D’Souza Out of His Depth?

Do physics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and related fields of inquiry provide evidence for life after death? Dinesh D’Souza considers that question in his latest book . But as Joseph Bottum says in a review for National Review (sub. req.), D’Souza is out of his depth:

Every once in a while there washes up on shore some strange object from the deep. A half-decayed cuttlefish of a kind that no one’s ever seen before. The broken tentacle of a giant squid. An eyeless creature that shouldn’t exist. A phosphorescent patch from the ocean floor.

It’s usually children who find it first, playing in the sand with their shovels and pails. They call their parents over, and then the local sheriff drives up for a look, and before long there’s a crowd gathered there on the beach—lifeguards, and gawkers, and photographers from the local paper, and biologists from nearby schools with their tape measures and scales—all looking down at the odd, misplaced being. And one by one, they rise and turn to stare out at the enormous, incomprehensible sea, shading their eyes and wondering.

Think of Dinesh D’Souza this way: a man who has seen some strange things—gone looking for them, in fact—and now invites us to join him, staring out at the ocean. Both the book he published last year, What’s So Great about Christianity , and now his latest volume, Life After Death: The Evidence , reveal that he is no philosopher or theologian; he doesn’t have a diving suit, and he flounders a little when he gets in too deep.

Still, he says, look at some of the peculiar stuff that’s washed up on the beach: reports of near-death experiences, for instance. Or examine what modern physics has to say about quantum anomalies, dark matter, and multiverses. Or notice the way ethics always seems, in the end, to require a final judgment of us as individuals. “The core of the book,” he notes, “consists of three independent arguments, . . . one from neuroscience, one from philosophy, and one from morality.” He admits that none of these is decisive in itself, but, then, the book, he says, “proceeds as a gathering storm, moving from the significance of the issue to its possibility, then its probability, and then its practical benefits, and finally why we should go for it”—where the it is nothing less than the rational conviction that life exists after death.

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