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Author: Michael Prescott
Science and the Afterlife Experience is the concluding volume in a trilogy by Oxford-trained philosopher Chris Carter, who previously brought us Science and Psychic Phenomena and Science and the Near-Death Experience. Together, the books meticulously build a case for the proposition that mind is more than simply an emergent property of matter, and that materialism is fatally flawed because it cannot deal with a raft of evidence for paranormal phenomena and postmortem survival. All three books are outstanding contributions to the field of parapsychology, but Science and the Afterlife Experience trumps the other two and brings Carter's extended argument to a dramatic conclusion.
Part of the reason I enjoyed this book so much is strictly personal. In it, Carter deals with the categories of evidence that I happen to find most interesting: children's past-life recollections, apparitions, and mental mediumship. He spends the bulk of his time on mediumship, offering an impressive review of some of the best cases investigated by the Society for Psychical Research and its American counterpart. He also devotes considerable time to an overview of the famed cross correspondences, providing the best and most reader-friendly summary of this complicated evidence that I've seen.
Not every line of evidence for the afterlife is explored. Past-life memories obtained under hypnosis, electronic voice communication, and physical and materialization mediumship are either not mentioned or cited only in passing. I agree that these categories are more problematic, and I think it was a wise decision to omit them from a book aimed at the general educated reader. While there are legitimate examples in each of these categories, the effort involved in weeding out fraud or delusion is considerable, and it makes more sense to focus on more clear-cut evidence.
When I began the book, I was a little bit concerned that Carter's approach might be a little too briskly paced for its own good. He covers the subject of children's past-life memories in only 50 pages, and handles the equally broad subject of apparitions in another 50 pages. I wondered if it would be possible to provide convincingly detailed expositions of all this evidence in relatively short treatments.... continues
Copyright©Michael Prescott
Reproduced courtesy of Michael Prescott
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