Carl Sagan presented an extraordinary claim, with no evidence whatsoever to support it
Voters are encouraged to comment - in particular, with evidence in support of Sagan's idea.
Edit - The comments are coming in - very encouraging! Hopefully, there will also be comments in response to the post about Sagan's misrepresenting Plato.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
~ Carl Sagan
From a skeptic's blog, this lament - the "late-great" Carl Sagan's bold but clueless attempt at explaining near-death experience. No evidence? What the hell!
People tend to look at the data that confirms their point of view, but not the data that doesn’t. And in this sense, the NDE becomes a kind of wishing pool: We stare into it and resolve its mystery by perceiving in it a reflection of the world we most expect or wish to see.
This line of argument is usually directed solely at believers. But in researching and writing Fringe-ology I found numerous examples of skeptics engaged in prolonged and public bouts of self-deceit.
The late great Carl Sagan, for instance, proposed an explanation for Near Death Experiences that never had a chance. Just a few years after the phrase Near Death Experience was coined by Raymond Moody, Sagan proposed that the source of tunnel reports in NDE stories was a replay of the birth experience. At the time of our death, he wrote, a repressed memory of the birth experience may surface. The sensation of passing through a tunnel and floating into another world and a mystical white light is a mirror of the experience of passing through the birth canal and emerging into a bright delivery room and the waiting hands of doctors and nurses.
From the beginning, this idea (to be clear, Sagan picked it up from another researcher—and ran with it) worked solely in a poetic sense. Our medical understanding at the time of Sagan’s writing suggested an infant’s visual system and memory aren’t capable of registering the birth experience in the manner necessary for this explanation to be viable. And of course, the experiences don’t really match up.
Is being smashed and struggling inside the birth canal anything like the peaceful, floating tunnel experience people describe in their NDEs? In fact, said baby is usually delivered with the crown of its head emerging first while its eyes remain closed and mashed against the vaginal wall.
In short, Sagan's favored theory never had anything to support it beyond his famous name. Others before me have soundly refuted it. (Most damningly, if Sagan's idea was right we'd expect people born by caesarean to report far fewer, if any, tunnel experiences. But people removed from the womb surgically are as likely to report tunnels as those born by vaginal delivery.) We’re well past the point, though, where simply knocking Sagan’s argument down is enough. I think we need to ask ourselves a further question:
Namely, why did Sagan ever propose such an obvious nonstarter of an idea?
My proposed answer is at once simple and surely incendiary for those who revere Sagan as a scientist, thinker and skeptic.
You ready?
He liked it.
Posted Feb 21, 2016, 9:52 PM UTC · edited