Expert: Austin Cline - 7/21/2004

Question
My brother-in-law is a highly intelligent creature who is also a "seeker".  He wants to find a "teacher" familiar with Tibetin spirituality.  He's buying into and explaining things having to do with transcending the physical world, particularly postmortum consciousness.  Here's the question!  He speaks of some book which relates a story of some yogi or maharishi who died in Los Angeles and the LA coroner reported that there were no signs of physical deterioration or decomposition for a week or so.  What's the skeptics' version or explanation of this story or like stories?  For a "scientific minded" guy he puts a lot of stock into these STORIES.  On the other hand he'll dismiss many bible accounts and chide those who would buy into that belief system.  So if you could just answer this one question, which he cited to me as evidence, perhaps he could regain a little desperately needed skepticism.  Any references that you know of addressing skeptical viewpoints on these matters?  One other thing: why or what is the dominating factor which drives very intelligent, inquisitive folk to stray from independent thought based on direct experience and to jump to conclusions based on leaps of faith.  Furthermore, how do those folks
fail to actually distinguish when they are doing this?                Thanks for your time,
                         Marcus

Answer
I'm afraid that I probably won't be able to give you as much of an answer as you would like. Without more information about the specifics of the case, I can't even begin to find skeptical critiques of it.

All I can offer are some general observations that would apply to just about anything:

1. How credible are the original reports? Is there any reason to believe them to be true? If true, it would contradict a great deal of what we know about biology and chemistry; ergo, the supporting evidence must be strong enough to contradict all of the evidence we have that supports modern biology and chemistry. Is it?

2. Are there any independent reports at all? Anything that doesn't come from "believers" in this religious/paranormal system?

3. Putting faith in anecdotal stories is directly contrary to the scientific method. Ergo, a person cannot be "scientifically minded" and put stock in them. They are, at best, interesting problems or questions that merit closer investigation - not a basis for strong beliefs or for chucking most of modern science.

4. Would you buy a used car based upon the same level of evidence and testimony? If not, then you shouldn't "buy" such beliefs that way, either.

5. Why do people do this? A variety of forces can be at work:

Wishful Thinking: people will lower their standards of evidence for things they want to be true.

Compartmentalization: people don't apply basic standards to ideas that are off in a different "compartment" (science vs. religion).

Rationalization: bad evidence is rationalized into looking better.

6. You can't easily reason someone out of a belief that they never reasoned their way into in the first place. A better tactic is to get them to apply basic standards of reason and skepticism generally and then see if they can apply them to an unreasonable belief. For example, does he reject Bible stories simply because they are "silly" or after a logical reasoning process? If the former, then of course he won't use a logical reasoning process on other stories - he isn't accustomed to using such a process on odd beliefs *at all*. Get him to start doing that and maybe it will leak over into other things.