In a study that confirms what fans of The Princess Bride have long known, researcher Dr. Sam Parnia found that those whose hearts stopped and were clinically dead were only “mostly dead”. He found that nearly 40% of patients who were revived after their hearts had stopped beating reported some level of awareness and consciousness. The doctor even went so far as to say that “you know you are dead because your brain keeps working” for some short period of time. Since the results of this study, which he dubbed AWARE, were published in 2015, there have been a slew of studies attempting to better understand death and so-called near death experiences. Unfortunately, a number of these studies ignore what we already know through philosophical anthropology and so end up taking researchers down into bottomless rabbit holes.
With the advent of the age of the “specialist” these types of studies, that is, studies that apply empirical science to questions philosophy can, and usually already has, provide an answer are becoming more common. Very often science, because it relies only upon empirical methods, comes up with incorrect conclusions. We already know, and have known for a long time, that you know when you are dead. This is because the soul is immortal.
Philosophy as the Handmaiden of Science
Some might think this is a theological claim and dismiss the question a priori has something that must be “believed” and not known. While the question of the soul’s destiny might be a theological claim, the fact that it is immortal is a philosophical truth. Human beings are capable of three types of actions. There are those that depend solely upon the body like digestion. There are those that depend upon the interaction of the body and the mind like choosing what to eat based upon both knowledge of nutrition and personal tastes. Finally, there are those actions that do not depend upon the body like abstract thought in some intellectual field like mathematics or even reasoning about the immortality of the soul. This latter group, because it does not depend upon the body as a completely immaterial operation, means that man has the capacity, at least in part, to act when the soul is separated from the body. We may use the body (such as our memory and imagination) when we perform these abstract operations, but these operations do not depend upon the body.
We may not be able to definitively say how we know after the soul has been separated from the body, but we can say with certainty that we continue to know things even after our brains cease operating. This, because it goes outside of ordinary human experience, would have to be revealed in some way to us. The point though is that it is not unreasonable to posit that one of those things that we know is that we are dead.
If philosophy already confirms this when it proves the immortality of the soul, then what value do studies like this have? Death, properly defined, is the separation of body and soul. Because the soul is an immaterial substance, its presence cannot be directly detected using scientific (materialistic) methods. Instead medical personnel must look for signs that the soul has, in fact, left the body. To see how this might be done, we again must turn to philosophy.
What do we mean when we say the soul is “in the body”? To say that a spiritual substance is in a material substance is to say that it is acting upon it. So, it is said that the soul is in the body, it does not mean that it is stored in some area of the body, but that it acts upon it. The soul does not act on every part of the body directly, but instead acts through the brain which serves as the body’s integrative organ. Once the brain is no longer able to perform this integrative task, then the soul leaves the body. This is the reason that the Church suggests what is called the Neurological Criteria for determining death.
Science as the Handmaiden of Philosophy
This study and studies like it seem to empirically verify what we have long known through reason—even if the heart stops beating, this does not mean a person is dead (i.e. the soul has left the body). Studies like this should also make us pause on questions of organ donation since many people use clinical death as a criteria to determine whether to harvest a person’s organs. The person, using the Neurological Criterion, may still actually be alive and even capable of higher brain activity associated with human thought. In so far as these studies help to refine and better pinpoint the moment of death, they are very helpful. But when they get off on tangents such as “you know you are dead” they undermine the task of true science. They seem to adopt a materialistic conception of man, without the strings that are attached. If you are “dead” and your body is all you are, then who is the I that is knowing he is dead? To even make the statement implicitly assumes there is someone who survives death.
When framed in this way these studies also feed the universal fascination with near-death experiences. As this particular study showed, these experiences are relatively common place. There is no reason why we should be skeptical of these accounts in general, especially when as Christians we have examples, including Lazarus, of people who have definitely died and are resuscitated. But there are reasons why we might be skeptical in particular instances. Few, if any, of these people describe the presence of the demonic or mention the epic struggle with fallen angels that we know happens in the dying. To say that all of these people have avoided the same epic struggle that Our Lord instructed us to pray against in the Our Father, stretches the Christian imagination. In fact, it stretches it thin enough to say that it is probably not common place at all. It is more likely that most of these are either illusory or demonically caused.