April 24, 2023

Keith Augustine On The Fallacious Reasoning of Christian Apologists In Survival After Death Cases

Keith Augustine is the executive director of Internet Infidels, a mega site of helpful articles, debates, commentary, and book reviews. Their main outlet is The Secular Frontier. Along with Michael Martin, Augustine edited a masterful book investigating the afterlife. If you like my anthologies you will love this one, titled, The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life After Death. Now that Martin has died, Augustine is probably the leading secular expert in after-life claims. If you're interested in life after death cases, you need to be reading what he has to say!

Given that his book is expensive Augustine has written a 3-part blog post (#1 here, #2 here, and #3 here) on 16 items that will be helpful for readers. He begins Part # 1 like this:
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. — Bertrand Russell, “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish” (1943).

In my critique of the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS) essay competition on the “best” evidence for life after death and my response to the summer and winter commentaries on it, I made reference to striking similarities between the arguments made by Christian fundamentalists and survival researchers (i.e., those who purport to investigate survival of bodily death scientifically). In this three-part guest post, I’d like to highlight or elaborate on fifteen or so examples of how those at the forefront of “scientific” research into an afterlife—or in BICS’ framing, the survival of human consciousness after death—have consistently used fallacious arguments that mirror parallel arguments prominent among fundamentalist Christians.


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John W. Loftus is a philosopher and counter-apologist credited with 12 critically acclaimed books, including The Case against Miracles, God and Horrendous Suffering, and Varieties of Jesus Mythicism. Please support DC by sharing our posts, or by subscribing, donating, or buying our books at Amazon. As an Amazon Associate John earns a small amount of money from any purchases made there. Buying anything through them helps fund the work here, and is greatly appreciated!

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