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发帖数: 481 | 1 University professor to study life after death
By Claudine Zap | The Sideshow
Pop quiz: Does life exist after death?
A University of California, Riverside philosophy professor, John Martin
Fischer, has been awarded a three-year, $5 million grant by the John
Templeton Foundation to study just this topic—and yes, students can take
his class.
Fischer noted in an email to Yahoo News, "Both I and my post-doc, Benjamin
Mitchell-Yellin, will teach related classes over the next three years. I
have frequently taught classes on death, immortality, and the meaning of
life both at Yale University and UC Riverside."
So what's the meaning of life? More on that in a moment.
Fischer noted, "We'll be open both to studying religious and non-religious
views about immortality. One thing that we'll study is whether human beings
would want to live forever: would it be boring? Would it lose its meaning
and beauty and urgency? Does death give meaning to life?"
According to the university's website announcing the grant award, many
anecdotal reports of the afterlife abound, but there has been "no
comprehensive and rigorous, scientific study of global reports about near-
death and other experiences, or of how belief in immortality influences
human behavior." The research will look at a range of phenomena, including
heaven, hell, purgatory, and karma. The grant is the largest ever awarded
to a humanities professor at UC Riverside, and one of the largest given to
an individual at the university.
Fischer said in a statement, "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."
The grant will also fund two conferences to discuss the findings. Said UC
Riverside Chancellor Timothy P. White, Fischer's research "takes a universal
concern and subjects it to rigorous examination to sift fact from fiction."
The Immortality Project, as it is called, will solicit research proposals
from eminent scientists, philosophers and theologians whose work "will be
reviewed by respected leaders in their fields and published in academic and
popular journals."
The research will also delve into cultural aspects of the afterlife. For
example, there are reports of millions of Americans seeing a tunnel with a
bright light at the end. In Japan, reports often find the individual tending
a garden.
The professor added that the academic research could include a range of
issues, like "heaven and hell: If we are material beings, how can we exist
in heaven, where we would not have physical bodies (or not of the sort we
have here)?
"There is a lot of interest in near-death experiences. We can carefully
catalog them and look into whether there are patterns. There has already
been a lot of work on this. Perhaps some cross-cultural studies would be
helpful.
"We'll also be open to studying the relationship between beliefs in
afterlife and behavior--moral behavior and crime rates."
Sounds like the kind of research topics that many college students have
already spent hours pondering. As for the meaning of life? The professor
says check back in three years. |
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