“An Atheist Meets the Masters of the Universe”

Philosopher and once Arch-Atheist AJ Ayer’s infamous near-death experience.

By Peter Foges

Dr. Jeremy George, senior consultant in the Department of Thoracic Medicine at London University’s Middlesex Hospital, was on duty one fine May afternoon in 1988. It was a day like any other. At around 3 p.m., an elderly patient was admitted with pneumonia.

When the young doctor saw this “crumpled heap in a corner of the private wing,” as he later put it, he instantly recognized “it” as Professor Sir Alfred Jules Ayer, also known as A.J. Ayer (or “Freddie” to his friends), the former Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, and Britain’s most eminent philosopher.

“He was very pleased that somebody knew who he was,“ said Dr. George, who spoke about the event for first time more than a decade later to the English playwright William Cash. “He looked very blue. His oxygen level was virtually incompatible with life.”

Dr. George gave Ayer emergency oxygen and admitted him immediately to the intensive care unit, where his condition improved. “He would not have survived the day.”

Ayer was my wife’s stepfather and brought her up. As his virtual; son-in-law I knew him well and was extraordinarily fond of him. Naturally, therefore, I paid him a visit. What, I asked, could I get him to relieve the tedium? A book was what he wanted—one to stretch his astonishing stainless steel brain. He asked me to buy Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, rather surprisingly riding high on the best-seller lists in Britain that spring. Within the hour I had placed it beside his bed as he slept, and tiptoed away. My visit was but one of many. Another of his legion of friends brought him a supply of smoked salmon—which his kind nurses pretended not to see.

In the early evening of June 6, as Ayer later wrote, he “carelessly tossed” a slice of this salmon into his mouth. It went down the wrong way and he choked. Before the biomedical machinery in the ICU, flashing red, had managed to summon the emergency staff to his side at a run to revive him, Freddie had actually been clinically dead for four minutes. The hospital notes simply stated: “cardiac arrest with bradycardia, and asystole.”

To give context to this mini medical drama it’s important to bear in mind that A.J. Ayer was an atheist. Not just any old atheist—the atheist as far as millions of Britons were concerned. In addition to establishing his reputation as one of the great analytic and rationalist philosophers of the century with such works as Language, Truth and Logic and the later Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, Ayer had spent most of his adult life putting the case very publicly on radio and television, as well as in print, for the “non-existence” of God—indeed arguing that the very idea of “God” was devoid of meaning, a position known in theology as igtheism. He had gone twelve rounds with the best and the brightest of the bishops and theologians in the land—and in the public mind he was thought, in the main, to have triumphed.

Life after life?

In 1971, soldier Glenn Brymer was repeatedly crushed between a stone wall and a military transport vehicle during an accident. Mangled and presumed dead by his colleague, Brymer relates what he then experienced:

“… everything just disappeared. All the pain was gone, the fear was gone. And I was like being in a big void, and this voice was in me. It was a voice like your grandfather’s or father’s or favourite uncle’s — somebody who cared for you very much. It was a male voice. The voice said: “You don’t die, Glenn.” I remember saying I don’t understand. And the voice said: “You don’t die, you continue.” And I said I still don’t understand.

I was conscious of being in a big void, floating. I wasn’t conscious of being in a body or anything. And far off in a distance was a very pinpoint of bright light, and it was like I was flying towards it through space. And it got rapidly larger, and as I got closer to it, it became a huge burst of light. It was brilliant, just brilliant – blue, white, sparkling. And it filled up my entire vision… it was almost like I was going into it.

Just was it filled my vision and I was very close to it, I stopped and it opened up. It’s at this point that it becomes very hard to try to tell what happened. It’s like seeing a video movie where you see ten thousand images in a spilt second. I was shown reason why I didn’t have to fear dying and I understood why you do not die.”

Brymer is convinced he had encountered God and was deeply moved. From then on, he felt a powerful love for all around him – from people to trees.

Remarkably, through many centuries, thousands have reported strikingly similar experiences. Key commonalities include having

“a sense of being outside one’s physical body, sometimes perceiving it from an outside position; a sense of movement through darkness or a tunnel; intense emotions;  heightened perceptions; experiencing a great light or darkness; perceiving a spiritual realm, which may include vividly memorable landscapes; encounters with deceased loved ones, spiritual beings and/or religious figures; knowledge of the nature of the universe; a life review; a sense of oneness and interconnectedness; a border of no return; a sense of having knowledge of the future; messages regarding life’s purpose.” (from: International Association for Near-Death Studies)

Have these people glimpsed a profound reality that most are blind to?

Lecturers inflict 20 hours of pain on student

20 precious Saturday hours later, I’ve sat through 3 seminars by NIE lecturers. It is remarkable how teachers of teachers can get paid for saying little that is insightful or useful; this is a farce which all teachers should endure to sear into their conscience what they ought not subject students to.It is increasingly difficult to think seminars are worth getting out of bed for. Like many a preacher, trainers seem content to state truths, or at least endeavour to do so. It matters not if those truths are pretty obvious or irrelevant.

A seminar is effective to the extent that it tells me what I don’t know but should know, yet would find it hard to know, in a manner that makes me want to know. Alas, many seminars make very little positive difference and really ought not be permitted to exist (assuming others think similarly of it). To be clear, my complaint is not:

(A) That they are too theoretical. Theories account for phenomena and unless the trainer explains the wrong theories, they help us understand why things are the way they are. I suspect most who lodge this popular complain don’t get what a theory is. The clearest indicator is when they mutter: “Theory is not truth; we all know that.”

(B) That there are too few examples. Examples are typically thrown in to bring the abstract to life. In my experience, trainers usually provide examples with almost religious fervour.

The problem of criterion

Guarding the gates of knowledge is an ancient and terrible creature who poses this riddle to anyone who wishes to pass:

“to know whether things really are as they seem to be, we must have a procedure for distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false.  But to know whether our procedure is a good procedure, we have to know whether it really succeeds in distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false.  And we cannot know whether it does really succeed unless we already know which appearances are true and which ones are false.  And so we are caught in a circle.” How do we escape the circle?

From The Problem of Criterion, by Roderick Chisholm.

By the way, Chisholm is not that terrible creature – he merely tells of that riddle. Here is a picture of Chisholm describing the horrific creature to a mortified student.

Put another way, the quest to understand knowledge goes through 2 questions:

(1) What do we know?

(2) What is the criterion for determining when we know something?

It seems we cannot answer (1) unless we first have the answer to (2). After all, how can you tell if you truly know something without first having the proper criterion to determine that? Yet it seems (2) cannot be answered without (1). How should we know if the criterion is the right one unless we can show that it truly separates what we know and what we don’t? But that requires us to know what we know.

Psychology, prayer and mathematics

The psychological processes which, as observed by introspection, are active within the praying subject, and the manner of their activity – these are matters as indifferent for the nature of the act of prayer as are a mathematician’s indigestion or his fantasies, while he thinks a problem over, for the noetics of mathematics (i.e. nature of mathematical thought).The act of prayer can be defined only from the meaning of prayer.

– Max Scheler

“Shark’s fins: One man’s delicacy, another’s poison pill”

Kirk Leech, For The Straits Times 3 Feb 11;

IN THIS age of a new Opec – the Organisation of Politically Engaged Celebrities – George Clooney hires satellites to monitor Sudanese troop movements during a referendum on partition; Daniel Craig, Kate Winslet and Paul McCartney lead successful campaigns to remove foie gras from high-end department stores; Angelina Jolie is a United Nations goodwill ambassador.

Now, into this ‘celebocracy’ steps British uber chef Gordon Ramsay campaigning to save the world’s shark population from ending up as soup. His recent TV special ‘Shark Bait’ investigated finning, the method used to source the key ingredient for the dish. During finning, a shark’s fins are removed after it is caught but often while the fish is still alive. The carcass, which is worth a fraction of the value of the fins, is then discarded at sea.

In his infamous foul-mouthed style but acting as a moral caped crusader, Ramsay and his film crew barge unannounced into shops in London’s Chinatown trying to find the perfectly legal fins as though on the trail of contraband.

He quizzes Costa Rican dock workers unloading fish, demanding to know the location of the source of harvested fins. He interrogates restaurant diners as to their ethics over eating such ‘beautiful creatures’. One wonders how long a journalist would last in one of Ramsay’s restaurants if they asked his customers to justify what they had on their plates.

Ramsay also visits Imperial, a high-end restaurant in Taiwan, tasting shark’s fin soup for the first time. Clearly believing that his Western pallet is the universal arbiter of good taste, he declares: ‘It’s really bizarre…it actually tastes of nothing.’

“it is the facts, not the language, that arouse the emotion”

“Statements about crime are not criminal language; nor are statements about emotions necessarily emotional language…’It is not cancer after all’, ‘The Germans have surrendered’, ‘I love you’ – may all be true statements about matter of fact. And of course it is the facts, not the language, that arouse the emotion.”

– CS Lewis, Studies in Words

Size matters?

You are not the center of the universe! Certainly seems true. And neither am I. But how should we justify that belief, however obvious it seems?

We could obtain a map of the universe and show we are not equidistant from all sides. That wouldn’t be terribly compelling though: when we speak of ourselves not being the center of the universe, we do not mean we lack the honour of being the geographical center. Instead, we’re admitting we aren’t the sole reason for which the universe exists. In even plainer (though perhaps less precise) terms, we aren’t the most important feature of the universe.

If so, then our geographical location does not matter in itself. The most important person in the room need not be the one in the middle. Unless we have prior reason to expect her to be there, why think she would be? Hold all else constant and consider if a person becomes more important just by being placed in the center. Back to the universe: why think the geographical center is where the most important resides? I don’t see any physical or philosophical reason.

The same seems true of size. All else being equal, the biggest entity in the room need not be the most important. Similarly, the most important entity in the room does not shed any importance just because we expand the room by a million times. As before, we need some prior reason to think size matters.

Thus, though the speaker rightly observes we are but a tiny part of the universe, she needs to say more how being tiny translates to being not the most important. In so addressing the students, the speaker very likely has something in mind to fill that gap. Unknown to some students, she has set them homework in the first minutes of the school year.

All said, we do know very well the world doesn’t revolve around us!

“Hypocrisy on the High Seas”

In response the the screening of The Cove, a film showing the annual dolphin hunt in Taiji, Japan, the Taiji mayor’s office stated:

“There are different food traditions within Japan and around the world. It is important to respect and understand regional food cultures, which are based on traditions with long histories.”

The mayor could give the West a taste of their own medicine by filming and screening fox hunts and bull-fights. But nothing would be as effective as making a show of factory farming. (Oh, actually that’s already been done: Earthlings.) That would certainly hammer in whatever need there is to respect and understand longstanding food cultures.

But all these would merely demonstrate the prevalence of food cultures built upon immense and needless animal suffering.

In his essay “Hypocrisy on the High Seas”, Peter Singer considers the ‘don’t impose your culture on mine’ response to the ethical case against Japan’s whaling:

Japan says that it wants the discussion of whaling to be carried out calmly, on the basis of scientific evidence, without “emotion.” The Japanese think that humpback whale numbers have increased sufficiently for the killing of 50 to pose no danger to the species. On this narrow point, they might be right. But no amount of science can tell us whether or not to kill whales.

Indeed, Japan’s desire to continue to kill whales is no less motivated by “emotion” than environmentalists’ opposition to it. Eating whales is not necessary for the health or better nutrition of the Japanese. It is a tradition that they wish to continue, presumably because some Japanese are emotionally attached to it.

The Japanese do have one argument that is not so easily dismissed. They claim that Western countries object to whaling because, for them, whales are a special kind of animal, as cows are for Hindus. Western nations, the Japanese say, should not try to impose their cultural beliefs on them.

An interesting response and insightful essay.

[Pic credit: Koji Sasahara/AP]

 

 

Feynman’s home-schooling

Richard Feynman:

“The next Monday, when the fathers were back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid said to me, ‘See that bird? What kind of bird is that?’ I said, ‘I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of bird it is.’ He says, ‘It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father does not teach you anything!’

But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: ‘See that bird? It’s a Spencer’s Warbler.’ (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) ‘Well, in Italian it’s Chutto Lapittida. In Portugese, it is Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it’s Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese it is Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you are finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatsoever about the world. You’ll know about the humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts.’ I learned very early on from my father the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”

Feynman explained: “My father understood that knowledge was different from the names of things. The names of things are only a convention that human beings use to discuss things, and of course that is important. But when he would tell me about looking at birds, it was not just to look at them but to see what they were doing. As an example, he said, ‘Look, see the birds walking around there. They seem to be packing their feathers all the time. Why do you think they do that?” And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ I was a kid of ten or eleven.

I said, ‘Maybe their feathers get ruffled when they are flying.’ I made an attempt at an explanation. He then said, “If that were the case, they would peck more when they just landed after they flew. And after they got straightened out, walking around, they wouldn’t peck so much. So let’s see, watch those that land and then see how long they go on pecking and whether or not they peck in their feathers at the same rate.’ After a while we discovered that indeed they did. So it was not due to a need to straighten out their feathers just after flying. You see, he had made a little experiment, learning how to observe and discuss”

– The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, p. 4.