Category: Science

What Is Death?


Popular Mechanics has run an article with the audacious title, “A Groundbreaking Scientific Discovery Shows that We Can Reverse Death.” Is that true?

It depends on how you understand death. In the old days, it was relatively easy to determine whether someone was dead: They stopped breathing and their pulse disappeared.

That was a useful way of determining death because breathing is necessary to get oxygen to the blood, and a beating heart is necessary to push oxygen-laden blood to the cells of the body. Without that happening, every cell in the body would die.

Of course, mistakes could be made. Someone might be breathing really shallowly, and they might have only a faint pulse, but if they really stopped breathing and their heart really stopped, they were dead. End of story.

Things got more complex in the twentieth century. Techniques became available to keep someone breathing and to restart their heart.

In the 1950s, ventilators were introduced. These are machines that act like bellows to move air in and out of the lungs.

Also in the 1950s, the first (external) mechanical hearts became available, and by 1960, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) could help keep blood moving during a cardiac arrest, adrenaline could encourage the heart to resume beating, and defibrillators could hopefully shock it back into a normal rhythm.

All this raised the question of whether people who met the previous definition of death (no breathing and no heartbeat) should be considered dead.

By the late 1960s, a new criterion was proposed: absence of brain activity. This could make sense because a functioning brain was needed to keep things like breathing and hearts going without mechanical aid.

So perhaps—some reasoned—if the brain was no longer working, if the patient was “brain dead,” you could forego artificial respiration and heart stimulation and treat the patient as dead.

This meant you could harvest their organs—if they were an organ donor—including their precious heart. The first successful heart transplant took place in 1967, so maybe someone else could use the organ if the donor was brain dead.

There has been a lively debate about whether lack of brain activity should be used to define death, and advocates of brain death as they key criterion have won a lot of converts to their view.

At the same time, there have been concerns that doctors have been defining brain death in a loosey-goosey way, such as merely being in a persistent vegetative state rather than truly and permanently lacking brain function. This would let them take more people off life-support—freeing up medical resources—and harvest organs from more people.

Personally, I am not at all convinced that the brain death criterion is adequately defined—or applied—today, and so a person who is actually still alive may be killed by the removal of their heart for a transplant. Consequently, I have not agreed to donate my organs on my driver’s license.

While the brain death debate has been going on, the concept of death has begun to be questioned on a new front: the cellular level. Hypothetically, one could argue that a person’s body isn’t fully dead unless all of the cells in it have died, and things like brain function, respiration, and heart action are just things needed to keep the cells alive.

We thus might be able to help save more people if we could intervene to keep their cells alive long enough to fix whatever is wrong with their brain, lungs, heart, or other organs.

Popular Mechanics has discussed a team of researchers who have been working on how to support the cells of the body when critical organs are not functioning. They call this system OrganEx, and preliminary trials on pigs have been successful, though human trials are still years off.

Other advances are also being made. It turns out that, if a person’s body and brain are cooled down in the right way, they can be brought back to normal functioning as much as six hours after cardiac arrest has occurred (see Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death).

We also now have implantable artificial hearts, and—though they aren’t yet as convenient and reliable as the one the biological version of Captain Picard had on Star Trek—we’re approaching the point where not having a functioning human heart may no longer be useful as a criterion for irreversible death.

What all of these advances have done is make death—which used to look like a simple either-or state—to look more like a process, and a process that in many cases can be reversed.

As medicine continues to advance, we may expect it to become more and more reversible, which will make it more challenging to define precisely when “final” death occurs.

Can Science Reverse Death?

Popular Mechanics recently re-shared an article on social media with the audacious title, “A Groundbreaking Scientific Discovery Shows that We Can Reverse Death.” Is that true?

It depends on how you understand death. In the old days, it was relatively easy to determine whether someone was dead: he stopped breathing and his pulse disappeared.

That was a useful way of determining death because breathing is necessary to get oxygen to the blood, and a beating heart is necessary to push oxygen-laded blood to the cells of the body. Without that happening, every cell in the body would die.

Of course, mistakes could be made. Someone might be breathing really shallowly, and he might have only a faint pulse, but if he really stopped breathing and his heart really stopped, he was dead. End of story.

Things got more complex in the twentieth century. Techniques became available to keep someone breathing and to restart his heart.

In the 1950s, ventilators were introduced. These are machines that act like bellows to move air in and out of the lungs.

Also in the 1950s, the first (external) mechanical hearts became available, and by 1960, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) could help keep blood moving during a cardiac arrest, adrenaline could encourage the heart to resume beating, and defibrillators could hopefully shock it back into a normal rhythm.

All this raised the question of whether people who met the previous definition of death (no breathing and no heartbeat) should be considered dead.

By the late 1960s, a new criterion was proposed: absence of brain activity. This could make sense because a functioning brain was needed to keep things like breathing and hearts going without mechanical aid.

So perhaps—some reasoned—if the brain was no longer working, if the patient was “brain dead,” you could forego artificial respiration and heart stimulation and treat the patient as dead.

This meant you could harvest his organs, if he was an organ donor—including his precious heart. The first successful heart transplant took place in 1967, so maybe someone else could use the organ if the donor was brain dead.

There has been a lively debate about whether lack of brain activity should be used to define death, and advocates of brain death as the key criterion have won a lot of converts to their view.

At the same time, there have been concerns that doctors have been defining brain death in a loosey-goosey way, such as merely being in a persistent vegetative state rather than truly and permanently lacking brain function. This would let them take more people off life-support—freeing up medical resources—and harvest organs from more people.

Personally, I am not at all convinced that the brain death criterion is adequately defined—or applied—today, and so a person who is actually still alive may be killed by the removal of their heart for a transplant. Consequently, I have not agreed to donate my organs on my driver’s license.

While the brain death debate has been going on, the concept of death has begun to be questioned on a new front: the cellular level. Hypothetically, one could argue that a person’s body isn’t fully dead unless all of the cells in it have died, and things like brain function, respiration, and heart action are just things needed to keep the cells alive.

We thus might be able to help save more people if we could intervene to keep their cells alive long enough to fix whatever is wrong with their brain, lungs, heart, or other organs.

The Popular Mechanics article discusses a team of researchers who have been working on how to support the cells of the body when critical organs are not functioning. They call this system OrganEx, and preliminary trials on pigs have been successful, though human trials are still years off.

Other advances are also being made. It turns out that, if a person’s body and brain are cooled down in the right way, they can be brought back to normal functioning as much as six hours after cardiac arrest has occurred (see Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death).

We also now have implantable artificial hearts, and—though they aren’t yet as convenient and reliable as the one the biological version of Captain Picard had on Star Trek—we’re approaching the point where not having a functioning human heart may no longer be useful as a criterion for irreversible death.

What all of these advances have done is make death—which used to look like a simple either-or state—to look more like a process, and a process that in many cases can be reversed.

As medicine continues to advance, we may expect it to become more and more reversible, which will make it more challenging to define precisely when “final” death occurs.

New Near-Death Experiences Study Released

The subject of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) came to public attention with the release of Raymond Moody’s book Life After Life.

In it, he recounted numerous incidents from people who were on the brink of death or who had even clinically died.

They reported things like leaving their bodies, looking down and seeing doctors and nurses working on them, traveling through a tunnel, encountering a bright light, meeting dead loved ones and religious figures, experiencing a review of their entire life, glimpsing a beautiful realm, feeling peace and joy, and ultimately being told that they needed to return to their bodies.

Since Moody’s groundbreaking work, other researchers have continued to look into NDEs. One of them is British doctor Sam Parnia, who now works in New York.

Between 2008 and 2012, he led what is known as the AWARE study (for AWAreness during REsuscitation), which examined the Near-Death Experiences of people who had undergone cardiac arrest and were in the process of being brought back.

More recently, he led a follow-up study called AWARE-II, and the results were recently published in the journal Resuscitation.

AWARE-II studied the cases of 567 people who experienced cardiac arrest. Unfortunately, only 53 of them survived, and only 28 completed interviews, so the sample size was small. Of the interviewees, 6 of them (21%) recalled transcendent experiences that have commonly been called NDEs. This is broadly in line with previous studies.

When the study was published, press accounts misleadingly claimed that it suggested dying people access “new dimensions of reality,” which without context would suggest other planes of existence.

Dying people may do that, but this isn’t what the authors of the study meant. They meant something more mundane and named the “other dimensions” as “including people’s deeper consciousness—all memories, thoughts, intentions and actions towards others from a moral and ethical perspective.” In other words, as part of the “life review” that NDErs commonly report, they are accessing other dimensions of themselves as they look at the events of their lives from a moral perspective.

Among the things that the study did find is evidence that consciousness persists even when it is not detectable, which the authors pointed out has broader implications, such as for people in “persistent vegetative states.”

They also found that substantial brain activity could resume as long as 60 minutes into cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), challenging the idea that irreversible brain damage occurs by 10 minutes after the heart stops.

The surprising lucidity of the patients’ transcendent experiences—such as their detailed life reviews—suggested that a form of “disinhibition” occurs that allows them to access long-dormant memories.

When it comes to the nature of consciousness—whether it is generated by the brain or by a separate entity (i.e., soul) that interacts with the brain, the authors concluded:

Although systematic studies have not been able to absolutely prove the reality or meaning of patients’ experiences and claims of awareness in relation to death, it has been impossible to disclaim them either. The recalled experience surrounding death now merits further genuine empirical investigation without prejudice.

However, they also noted that “the paradoxical finding of lucidity and heightened reality when brain function is severely disordered, or has ceased, raises the need to consider alternatives to” the idea that consciousness is generated by the brain.

Hopefully, future studies of NDEs will further clarify matters and provide additional evidence that consciousness is not generated by the brain and thus provide scientific data supporting the existence of the soul.

Pope Francis Celebrates Blaise Pascal

The French mathematician, philosopher, and apologist Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was born 400 years ago. The anniversary of his birth was recently celebrated by Pope Francis in an apostolic letter titled Sublimitas et Miseria Hominis (“The Grandeur and Misery of Man”)—reflecting one of the themes in Pascal’s writing.

Recent popes, such as John Paul II and Benedict XVI, have expressed appreciation for Pascal, and in 2017 Pope Francis reportedly said that he “deserves beatification.”

The pope’s 5,400-word apostolic letter makes for interesting reading. Papal documents like this are commonly ghost written, and the pope then makes the words his own when he signs and issues the document. The same is presumably true of this letter, and it is clear that whoever drafted it knows Pascal’s life and thought very well. It’s a quality read!

At least in Catholic circles, Pascal is best known today for two things: his Provincial Letters, which are a defense of the Jansenists against their Jesuit opponents, and his Pensees (French, “Thoughts”), which consists of notes that he took in preparation for an apology defending the Christian faith that he wanted to write.

However, these writings come from the later period of Pascal’s life, and he is remembered outside Catholic circles for other contributions. As the letter notes, “In 1642, at the age of nineteen, he invented an arithmetic machine, the ancestor of our modern computers.”

Pascal also made contributions in other areas, including physics (specifically, fluid dynamics, where he proposed what is now known as Pascal’s law) and mathematics (where he made numerous contributions, including being one of the founders of probability theory).

Pope Francis’s apostolic letter touches briefly on such contributions, but it focuses on the development of Pascal’s life and his Christian faith, which became more prominent as he got older.

A turning point in this regard occurred on the night of Monday, November 23, 1654, when Pascal was 31-years old. For two hours—between 10:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m.—he had a profound mystical experience that led to a religious conversion.

Afterward, he wrote an intimate series of thoughts about this experience on a sheet of paper. How meaningful the experience was to him is illustrated by the fact that he thereafter carried the paper with him, keeping it in the lining of his coat, where it was discovered after his death.

What we know about this powerful mystical experience comes from the brief, tantalizing statements he made on the paper. It is now known as Pascal’s Memorial, and an English translation is available here.

Pope Francis’s letter discusses the Provincial Letters and the Jansenist controversy that occasioned them. Since the Jesuits were the target of the Provincial Letters, it is interesting to see what Francis—the first Jesuit pope—has to say. He writes:

Before concluding, I must mention Pascal’s relationship to Jansenism. One of his sisters, Jacqueline, had entered religious life in Port-Royal, in a religious congregation the theology of which was greatly influenced by Cornelius Jansen, whose treatise Augustinus appeared in 1640. In January 1655, following his “night of fire” [i.e., his mystical experience], Pascal made a retreat at the abbey of Port-Royal. In the months that followed, an important and lengthy dispute about the Augustinus arose between Jesuits and “Jansenists” at the Sorbonne, the university of Paris. The controversy dealt chiefly with the question of God’s grace and the relationship between grace and human nature, specifically our free will. Pascal, while not a member of the congregation of Port-Royal, nor given to taking sides—as he wrote, “I am alone. . . . I am not at all part of Port-Royal”—was charged by the Jansenists to defend them, given his outstanding rhetorical skill. He did so in 1656 and 1657, publishing a series of eighteen writings known as The Provincial Letters.

Although several propositions considered “Jansenist” were indeed contrary to the faith, a fact that Pascal himself acknowledged, he maintained that those propositions were not present in the Augustinus or held by those associated with Port-Royal. Even so, some of his own statements, such as those on predestination, drawn from the later theology of Augustine and formulated more severely by Jansen, do not ring true. We should realize, however, that, just as Saint Augustine sought in the fifth century to combat the Pelagians, who claimed that man can, by his own powers and without God’s grace, do good and be saved, so Pascal, for his part, sincerely believed that he was battling an implicit pelagianism or semipelagianism in the teachings of the “Molinist” Jesuits, named after the theologian Luis de Molina, who had died in 1600 but was still quite influential in the middle of the seventeenth century. Let us credit Pascal with the candor and sincerity of his intentions.

Pope Francis also touches on Pascal’s apologetics and his famous work, the Pensees. Interestingly, he does not mention the most famous part of the Pensees, which is a passage in which Pascal seeks to help those who feel unable to choose between skepticism and Christianity based on evidence.

He proposes what has become known as Pascal’s Wager, in which he offers a way to use practical reason to decide between the options when an evidential solution seems unavailable. In essence, Pascal argues that if one adopts or “bets” on skepticism and it turns out that skepticism is true, then one will at most reap a finite benefit. However, if one “bets” on Christianity and it turns out that Christianity is true, then one will receive an infinite benefit. It is thus in one’s interest to wager that Christianity is true if one feels unable to decide based on the evidence.

It should be noted that the Wager is designed only to decide between Christianity and skepticism. However, Wager-like reasoning can be applied to other religious options. (For example, if one is deciding between reincarnation and the view we only have one life, it is better to wager that we only have one life, so we need to make this one count.)

Pascal experienced his final illness in 1662. Shortly before his death, he said that if the doctors were correct and he would recover, he would devote the rest of his life to serving the poor.

However, he did not recover, and he passed on to his reward at the age of 39. It is not clear what he died of, but tuberculosis and stomach cancer have been proposed.

It is good to see Pascal being recognized for his contributions. He was, indeed, a genius, as well as a man of profound faith and insight. He is well worth studying by contemporary apologists.

The Rosenhan Experiment (Psychology, Psychiatry, Sanity, Insanity, Schizophrenia, Fraud)

The Rosenhan Experiment rocked the psychology profession 50 years ago. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli discuss the study’s look into how mental health patients were treated, why the study was so important, and what it revealed about the human mind.

The video will be available at noon Eastern on the day of release.

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Did Early Christians Believe in Dragons?

Today people are fascinated by cryptids—hidden creatures—like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. In the ancient world, the most famous cryptid was the dragon, so did early Christians believe in them?

The term dragon (Greek, drakôn) appears in the Greek Bible, but normally it is in a symbolic context—like when the devil appears in the form of a dragon in the book of Revelation (e.g., Rev. 12). So this doesn’t provide good evidence for belief in literal dragons.

However, the term also appears in other contexts. For example, in Daniel 14, the prophet Daniel kills a large drakôn that the Babylonians worshipped. However, in secular Greek, the term drakôn originally referred to a snake or serpent, and it did not always have monstrous connotations. This is clear in Wisdom 16:10, where the author refers back to the snakes that bit the Israelites in Numbers 21 and describes them as “venomous drakontôn.” The author of Daniel 14 may thus have expected readers to imagine a big snake, and some modern Bible translations like the Common English Bible use “snake” in the passage.

The Bible thus doesn’t provide a good basis for documenting belief in literal dragons. However, we do find some in the early Church who were open to the idea. St. Augustine writes:

As for dragons, which lack feet, they are said to take their rest in caves, and to soar up into the air. While these are not too easy to come across, this kind of animated creature is for all that definitely mentioned not only in our literature but also in that of the Gentiles (Literal Meaning of Genesis 3:9:13).

This passage may not mean what it suggests, however. You’ll note that Augustine says dragons have no feet—which would point to snakes—but that they fly. There were—indeed—references to flying snakes in ancient literature. Isaiah mentions them (14:29, 30:6), and so does the Greek historian Herodotus (Histories 2:75-76, 3:109). So Augustine is likely not referring to what we would think of as a dragon but to flying snakes. (Note: flying—or, technically, gliding—snakes do exist in some parts of Asia.)

The flying snakes that Herodotus referred to were small, but in another passage, Augustine envisions dragons that are very large:

Now dragons favor watery habitats. They emerge from caves and take to the air. They create major atmospheric disturbance, for dragons are very large creatures, the largest of all on earth. This is probably why the psalm began its consideration of earthly creatures with them (Expositions of the Psalms 148:9).

Augustine wasn’t alone in thinking about real, enormous dragons. Other Church Fathers did so also, and so did non-Christian thinkers.

The reason is obvious when you think about it. Although the term paleontology was only coined in 1822, humans have been running across fossils for as long as there have been humans. When they came across the bones of giant, monstrous animals, they correctly concluded that there used to be giant animals in the area.

In her book The First Fossil Hunters, historian Adrienne Mayor insightfully argues that it was the ancient discovery of fossils that formed the basis of the legends of dragons and similar creatures the world over.

St. Augustine himself reports finding a giant tooth on a beach, where the action of the waves presumably uncovered it:

Once, on the beach at Utica, I saw with my own eyes—and there were others to bear me witness—a human molar tooth so big that it could have been cut up, I think, into a hundred pieces each as big as one of our modern teeth. That tooth, however, I can well believe, was the tooth of a giant (City of God 15:9).

I’m not a Young Earth Creationist, but I have to agree with musician Buddy Davis’s fun children’s song D Is For Dinosaur:

When dinosaurs first roamed the earth, many years ago
People called them dragons (and just thought you’d like to know)
So dinosaurs and dragons are both the same thing
The only thing that’s different is we changed the dragon’s name

 

Starts With A Bang! The Big Bang (Science & Faith) – Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World

In the 20th century, scientists began to theorize what Christians have long held: that the universe had a definite beginning. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli ask what is the Big Bang, what evidence points toward it, and what are its implications.

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How We Found the Universe (Science & Faith) – Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World

How did humanity come to know the world around us, the structure of our planet, our solar system, and the universe. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli discuss the mystery of the nature of the universe and the historical figures who found the answers we have today.

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Mysterious Headlines

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Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World is brought to you in part through the generous support of Aaron Vurgason Electric and Automation at AaronV.com. Making Connections for Life for your automation and smart home needs in north and central Florida.

Catechism Class, a dynamic weekly podcast journey through the Catechism of the Catholic Church by Greg and Jennifer Willits. It’s the best book club, coffee talk, and faith study group, all rolled into one. Find it in any podcast directory.

Fiorvento Law, PLLC, specializing in adult guardianships and conservatorships, probate and estate planning matters. Accepting clients throughout Michigan. Taking into account your individual, healthcare, financial and religious needs. Visit FiorventoLaw.com

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Can the Soul Be Weighed?

NOTE: I submitted the following as a term paper for the course “Skeptical Approach to Parapsychology” at the Rhine Education Center.

The assignment was to take a noteworthy parapsychological study and evaluate it by apply critical thinking–being neither unduly credulous nor unduly dismissive of its claims.

(Also, since the assignment was to approach the task from a scientific, parapsychological perspective rather than a religious one, I don’t simply provide a theological analysis of what the soul is, and I consider options a non-religious researcher would need to.)

The paper received an “A.”

 

Can the Soul Be Weighed?

by Jimmy Akin

A minor pop culture trope holds the human soul weighs about as much as a piece of bread, or 21 grams. This trope appears various places, including the title of the 2003 Sean Penn movie 21 Grams.

The trope’s basis is a set of experiments begun in 1901 by Duncan MacDougall, M.D. His results were published in 1907 in American Medicine and the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research (vol. 1, no. 5).

MacDougall weighed humans and dogs at the moment of death and—in the case of humans—found a measurable loss of weight coincident with death. After accounting for known, natural substances the subjects’ bodies could have released, MacDougall conjectured the loss of weight may have been due to the departing human soul.

 

Rationale for Experiment

MacDougall explains the basis for his experiment by stating that, if the personality survives death, it must exist as a “space occupying body.” He writes:

It is unthinkable that personality and consciousness continuing personal identity should exist, and have being, and yet not occupy space. It is impossible to represent in thought that which is not space occupying, as having personality, for that would be equivalent to thinking that nothing had become or was something, that emptiness had personality, that space itself was more than space, all of which are contradictions and absurd.

He reasons that whatever substance this personality-bearing, “space occupying body” (hereafter “soul,” for convenience) may have a measurable weight. He writes:

According to the latest conception of science, substance or space occupying material is divisible into that which is gravitative—solids, liquids, gasses, all having weight—and the ether which is non-gravitative.

MacDougall considers whether the soul might be made of normal “gravitative” matter, although he also considers two alternatives.

The first is that the soul might be made of luminiferous ether—a substance formerly believed to fill the universe and be responsible for propagating light waves through space. MacDougall thinks this option impossible, since ether was believed to be continuous throughout the universe, whereas individuals’ personalities are separate and distinct.

The second alternative is that the soul may be made of “a middle form of substance neither gravitative matter nor ether, not capable of being weighed, and yet not identical with ether.” Such a “middle form” might be non-continuous, allowing separate personalities/souls, but still not being weighable. However, MacDougall thinks it more reasonable to suppose that the soul “must be some form of gravitative matter” since it is linked organically with the body until death.

He thus proposes weighing dying individuals.

 

Examining the Rationale

MacDougall’s rationale is clever and worth examining in light of the history of philosophy and subsequent scientific developments.

Although he says it is “unthinkable” that the soul is not a space-filling body, many prior thinkers disagreed. In the Middle Ages, it was a commonplace for philosophers to regard spirits—including God, angels, and human souls—as entities that lacked extension in space. These spirits could be said to be “in a place” in an accommodated sense. When a spirit manifested its influence on something in the material world, the spirit could be said to be “in” that location (cf. Summa Theologiae I:52:1).

In the Early Modern period, there was renewed discussion of this subject, with Renee Descartes taking the position that the soul is non-extended and Henry More arguing that spirits must be extended. (An issue that arose as a result of this discussion was how a non-extended, immaterial entity could control a body since the two could not have physical contact. Parapsychologically, this would be “explained” in terms of psychokinesis [PK], though the basis or bases of PK remain very unclear.)

Since many thinkers consider the idea of a non-extended soul conceivable, we will include this possibility when considering MacDougall’s results.

From a scientific perspective, MacDougall’s discussion of ether has been superseded. Evidence against the existence of ether had been discovered in the famous, 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment, and the idea ceased to be commonly used in physics during the twentieth century.

However, something like MacDougall’s “middle form” of matter/energy emerged in twentieth century science—that is, things other than ether that lack mass. Current science holds that there are massless particles, such as the photon and gluon. However, these are force-carrying particles and are not thought to form structures that would be capable of sustaining a personality independent of massive particles.

A possibility MacDougall didn’t consider was that the soul might be made of a gravitative substance different than the solid, liquid, or gaseous states known in his day. While subsequent science has proposed additional states of matter, such as Bose-Einstein condensates, none of these are good candidates for the soul. (E.g., Bose-Einstein condensates can exist only close to absolute zero, and it would seem impossible for such a substance to coexist with a warm, living human body.)

In light of parapsychological research suggesting that ghosts are not electromagnetic phenomena, an interesting thought that could not have occurred to MacDougall would be the idea that souls might be made of “dark matter”—a hypothetical form of matter that does not interact with the electromagnetic force but that does interact gravitationally. The loss of such a soul could be weighable, and yet the soul would not show up on EMF detectors. (It should be immediately pointed out that current dark matter theories do not predict the existence of soul-like objects, but neither do they completely rule them out. A dark matter soul would need to interact with its body through a form of PK rather than EM.)

 

MacDougall’s Experiments

The design MacDougall used for his experiments was carefully thought out.

For human subjects, he arranged a large platform scale on which a bed could be set, along with a dying patient, and then balanced it. The scale was sensitive to two tenths of an ounce (5.7 grams).

With patient consent, MacDougall chose subjects dying of conditions expected to result in a peaceful passing so as not to jar the scale with death throes. (All died of tuberculosis—“consumption”—except for one in a diabetic coma.)

He tracked the subjects’ weight in the hours preceding death to account for the natural loss of moisture that occurs through perspiration and respiration when the body is not being hydrated.

He then recorded any sudden change the scale registered at the time of death—to the extent this could be determined in his day. (Since electrocardiogram [ECG] monitoring was still being pioneered, this involved observing signs such as cessation of eye and muscle movement, breathing, and heartbeat—as determined by stethoscope.)

After death, MacDougall checked if the subject’s bowels had moved and whether—and how much—urine had been discharged.

For his canine subjects, MacDougall was unable to find dogs dying in peaceful ways. He thus used healthy dogs, sedated them to keep them still, and euthanized them—while monitoring their weight on scales that were sensitive to 1/16th of an ounce (1.8 grams).

 

MacDougall’s Results

Six trials were done with human subjects, with the following results (all numbers converted to metric):


Subject		 Measurement at Death Second, Later Measurement
1 -21 g
2 -14 g -46 g
3 -14 g -43 g
4* -11 to -14 g
5 -11 g
6* -43 g

The measurements at death represent sudden drops that occurred within the space of “a few seconds.”

In two cases, a second measurement was taken shortly after death:

    • Subject 2’s initial measurement was a sudden loss coincident with the last movement of the facial muscles, and the second reading was taken after cessation of heartbeat was verified.
    • Subject 3’s additional reading was taken “a few minutes” after death.

MacDougall eliminated the results of Subjects 4 and 6 (marked by asterisks) from consideration:

    • With Subject 4, MacDougall reports that “unfortunately our scales were not finely adjusted and there was a good deal of interference by people opposed to our work”—apparently hospital employees who regarded the experiment as too morbid. However, “at death the beam sunk so that it required from three-eighths to one-half ounce to bring it back to the point preceding death.”
    • With Subject 6, although MacDougall recorded the measurement at death, he rejected it since “the patient died almost within five minutes after being placed upon the bed and died while I was adjusting the beam.”

Fifteen trials were conducted with canine subjects. MacDougall reports:

The same experiments were carried out on fifteen dogs, surrounded by every precaution to obtain accuracy and the results were uniformly negative, no loss of weight at death.

 

Eliminating Naturalistic Explanations

MacDougall sought to account for conventional material substances released by the body—moisture in the form of respiration and perspiration, as well as evaporation from urine and feces.

He tracked a slow, steady loss of weight before death due to moisture loss through respiration and perspiration, so this could not be responsible for the sudden drops coincident with the moment of death.

His subjects did not suddenly expel 11-21 grams of moisture with their last breaths. Neither did they suddenly release this amount of perspiration, which would have remained in contact with their bodies and the bedclothes and only evaporate slowly, meaning it still would have been weighed by the scale.

MacDougall did not report the subjects experiencing bowel movements upon death, though if they had, the feces “would still have remained upon the bed except for a slow loss by the evaporation of moisture depending of course, upon the fluidity of the feces.”

He reported some subjects releasing urine upon death (due to the relaxation of the urinary sphincter), however, “the urine remained upon the bed and could not have evaporated enough through the thick bed clothing to have influenced the result.”

Having eliminated semi-solid and liquid substances released by the body, MacDougall sought to account for gas that could be suddenly released at death—i.e., air in the lungs.

Physics indicates this should not matter. At ground level, the Earth’s atmosphere is pressing downward on objects, including the scale, and it does not matter whether the air is in the subject’s lungs or above the chest. The scale should not be materially affected, which is what MacDougall found:

Getting upon the bed myself, my colleague put the beam at actual balance. Inspiration and expiration of air as forcibly as possible by me had no effect upon the beam. My colleague got upon the bed, and I placed the beam at balance. Forcible inspiration and expiration of air on his part had no effect.

 

Alternative Naturalistic Explanations

Alternative explanations for MacDougall’s results have been proposed. A selection is considered and critiqued by Masayoshi Ishida in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (vol. 24, no. 1), though what follows here are principally my own thoughts.

Since the human body begins to cool at death, could the loss of heat be responsible for the observed loss in weight—either directly or due to a change in air currents (as proposed by Len Fisher)?

Neither would be plausible. Heat is produced by the small-scale motion of atoms, and the fact these vibrate less after death does not change their weight. Only a large-scale removal of atoms from the bed would produce the observed readings.

Similarly, while convection currents caused by the heat of a living body might lightly press down on the bed—if such currents existed in these cases—they would not dissipate at the moment of death. The coldness of death—known as algor mortis—takes hours to occur and is frequently used to determine time of death in criminal investigations. There would be no sudden loss of weight.

What about heartbeat or breathing? These produce vibrations that could affect a scale, and they cease suddenly at death. However, they would cause a living, prone patient to slightly oscillate up and down on the bed, and if the scale were visibly at balance when the patient was alive then it should remain even more steadily (and likely sub-perceptually) at balance upon death. There would not be a sudden drop of 11-21 grams.

It could be proposed that there was something wrong with MacDougall’s scales, that the measurements he took were botched, or that he committed fraud. However, there does not appear to be evidence supporting these hypotheses.

 

Paranormal Speculations

Lacking a good naturalistic explanation for MacDougall’s results, it is reasonable to consider paranormal explanations. These can only be speculative due to the limited data his experiment returned. Replication and new types of experiments would be needed to test individual hypotheses.

The first possibility is MacDougall’s own conjecture—that the loss of weight may be due to the departure of the soul, conceived of as a space-filling entity capable of being weighed.

If so, the soul might be a very fine structure made of conventional matter/energy recognized by the Standard Model of particle physics. Alternately, it might be made of an undiscovered form of matter that interacts gravitationally.

Questions that might be asked are what would account for the variance in numbers MacDougall saw upon death, what was responsible for the additional weight loss in the second readings, and why there was no weight loss observed with dogs.

All the readings were within a factor of ~4 (11-46g), and the readings at the moment of death were within a factor of 2 (11-21g). Given the small sample size (4-6, depending on which are counted) and the sensitivity threshold of the scale (5.7 grams), these differences might simply be due to normal variation in taking measurements.

However, it also is possible that—just as some humans have heavier bodies—some humans have heavier souls.

If further experiments showed that the second, greater readings taken in two cases represent a real, second post-mortem weight loss, it might be proposed that there is more than one paranormal “thing” that detaches at death.

This idea may correspond to certain religious conceptions. In ancient Egypt, the human was thought to consist not only of the physical body but also several soul-like entities referred to as the ba, the ka, the shut, etc. Similarly, some Christians have understood humans as being tripartite, consisting of body, soul, and spirit. Even body/spirit dualists like John Duns Scotus have held that humans have multiple intangible “substantial forms” when alive.

Such claims, in light of MacDougall’s second readings, should alert us to the possibility that the death process may involve more than the departure of a single soul-like entity.

When it comes to dogs, MacDougall’s results would be equally consistent with the hypotheses that dogs do not have souls that survive death or that their souls produce results below the sensitivity threshold of the scale used (1.8g).

Attention should be paid to how MacDougall’s results might be explained if the soul is not spatially extended, as various philosophers have proposed. Why would the departure of such an entity result in an observed loss of weight?

It seems difficult to imagine a non-extended entity having intrinsic mass, but the soul could still interact with weighable matter. This would seem to be a form of PK, and two possibilities for the loss of weight spring to mind.

First, the soul would seem to have a tight psychokinetic association with the body during life, as illustrated by the ease of producing voluntary motions (e.g., lifting an arm) and the difficulty in psychokinetically moving objects outside the body. This tight association might not instantaneously vanish upon death. The soul might retain a PK “grip” on particles or atoms within the body, and as the soul detaches during the death process, enough of these might be pulled along with it to explain the loss of weight.

Second, there may be an explanation in line with the super-psi hypothesis that psychic functioning is part of people’s activity in their everyday environments. People use their bodies to steady themselves as they navigate their surroundings, resulting in them shifting their weight as they move body parts. They might use PK to assist this process. They might even continuously, psychokinetically cause their bodies to slightly sink down as part of steadying themselves in their environment, and if this PK ceased upon the departure of the soul, it could result in the observed loss of a number of grams.

In both this and the previous case, MacDougall’s variant readings might be explained by differences in the strength of the subjects’ PK. Depending on how the death process works from the soul’s perspective, it might also explain the larger, apparently postmortem readings he obtained in two cases—as the soul detached or the PK ceased functioning in stages.

 

Conclusion

MacDougall’s 1907 paper remains intriguing, and a good naturalistic explanation for his results has not been found.

Unfortunately, the small sample size he was able to achieve greatly limits the paper’s evidential value. MacDougall wanted to perform many more experiments with human subjects, but opposition to the project made this impossible.

Thus far, it appears no one has attempted to replicate his experiment with dying humans. However, there have been attempts to do so with animals. In 1907 the Los Angeles Herald reported on an animal replication effort by H. La Verne Twining, which produced mixed results.

Unfortunately, until human replications are attempted with substantially larger sample sizes—as well as modern measurement and control methods—MacDougall’s paper remains only a fascinating, suggestive study.

Science and the Kalaam Argument: Some Words of Caution

The Kalaam Cosmological argument is one of the more popular arguments for God’s existence.

In essence, it states (1) that anything that has a beginning must have a cause, (2) that the universe has a beginning, and so (3) the universe must have a cause, which is God.

There have been various attempts to show philosophically that the universe has a beginning, but these arguments don’t work.

However, there also have been efforts to support the second premise of the argument by appealing to contemporary science and Big Bang cosmology.

This is more promising, but there are some cautions that need to be made in this area also.

Christian apologists should not rely on Big Bang cosmology in an overly confident way, and they need to be aware of the current state of cosmology and the effects it has on the way the Kalaam argument needs to be presented.

It’s important that they be aware of this (a) so that they present the argument correctly and do not distort what current science indicates and (b) so that they don’t cockily present the argument and find themselves called on the carpet by a knowledgeable skeptic.

Here are three articles that apologists wanting to use the scientific version of the Kalaam argument should be aware of.

 

No Singularity?

It’s common to hear claims that at the moment of the Big Bang there was a singularity in which space and time came into existence.

This used to be common thinking among cosmologists, but it is not taken for granted today.

Here Ethan Siegel, who is a mainstream astrophysicist (i.e., not a fringe nut) explains:

The TL;DR for apologetic purposes is that we ought to be careful making claims that the Big Bang shows the existence of a singularity in which space and time sprang into existence.
Siegel’s point is that this was the conventional understanding among astrophysicists 40 years ago, but that the view has since been undermined by the failure to observe certain features that the universe should have if it were true.
Instead, contemporary astronomical evidence points to the whole universe once existing in a hot, dense state that then began expanding (i.e., the Big Bang) but it does not show that space and time sprang into existence at this point.
Siegel admits that there could have been a singularity at some point prior to the Big Bang where space and time sprang into existence, but astrophysics doesn’t presently show that.

 

Cosmological Response to the Kalaam

In this second article, Siegel offers a critical evaluation of the Kalaam argument from the perspective of modern astrophysics.

Apologists should be aware of this type of critique.

Article 2: Does Modern Cosmology Prove the Existence of God?

 

The Crisis in Cosmology

Finally, apologists need to be aware of what’s called the “crisis in cosmology.”

In recent years, measurements have been taken that call into question important elements of current cosmological thought.

This has led cosmologists themselves to begin discussing a “crisis” in their field.

There also are assumptions in Big Bang cosmology that need to be examined.

While some form of the Big Bang is still the dominant model in cosmology, apologists need to be aware of the crisis in cosmology and be careful in how confidently the present current cosmological ideas in their arguments.

Here is a treatment of that.

Article 3: Escaping Cosmology’s Failing Paradigm

 

Apologetic Integrity

Apologetic integrity demands that apologists accurately present the data on which their arguments are based.

Therefore, when presenting cosmological ideas in their arguments, apologists must be aware of the current state of cosmological science, and it must be accurately reflected in how the present evidence for the Christian faith to others.

They must not misrepresent the science when making scientific arguments.

These articles will help Christian apologists be aware of important issues that have a bearing on the Kalaam argument.