As we wrestled with the heart-wrenching task of telling everyone in the family that Christopher had died, the vision of Chris’s amazing Spirit seemed more and more elusive. I turned to it many times a day, trying to relive every second of the experience, as if it were a drug to chase away despair and anger.
I had no doubt about what I’d seen. I felt blessed that we’d been given this vision of paradise. But I had no idea how to process it. I didn’t realize that Christopher wasn’t done with me yet, and that by the time he finished, he would turn my worldview upside down and challenge everything I thought I knew about myself or about him. He’d give us another demonstration of the immortality of his soul that was even more compelling than what we’d seen, and he’d show me that the immortality of each individual soul is intimately connected to the origin of the universe.
I’d been trained as a scientist and researcher. Logic, reason, and experimentation were my most important tools. For most of my life I had considered the great mysteries of life to be essentially unknowable: how we came to be here, for what reason or purpose—if any—and what happens after death. In high school, I’d been impressed by the writings of Thomas Aquinas, who drew a hard line, never to be crossed, between knowledge and faith. What one could know, reasoned Aquinas, did not require faith. Religion was based on faith, not knowledge; hence the truths of religious faith could only be believed, never confirmed as fact. By their very nature and God’s intent, they were beyond proving. Not being one to take anything on faith, I had dismissed religion and spiritual matters as fanciful and committed myself to a lifetime of agnostic thinking, applying the skepticism of science to all beliefs. The results of skepticism were paradoxical, however.
I found it easy to believe, as do most scientists, that life arose completely by chance: the right environmental conditions, the proper ingredients in a primordial chemical soup, the random association of molecules assembling the primitive nucleotides of the genetic code, a billion years of evolution yielding the human brain, the chemistry of which created consciousness. The problem with this point of view is that it is not truly scientific. It requires a surreptitious leap of faith.
In his book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, Sir Francis Crick, the renowned physicist and biochemist who received the Nobel Prize for his work in unraveling the structure of DNA, states the “scientific” view of the human soul quite succinctly: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”1 And: “If the scientific facts are sufficiently striking and well-established, and if they appear to support the Astonishing Hypothesis, then it will be possible to argue that the idea that man has a disembodied soul is . . . unnecessary.”2 Over the next decade, until his death in 2004, Crick continued to work on a theory of human consciousness as the by-product of chemistry and anatomy. No soul, no spirit, just molecular networks.
Crick’s hypothesis is a shining example of scientific reductionism, the belief that the best way to understand anything is to break it down into its component parts and study them. His theories expose the scientist’s leap of faith in a most flagrant form. Between descriptions of the physiology and psychology of vision, which make up the bulk of Crick’s evidence, and anything that could reasonably represent an approach to understanding human consciousness, let alone a soul, lies a vast intellectual chasm. In 1994, Crick had to admit, rather sheepishly: “At the moment of writing, there does not appear to be one set of ideas that click together in a convincing way to make a detailed neural hypothesis that has the smell of being correct. If you think I appear to be groping my way through the jungle you are quite right.”3 After thousands of hours delving into visual processing by monkeys, Crick summed up his progress by stating that he studied vision because it was easier and that he had to leave aside “the more difficult aspects of consciousness, such as emotion and self-consciousness.”4
What assumptions would allow Crick to express his theory of the soul as if it carried behind it the awesome power of “science”? First was his opinion that in reducing a human being to the essential components, scientists could stop at the molecules that make up the body. Second was his unstated decision to limit the field of inquiry to measurable, replicable phenomena, and to assume that what is learned there can be extended to phenomena that are not measurable and cannot be experimentally replicated. Third was his high regard for “the spectacular advance of modern science,” which has allowed us to know much that was at one time considered unknowable. These are opinions, and although they are shared by many scientists, they are no less subjective than the opinions that underlie most types of spiritual belief. Over the next several years, as I investigated Christopher’s revelations, I realized that these “spectacular advances” have been accompanied by a loss of vision. There are truths we rarely see because we’ve lost the ability to see them.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Following Christopher’s visitation, I concluded that it was more in keeping with the spirit of science to forgo opinions based on reductionist thinking and to be skeptical about the unsupported assertions of scientists. Without faith, but with just enough doubt about the soundness of conventional thinking, I was prepared to be open to experience and the lessons it would teach me. I expected that the questions would exceed the answers—that I would search more than I would find and sow more than I would reap. I was wrong.
Over the next three weeks, Christopher would reveal to me far more about the nature of life than I ever expected. My dead, brain-damaged, 22-year-old son would show me, with about as much evidence as I could reasonably expect, that death is not the end of life, but merely a turning point in the adventure of the individual Spirit. And once I thought I had that down, he’d turn my understanding on its head and give me a vision of the universe that would completely shatter my notion of what is real.
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1 Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994), 1.
2 Ibid., 261.
3 Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, 251.
4 Francis Crick and Christof Koch, “A Framework for Consciousness,” Nature Neuroscience 6 (2003): 119–126.