YOU MAY not have noticed, but earlier this week scientists proved the existence of God. Okay, that's not quite right. One boffin has, however, claimed to have recently visited a wearingly traditional class of afterlife, writes DONALD CLARKE
You know the sort of thing. Beautiful women with blue eyes fan your brow while fat clouds drift about the celestial architecture. Dr Eben Alexander, an actual neurosurgeon with a degree from Harvard, has, to date, said little about the administration of this prog-rock gatefold sleeve. Perhaps, a committee of deities runs the place in the Scandinavian style. Maybe, some sort of two-headed elephant is in charge. At any rate, it seems a safe bet that some number of gods are involved.
Alexander – whose bowtie suggests somebody auditioning for the role of neurosurgeon in a bad soap – went through his near-death experience after dropping into a coma caused by meningitis. He remembers seeing winged creatures and hearing music that “was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn’t get you wet”. (So not like rain at all then.)
Now, more than a few cynics have pointed out that the good doctor has a book to sell. In Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, he explains his passage from scepticism to willing, enthusiastic acceptance. “What happened to me was, far from being delusional, as real or more real than any event in my life,” he says.
Those sceptics unkindly suggest that Alexander made it all up to help distinguish his volume from other ludicrous screeds in the “mind, body and spirit” section of your local bookshop.
I think this is most unfair. I believe there is every possibility that Alexander may have been sick enough to go temporarily insane. Having long ago realised that thunder doesn’t come from God’s bottom, we can, of course, dismiss the possibility that the book tells genuine truths about the afterlife.
If that were the case then this would be among the most important books in the history of human civilisation. Such a volume would surely be handed to some bearded elder on a mountaintop. Proof of Heaven, by way of contrast, is available for $21.99 from the best online retailers.
This is not to suggest that Alexander’s tome fails to scare up some interesting questions. In particular, it encourages us to ponder the difficulty various religions have in describing paradise.
Imagining the other place is a doddle. Bruce Robinson, writer of the classic film comedy Withnail I, began his script thus: “Dostoyevsky described hell as perhaps nothing more than a room with a chair in it. This room has several chairs.”
Dante was overdoing it with the elaborate fiery tortures. After a few centuries sitting on your chair, a red-hot poker up the unmentionable might, at least, offer some welcome variety. Any human being can, without too much effort, think up ways to make eternity a torment.
But what of paradise? Of course, until quite recently, life was – for the poor anyway – so unremittingly ghastly that no specifics were necessary. Heaven was a place where you didn’t have to sleep in a sewer. In heaven the rich didn’t kick you in the face for sport. In heaven all those children who died in infancy (the ones who had been christened, at least) lived happily under the eye of God.
If any unfortunate serf did, however, ask for details of the catering arrangements or the sleeping facilities then he might begin to wonder how much fun paradise really was.
There is quite a bit about heaven in the Bible but, for precision and comprehensiveness, the book can’t compare with TripAdvisor. We need some married traveller from Düsseldorf to point out that “the clouds are roomy and spacious, but our promised view of Pearly Gates was not there”.
Instead, there’s a lot of stuff like this: “And every creature which is in heaven, and on the Earth, and under the Earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, ‘Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne’.”
Hang on a moment. How am I going to sleep with that racket going on? These are the sorts of questions children ask about heaven. And they never get proper answers. In later life, believers are fobbed off with wads of quasi-theological twaddle that even a politician would recognise as obfuscation.
The truth is that any environment, if endured long enough, will eventually turn into a kind of hell. Mind you, the version of heaven described by Alexander – all that blasting music and all those scary flying creatures – sounds like the sort of place that would drive you barmy before you’d unpacked your bags.
Hang on. Are you sure that wasn’t the lower realm, Eben? Mend your ways, Doctor.