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CARTER,CHRIS. (2012). Science and the afterlife experience. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. xiv + 369 pp. ISBN 9781594774522, Paperback, $18.95. Reviewed by Stafford Betty.
Chris Carter's Science and the Afterlife Experience is the last book of a trilogy designed to show the strength of substance dualism and its satellite claim that we survive death. His earlier works are Science and the Near-Death Experience (2010) and Science and Psychic Phenomena (2012). Carter is an Oxfordeducated Canadian philosopher with an encyclopedic grasp of the history of psychical research and the philosophical skills to build imposing arguments around it. He enjoys the esteem of many of the world's foremost psychical researchers, some of whom think his marshalling of evidence deals a near fatal blow to materialism. He writes lucidly in the language of everyman.
What makes this book different from others is Carter's ability to expose the weak points of materialism and replace it with a dualist metaphysics built around what he considers to be near insurmountable evidence. He is convinced of the following:
1. substance dualism is no more improbable out of the gate than materialism, and Ockham's razor should not predispose philosophers to favor materialism;
2. careful analysis of paranormal phenomena leaves no doubt that materialism is at a loss to account for them, whereas dualism is consistent with them; and
3. the deceased have long been trying to tell us through mediums what life on the "Other Side" is like, and we have good reason to trust their accounts.
1. Materialists commonly use Ockham's razor to support materialism. "Why introduce an invisible factor like a soul when we have a body right in front of us? Keep it simple," they argue. "But reality is often not simple," Carter responds. Newtonian physics is much simpler than quantum physics, he points out, but becomes inadequate beyond a certain threshold and has to give way to the more complex, more comprehensive theory. Besides the understandable preference for things that can be seen, a deeper reason for the philosopher's opposition to dualism, Carter argues, is a fear that it will "usher in a return to an age of religious persecution and irrationality" (p. 15). Dualism, however, is not a religious doctrine, he responds, but a philosophical stance built around...