From church apologist to neuroscientist and physicist

[dastardly stem]

I wonder exactly how fear of death may drive people to Mormonism. There are other belief systems which offer just as much hope for afterlife without all the Mormon baggage of ugly history, fake Scriptures, and high activity demand. I mean, one can just decide to believe that after death we all get eternal beach vacations, with no strings attached. If you can really believe that, you've got the fear of death licked.

I suppose that's the rub. If you just decide to believe something, it's too obvious that that's all your doing. When evidence is unavailable, one way you can still raise your confidence is to up your investment. A $100 bottle of wine is bound to taste better than a $10 bottle. If you don't actually know wine, but you really want to be sure you're getting a good bottle, you might just try to buy the most expensive bottle you can find.

Maybe committing to Mormonism is kind of analogous to that strategy.

I wonder how fear of death drives religion in general. For reason religion seems very convincing when people think they are the ones who are in for a treat come death while others are in for eternal disappointment. It was ultimately my biggest reason for leaving religion behind me. I couldn't imagine finding sweet delights in eternity while tons of others were in misery all for arbitrary reasons. Eternal disaster for some is eternal hell for us all, I figured.

[Physics Guy]

Isn’t abandoning religion because of Hell like abandoning pizza because of anchovies?

[dastardly stem]

Isn’t abandoning religion because of Hell like abandoning pizza because of anchovies?

Nah...I still eat pizza. If pizza were garbage there'd be tons more reasons to abandon it than anchovies--anchovies just happen to be one reason.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I've had a hundred or so in my life. … I said it as if I had my fingers crossed behind my back, lying, only to get him to leave me alone. It worked...and recovered, came out of my vision a bit sweaty and worked up, but after a couple of deep breaths moved on again.

It's really not fun. It sucks for me. I wouldn't really wish anyone experienced them, even the positive sounding ones.

Do you experience sleep paralysis during these episodes?

- Doc

[dastardly stem]

I've had a hundred or so in my life. … I said it as if I had my fingers crossed behind my back, lying, only to get him to leave me alone. It worked...and recovered, came out of my vision a bit sweaty and worked up, but after a couple of deep breaths moved on again.

It's really not fun. It sucks for me. I wouldn't really wish anyone experienced them, even the positive sounding ones.

Do you experience sleep paralysis during these episodes?

- Doc

yes. Mostly.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Do you experience sleep paralysis during these episodes?

- Doc

yes. Mostly.

I can see why you don’t wish that on others. I experienced a ‘Joseph Smith moment’ the night before I went through the temple. I was in a hotel room with my parents, and I woke up, but couldn’t move. I felt the presence of the Devil, and it scared the everliving *** out of me. I was completely paralyzed. Finally, after some moments passed I was able to whisper some sort of ‘get thee behind me Satan’ Mormon priesthood incantation (obviously I don’t recall the exact words).

I think a lot of people who experience sleep paralysis and feel the presence of evil spirits, the devil, aliens, or some form of imagined difficulty probably draw on what they know. Whatever the case may be, if it were the Devil doing his getcha thing he does, it was utterly unnecessary since the temple ceremony scared me far more than whatever boogeyman man routine happened the night before. Those penalties were the beginning of the end for me.

- Doc

[dastardly stem]

I can see why you don’t wish that on others. I experienced a ‘Joseph Smith moment’ the night before I went through the temple. I was in a hotel room with my parents, and I woke up, but couldn’t move. I felt the presence of the Devil, and it scared the everliving *** out of me. I was completely paralyzed. Finally, after some moments passed I was able to whisper some sort of ‘get thee behind me Satan’ Mormon priesthood incantation (obviously I don’t recall the exact words).

I think a lot of people who experience sleep paralysis and feel the presence of evil spirits, the devil, aliens, or some form of imagined difficulty probably draw on what they know. Whatever the case may be, if it were the Devil doing his getcha thing he does, it was utterly unnecessary since the temple ceremony scared me far more than whatever boogeyman man routine happened the night before. Those penalties were the beginning of the end for me.

- Doc

Still scares me and gets me all worked up. Not as bad as it used to be. I have a few sleep paralysis experiences that don't include OBE's but probably most do for me. Apparently that's a little odd, but happens. Many have concluded there's significant overlap, as I understand it.

I never could get presences to leave when I was religious trying to scream out the same incantation you mention. That always sucked. It was like they were laughing at me as soon as I invoked Jesus.

Makes sense on the temple thing.

[Billy Shears]

Our favorite PhD has been hard at work mastering another couple scientific disciplines:

“I’m pleased to report that I’ve just been notified that I will be speaking between 3:45 and 4:45 PM on Saturday, 3 September, at the 2022 annual convention of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS). It will be held this year in Salt Lake City. I’m really pleased with that date and time, and had actually requested it, because I will have just returned about forty-eight hours earlier from a stay in Europe. My title is “Has Modern Physics Proven Out-of-Body Experiences Impossible?”


It’s quite an achievement to go from linguistics to philosophy to neuroscience to physics. He’s really a modern day Renaissance man.

Wow. Could the so-called International Association for Near-Death Studies have any lower standards?

Over the course of a years, I repeatedly challenged Professor Peterson to read a few chapters of The Big Picture so that he could get a rudimentary understanding of why physicists think the answer to his question is yes. He never did. Yet now he's the expert?

Peterson's responses to my posts on this topic got ridiculously predictable.

1- First mock me for thinking highly of Sean Carroll's "(PHUH)" understanding of physics.
2- Belittle my point as merely being Billy Shears's interpretation of Sean Carroll's interpretation of physics.
3- Make a reference to a scientist who happens to be religious as definitive proof that Carroll's arguments couldn't be valid--if they were, how do I explain the existence of a religious scientist?

I predict that rather than engaging with Sean Carroll's arguments in his presentation, Peterson will say the following:

1- Say this is nothing new and nothing to worry about--materialists have disbelieved in the ghost in the machine for generations.
2- Lots of impressive scientists believe in religion and presumably in spirits, so of course physics hasn't proven anything on the topic.
3- Say something about Thomas Kuhn and how science doesn't really prove anything.

And that's it. The objective will be to help people ignore and dismiss physics rather than help them understand the nature, scope, and strength of the actual arguments.

[drumdude]

Peterson is constantly trying to misrepresent the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis doesn’t say something cannot be true, it says that you need sufficient statistically valid evidence before you can declare it to be true or likely to be true.


Magnetic rings and crystals might actually heal people. There are probably doctors around the world who believe in them. But the null hypothesis is that they do not work, and the burden of proof is on the faithful to demonstrate otherwise.


I’m not aware of any large community of out of body experience deniers, who go to out of body denier church once a week to affirm their belief that these experiences can’t exist. Rather, the default position for a rational human being is that they are mere subjective experiences, hallucinations, until proven otherwise.

[Billy Shears]

With regards to the question of whether out-of-body experiences are possible, mainstream physicists don't merely state skeptics get the benefit of the null hypothesis. Rather, they say the overwhelming positive evidence is that out of body experiences are just perceptions that happen within the brain and there is not a ghost that steps out of the machine to make some observations from a different vantage point. Quoting Sean Carroll:

"The Core Theory of contemporary physics describes the atoms and forces that constitute our brains and bodies in exquisite detail, in terms of a rigid and unforgiving set of formal equations that leaves no wiggle room for intervention by nonmaterial influences. The way we talk about immaterial souls, meanwhile, has not risen to that level of sophistication. To imagine that the soul pushes around the electrons and protons and neutrons in our bodies in a way that we haven't yet detected is certainly conceivable, but it implies that modern physics is profoundly wrong in a way that has so far eluded every controlled experiment ever performed."

Carroll, Sean. The Big Picture, page 212.

His arguments on this point actually get quite detailed. Say we had the hypothesis that something called "spirit matter" existed, and had the property of being able to interface with the electrochemical system of the human brain by gently influencing the electrons in our brain. If this were true, then according to quantum field theory we could create "spirit matter" in a particle accelerator by smashing together electrons and positrons. This experiment has in fact been meticulously done. Or maybe "spirit matter" gently influences protons? Then you could create "spirit matter" by smashing together protons and anti-protons. That experiment has been done, too. In fact, every other conceivable combination has been tested. According to Carroll:

"The verdict is unambiguous: we've found all of the particles that our best current technology enables us to find. Crossing symmetry assures us that, if there were any particles lurking around us that interact with ordinary matter strongly enough to make a difference to the behavior of everyday stuff, those particles should have easily been produced in experiments. But there's nothing there." (page 182)

Here is a link to a paper that explains his point:

The Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes

If Daniel Peterson is the best true believers can come up with to dispute this, doesn't that tell us something about the strength of Carroll's arguments?