central nervous system.” (John Holland)But “most” does not mean all, and some scientists havestrongly reacted against such academic obscurantism. RogerTrigg e.g. states: “Science is itself the product of human reason.It can’t, in the end, explain human reason away withoutexplaining itself away.” 5 And the eminently reasonable BrianPippard wrote in a letter: “Too many physicists (and others)take for granted that in due course an explanation will befound of conscious mind in terms of the material operationsof the brain. This is to put the cart before the horse – it isthrough our minds that we know of the brain, and we aremore likely to find how they are related by concentrating on5 In Russell Stannard: Science and Wonders, p. 60.