Roberta Grimes

Death of Science

Posted by Roberta Grimes • February 14, 2026 • 10 Comments
Afterlife Research, Death

Who can I turn to when nobody needs me?
My heart wants to know, and so I must go where destiny leads me.
With no star to guide me, and no one beside me,
I’ll go on my way and, after the day, the darkness will hide me.

And maybe tomorrow I’ll find what I’m after.
I’ll throw off my sorrow, beg, steal, or borrow my share of laughter.
With you I could learn to, with you what a new day,
But who can I turn to if you turn away?
– Anthony Newley (1931-1999) & Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021), from “Who Can I Turn to?” (1964)

I suppose this was the inevitable next stage of materialist science, after its more than a century of mostly useless fumbling for something of value for materialist scientists to discover; but still, watching it literally attempt to so limit its work that effectively it is killing itself is horrifying. This week I came across a lengthy article in the very reputable online popular science journal Nautilus that was entitled, “The Afterlife is in Our Heads”, in which a young “Science Journalist” named Kristen French, with an actual degree in Science Journalism, uses some of the recent abundance of near-death experiences (NDEs) to debunk the very possibility of an actual life after death as only an idea of recent vintage that is based on NDEs. This whole lengthy, learned-seeming, and heavily footnoted article has not taken into account even the possibility that prior to the publication of Raymond Moody’s Life After Life in 1975, there might have been much evidence at all of any sort of afterlife to be considered beyond NDEs, which are of course not even evidence of, nor are they in any way related to life after death.

This article’s whole tone is set right at the start with its two delimiting paragraphs.  It has, of course, set its whole premise before you even start to read it, right there at the head, with its title. “The Afterlife is in Our Heads” must mean that somehow, we have made up the afterlife in our minds? And then, as we begin to read, we learn near the start of the article that, “Many studies and books that bear witness to life after life have sprung up since Moody’s book, none more notorious than Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, a New York Times bestseller in 2012, by neurosurgeon Eben Alexander.” So, here we learn near the start of the article that before Eben Alexander’s book came out in 2012, there wasn’t much general interest in the afterlife at all. Soon thereafter, we learn that the reason why there wasn’t much interest in the afterlife until recently was that until Dr. Moody’s book came out in 1975, no one even was imagining that an afterlife was possible: “But neuroscientists who study consciousness and have weighed the decades of research into NDEs told me these claims that consciousness survives death are not supported by the research. Though they are highly personal and often transformative for those who experience them, NDEs are nonetheless explained by physiological processes, they said, which have been pieced together over the past 50 years. In the decades since Moody published Life After Life….” So this article by a young Journalist named Kristen French, where she claims that every bit of afterlife evidence that we have comes from NDEs reported within the past fifty years, is highly misleading. As lengthy as the article is, and as scholarly as it appears to be, Ms. French’s article limits itself to discussing the effect on our knowledge of and interest in the afterlife that was produced by near-death experiences just in the fifty years since Raymond Moody’s Life After Life was first published. It is effectively an altogether new kind of scientific study altogether, one that considers only knowledge produced within a very limited time and in a strictly limited way, and then draws broad, universal conclusions from that limited bit of information.

You could treat studying anything in this way by having a limited subset of what you are studying stand for its entire class. What about bears, perhaps? You have only limited funds, so you study all the bears of the world and for all of time by studying just the bears living in a part of the American Rocky Mountains during a recent ten-year period. You find that they are all brown, all this, all that, and being squeezed out by human competition, and whatever you learn from studying this small sample of bears, you now apply to all the bears in the world and for all of time. Wow, and now doing science is so much easier!  But this is not unlike what first was done to mainstream science soon after the turn of the Twentieth Century, when the dogma of materialism was first imposed upon it. By doing that, scientists foreclosed their own relationship with consciousness, and thereby they made it nearly impossible for them ever to discover some very important things. We’ll talk more about this next week. And also, perhaps most importantly, they encouraged young scientists of their own future to think of doing what Ms. French is doing now, and lopping off other aspects of what has long governed traditional science as well, in an effort to make doing scientific research much easier. Well, why not?

So this article that attempts to kill off the afterlife uses what limited information Ms. French could glean from interviewing some of the few materialist scientists and experts in recent NDEs and in consciousness studies that have been most prominent in just the past fifty years, and indeed by no means even all of those people. It then draws from that very limited base all of Ms. French’s and her limited set of experts’ conclusions. Amazingly, even when her self-limited expert group is so small, she seems deliberately to have excluded or explained away every known kind of NDE that could have weakened her theory as it is set forth in her title, that we have made up the afterlife in our minds. And there are many of these exceptions! There are lots of famous and well-documented NDEs in which the NDE-ers in their travels out of the body have seen and later described things that proved that their consciousness actually had been far away from their living bodies for a time. And cases, too, when a patient’s brain had been deeply drugged on an operating table, eyes covered and brain inactive, while the patient was able to accurately describe the whole operation as it was happening, from the viewpoint of an upper corner of the room. And what of terminal lucidity? What of the extensive experiences of the dying that have been lovingly recorded as they were being reported from the bedside, which experiences so often include long-dead loved ones, now again young and happy, who come to bring their loved one home with them; and those dead loved ones are sometimes seen by the living near the dying person’s bedside?

I would like to ask the estimable young Science Journalist Kristen French, who has just proclaimed the afterlife to be nonexistent based on a narrowly curated bit of irrelevant modern NDE evidence, what she might have to say about the many hundreds of extensive and amazingly consistent accounts of the afterlife that were received from people who were then very recently dead, and were speaking to us with the help of the great deep-trance mediums around the turn of the Twentieth Century, which is now about 125 years in the past? Back in the early Nineteen-Seventies, when I was around Ms. French’s present age, I was just out of college, and living in Boston, working to program an IBM 360 computer that was the size of a small house and took up most of one entire floor of a tall city building. I was then afterlife-curious, but also quite afterlife-skeptical. My college education had been largely Biblical, around a major in Early Christian History. So, at that point, what did I know? Not much. But Boston had some wonderful antique-book stores that I could browse on weekends; and at around that point, wow, wouldn’t you just know it, many people were dying of old age in the Boston area. And many of those old folks had bought books at the start of the Twentieth Century, when they had been as young as I was in the early Seventies, and their books that now were being discarded into those old-books stores that I was finding and browsing were full of answers to the very questions about the afterlife that I was then so eager to ask and have answered!

Deep-trance mediumship had been a Nineteenth-Century skill, so it was becoming an extraordinary lost art, even as the Twentieth Century was just beginning. What killed deep-trance mediumship was electricity, and specifically electric lights being installed in most people’s homes. In the more elegant, and certainly the more leisurely latter part of the Nineteenth Century, just past the end of the Civil War, people would dine by candlelight, and then afterward the gentlemen would smoke their cigars and drink their brandy in the still-candlelit dining room, while the ladies and some of the younger gentlemen would sit in a darkened parlor and hold their seances, do some table-tipping, and so on. Some of the ladies, and even a few of the gentlemen, would become very good deep-trance mediums, with skills that are largely unknown today. While relatives of newly-dead loved ones sat quietly, waiting and listening in the darkened parlor, a Medium would sit in darkness, or in very dim light, and would go into trance so deeply that she could leave her body altogether, and her spirit guide, generally referred to as her “Control”, could take over her body, and could speak directly to those in the room. The Control could also allow a recently-deceased loved one of some of those in the room to speak, using the Medium’s voice, and often these newly-dead loved ones would tell those in the room about the afterlife where the dead person now was, in considerable detail.  Or it might be the Control who talked to those in that dark room about the afterlife, using the Medium’s voice.

Many of these seances were documented in some detail by writers who were young at the start of the Twentieth Century, and were based in London, in Boston, or in New York City, which were the three areas where early-Twentieth-Century seances most commonly happened. Some writers even wrote books about these seances, and many of those books eventually ended up in Boston’s mid-century old-books stores. And there was I, on so many early-Seventies Saturdays in Boston, so eager to find more of the books that those young documenters of these seances had written! Most of the books that I found on my Saturday browses had been written in Boston; but books about British Mediums, and also New York City Mediums, were also to be found in Boston in the Seventies. So, what did those books say?

Well, as you can imagine, I collected as many of those books as I could find. About twenty, overall, still remain in my library. And while I have given away a few books, I think I still have most of what I first bought. So then, I sorted them roughly by categories, and I set right in and read them all. It took me about two years, and because some of those books contain a lot of seance experiences, I rough-calculate that I read in them the experiences of well over two hundred and fifty new afterlife arrivals. I soon had a favorite Medium, Gladys Osborne Leonard with her chatty Control, Feda; and I soon was overwhelmed by one amazing fact. No matter where those people who were communicating from the afterlife had died, all the details of the afterlife in which they now lived were always astonishingly about the same! The same process, the same clothing; the same complex, sort of formal, and very beautiful scenery; the same pastimes, all the same little details; and all the same strange and beautiful colors, ranging far beyond the visible light spectrum. The same great, tall flowers and trees. Really, all the same vast everything! The North American Summerland, which was what back then they called the afterlife, was surrounded by beautiful Rocky Mountains. In London, you landed just in lovely formal gardens. But whatever your local afterlife might be like, it was infinite in size and duration, and it was full of love. Jesus was everywhere, welcoming us all home. And what about skeptical me? How did I at first deal with all this? After two years of reading such solid and varied evidence that was always so consistent across all three cities, I became convinced that it was impossible for the afterlife not to be real. And in all the fifty years since I first drew that conclusion, based only on genuine afterlife evidence, I have become only ever more certain that the afterlife is real, and it is beyond-belief wonderful!

With you I could learn to, with you what a new day!
But who can I turn to if you turn away?
– Anthony Newley (1931-1999) & Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021), from “Who Can I Turn to?” (1964)

 

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)