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Post date: Jan 10, 2021 6:35:10 AM
Associate Professor:
Steve Stewart-Williams starts it off with the first dozen or so pages... The PDF has them all to finish...
Well Done Steve!!!
My grandmother died when I was fourteen. It didn’t come out of the blue; she’d been teetering on the edge of life for several months, and I don’t think anyone was in any doubt about where things were headed. For some time, she’d been too unwell to live alone in her little flat, so she’d moved into my aunt and uncle’s house—a large house in a small town where I’d spent many happy summer holidays as a child. One night, shortly before the end, something strange happened. My aunt and uncle were woken abruptly in the middle of the night by a series of bumps and bangs coming from out of the darkness. They got up to find out what was going on. What they found was my grandmother—Granny—packing her suitcases. “What’s going on? Why are you packing?” they asked, gently guiding her back to bed. She responded: “I just saw my parents, and they told that me it’s time to go.” She died the next day. This is one of my favorite stories. At the time it happened, I still believed (or half-believed, or wanted to believe) in an afterlife, and this struck me as evidence consistent with that belief. Of course, on its own, it wasn’t clinch-the-deal-type evidence. But it wasn’t the only story of its kind. There were many similar stories floating around, as there still are, and although each on its own might only have offered a fragile wisp of a reason to believe, together they added up to a reasonable case that perhaps we really do survive death. That, at least, is what I thought back then. It’s not what I think anymore. As much as I love my grandmother’s story, it’s all too easy to come up with plausible alternative explanations for what happened—explanations that don’t invoke supernatural causes. The same is true of every other near-death story I’ve come across. Even if you’re a believer yourself, you could no doubt come up with any alternative explanation that I might suggest. So, rather than picking apart the evidence, I’d like to focus on another, more puzzling issue. If you didn’t already have the concept of an afterlife in your repertoire of ideas, it wouldn’t have occurred to you that my grandmother’s story could be given a supernaturalistic interpretation. Nor would it have occurred to me at the time it happened. We would both have immediately assumed that she’d had a dream or hallucination about her parents, and we would not have seen the connection between the statement “it’s time to go” and my grandmother’s subsequent death. The only reason that we saw any other interpretation is that, at some point in the past, we somehow picked up the idea of an afterlife from our culture. So, where did this idea come from in the first place?
https://www.stevestewartwilliams.com/
https://www.nottingham.edu.my/Psychology/People/steve.stewartwilliams
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist's_Wager
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