Cached April 1, 2010, at about 5:55 PM ET
from http://www.newsweek.com/id/235462
(Story found on Google News at about 5:40 PM ET on April 1.)
Can Science Explain Heaven?
Scientists try to explain near-death experiences.
By Lisa Miller
| Newsweek Web Exclusive
There
are those who believe that science will eventually explain
everything—including our enduring belief in heaven. The thesis here is
very simple: heaven is not a real place, or even a process or a
supernatural event. It's something that happens in your brain as you
die.
I first encountered this idea as I was researching my new book, Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination
With the Afterlife.
I was having lunch with my friend and colleague Christopher Dickey, who
told me that his father, the writer James Dickey, had a fantasy of
heaven in which all of his closest friends were sitting around a
swimming pool, chatting. "There was nothing special about the pool
itself," wrote Chris in Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of
Father and Son .
"Nobody walked on the water. And he never told me who the friends were
... But what he took away from the dream was a sense of contentment, of
being at ease with himself and the world, as if he had gotten a preview
of heaven. He called that place 'The Happy Swimming Pool.' " Chris
believes that everything we think we know about heaven happens in the
moments before death. After that, there's nothing. Science cannot
definitively proof [sic] or disprove Chris's theory, but some scientists are
willing to take guesses.
.....