Note to Jerry Coyne: near death experiences are a hell of a lot more common than origin of species

Darwinist Jerry Coyne takes a swipe at the report of an out-of-body/near-death experience of Harvard neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, who was in a coma for a week due to meningitis.

Dr. Alexander reports:

It took me months to come to terms with what happened to me. Not just the medical impossibility that I had been conscious during my coma, but—more importantly—the things that happened during that time. Toward the beginning of my adventure, I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky. . .

Higher than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines behind them.

Birds? Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms.

A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. Again, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the joy of these creatures, as they soared along, was such that they had to make this noise—that if the joy didn’t come out of them this way then they would simply not otherwise be able to contain it. The sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn’t get you wet. . .

It gets stranger still. For most of my journey, someone else was with me. A woman. She was young, and I remember what she looked like in complete detail. She had high cheekbones and deep-blue eyes. Golden brown tresses framed her lovely face. When first I saw her, we were riding along together on an intricately patterned surface, which after a moment I recognized as the wing of a butterfly. In fact, millions of butterflies were all around us—vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the woods and coming back up around us again...

Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real—was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial.

The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this:

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”
“You have nothing to fear.”
“There is nothing you can do wrong.”..

What happened to me demands explanation...

Today many believe that the living spiritual truths of religion have lost their power, and that science, not faith, is the road to truth. Before my experience I strongly suspected that this was the case myself. 

But I now understand that such a view is far too simple. The plain fact is that the materialist picture of the body and brain as the producers, rather than the vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed. In its place a new view of mind and body will emerge, and in fact is emerging already. This view is scientific and spiritual in equal measure and will value what the greatest scientists of history themselves always valued above all: truth.

Such experiences are very common among people who are comatose or who have near-death experiences. I know of several experiences by patients in my practice, and I have spoken to neurosurgeons who have had patients with experiences that can be confirmed (they knew of things that they could not have known except by extraordinary perception-- such as describing details of surgery that they watched while their heart was stopped, etc.)

Coyne ridicules Dr. Alexander:

Give that man a Templeton Prize! My explanation: Alexander had a long dream, one conditioned by his religious upbringing (he describes himself “as a faithful Christian”). Isn’t that more parsimonious? 

Note to Jerry: people in comas don't have "dreams" as we understand them (if they're dreaming, they're sleeping, which is not coma). There is no simple medical explanation for such a rich complex experience, which occurred when the man's brain function was so minimal that he was comatose, which is a state associated with neurological disability so profound that speaking or comprehending or even purposefully moving are impossible.

The most "parsimonious" explanation is that the experience was real.

Note that the title of the piece is “Proof of heaven.” Proof! And from a single long dream.
It’s bad enough that a man of science (if doctors deserve that monicker) buys the whole hog of religion from such an experience, but it’s worse that this is foisted on Americans in a best-selling magazine as “proof of heaven.” That’s how hungry we are for assurance that our death will not be the end. 

Actually, Jerry, doctors are men of science. In fact, we're the guys who did better than you in college. That's how we got into med school. Two of my professors in med school were subsequently Nobel laureates-- Eric Kandel and Richard Axel. Both are MD's.  

And it embarrasses me, especially before my foreign colleagues.

Note that the atheist Coyne dismisses this man's experience, and the experiences of millions of other people, out of hand, because their intensely personal-- often life-changing-- experience didn't fit Coyne's tiny ideological mold. In fact Coyne insults the man, and claims that he "embarrasses" him in front of his foreign friends. Coyne is such an arrogant bastard.  

The simplest explanation-- the simplest scientific explanation-- is that it was real. Tens of millions of people have had such experiences, which is tens of millions of more times than we've seen origin of species, which is never.