The John Templeton Foundation has awarded a three year, $5 million grant, to University of California professor John Martin Fischer. This award has an interesting subject matter: The money and study will be to find out all that is--or isn't--about life after death.
Including with the study: Immortality, near death experiences, how beliefs impact afterlife or human behavior..
The money quote:
“We will be very careful in documenting near-death experiences and other phenomena, trying to figure out if these offer plausible glimpses of an afterlife or are biologically induced illusions,” Fischer said. “Our approach will be uncompromisingly scientifically rigorous. We’re not going to spend money to study alien-abduction reports. We will look at near-death experiences and try to find out what’s going on there — what is promising, what is nonsense, and what is scientifically debunked. We may find something important about our lives and our values, even if not glimpses into an afterlife.”
The study sounds like it is setting out to be reputable and quotable. It will interesting just what Ms. Fischer and company find out concerning the real and true glimpses of NDEs. There are lots of pieces of nonsense and steaming piles of excrement around any time you delve deep into paranormal or after death accounts. The subject matter of UFOs and abductions brings about the same scenarios of making sure you wear knee deep boots. But a real study about the subject works if the subject matter itself is respected by those who are researching it. It appears, in just casual reading on this matter, that it could a respectable approach to finding out just what else is out there after this.
And in the end, don't you think that this study is setting out to try to answer the most important question of life anyway? Is there life after death or not? That question has been thought about for almost all of humankind. And after all this time, we are no closer to an answer than we were when original humans discovered fire.