Now that Rosalía has turned to mysticism and the “philosopher of 15-M” Ernesto Castro has converted to Christianity, it is not surprising that science is also being seduced by God. Scientists from all over the world are encouraged to investigate topics such as heaven, reincarnation, or the immortality of the soul. In contrast, a majority of the scientific community remains skeptical and even doubts that the scientific method is suitable for addressing these questions.
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This branch of scientists thrives on the internet and in bookstores. To reach the conclusion that a spirit, a heaven, or a divinity exists, they rely on observations of various phenomena. Some as fundamental as the extraordinary leap from inert matter to living beings, which engineers Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies use to defend the existence of a creative intelligence in their essay God. Science. The Evidence (Funambulista, 2023), which has sold more than 250,000 copies in France. And others more anomalous or less studied, such as children who remember past lives or so-called near-death experiences (NDEs): intense episodes that some people report after surviving a life-threatening situation, such as leaving their own body, passing through a tunnel, or seeing a bright light.
The study of these phenomena is not new. NDEs have been investigated since the 1970s, based on the work of psychiatrist Raymond Moody, and decades ago psychiatrist Ian Stevenson documented supposed memories of past lives that would support reincarnation. We are now experiencing a boom, likely linked to a general resurgence of spirituality, which has multiplied works on these topics and makes their authors go viral every time they appear on a podcast. Not all are outsiders: among their supporters are leading researchers, such as cardiologist Valentín Fuster, Prince of Asturias Award winner for Scientific and Technical Research, who wrote the foreword to Ego and Supraconsciousness (Planeta, 2025), by surgeon Manuel Sans Segarra, with a distinguished career at the Bellvitge University Hospital. Or Robert W. Wilson, Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the background radiation that confirmed the Big Bang, who wrote the foreword to Bolloré and Bonnassies’ book.
One of the forerunners of this latest surge was Proof of Heaven (2012), by American neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, who practiced for 15 years at Harvard Medical School. In November 2008, bacterial meningitis kept him in a coma for a week; upon waking, he recounted what he interprets as a real journey to the afterlife. His testimony includes features described by many patients: an out-of-body experience — leaving the body and rising —, encounters with beings of light or deceased relatives, and an instant but thorough review of one’s own life, all wrapped in lucidity, peace, and an unparalleled intensity of love.
For Alexander, this experience cannot be a hallucination like those induced by certain psychoactive substances: he argues that an experience of such intensity could hardly be generated with key brain areas inactive, as his were during the coma. He adds that, in his view, there are clear differences between an NDE — structured, persistent in memory, and with lasting effects — and a hallucination, chaotic and fragmentary, which barely leaves a trace. “Life after death has been proven beyond all doubt from a scientific perspective. The problem is that some people are not interested enough to inform themselves,” the scientist says via video call.
However, other studies have questioned the interpretation of this phenomenon as proof of a transcendent reality. One of them is the study led by neuroscientist Charlotte Martial, researcher at the University of Liège, published last year in Nature Reviews Neurology. In it, the authors propose a model that integrates decades of research and explains NDEs as the result of a cascade of neurobiological processes in a brain under extreme stress. Factors such as lack of oxygen, increased carbon dioxide, and alterations in brain electrical activity trigger neuronal hyperactivity and a massive release of neurotransmitters capable of generating intense, coherent, and emotionally deep experiences.
Beyond this experiment, one of the problems in studying NDEs and other transcendent phenomena is that they occur in an immaterial dimension, outside space and time. This places them beyond the reach of scientific tools. The scientific method is based on phenomena that can be observed, measured, and reproduced. “We could prove that those people saw something, not that that something was really there,” explains philosopher Carlos Blanco by phone, author of Consciousness and Selfhood (Dykinson, 2013). That something cannot be observed, he clarifies, does not imply it does not exist: “One thing is the order of being and another the order of knowing.”
Part of science is based on inferring unobservable causes from indirect measurements. This happens, for example, with electrons, which we do not see directly but through their effects, or with black holes, whose existence is deduced by how they affect matter and light around them. But there is a fundamental difference, explains philosopher of science Óscar Teixidó: electrons or black holes are not observed directly, but they leave measurable and consistent traces in matter. In contrast, a consciousness outside space-time leaves no trace at all. “It’s not only that it is unobservable, but it is also in another plane of existence,” he states.
Blanco says that some of the supposed scientific proofs of God’s existence are a return to old philosophical arguments. The reasoning starts from an observable effect — that the universe has laws, order, constants so finely tuned they seem prepared to host life — and goes backward from it to a cause, God, as Thomas Aquinas did. But from the effect, Blanco argues, the cause cannot be deduced: this falls into what logic calls the fallacy of affirming the consequent.
The same effect admits different explanations, and nothing in mere observation allows deciding which is true. “Everything could be the result of chance, or that the universe is simply like this, eternal, or that other universes, multiverses, exist. God is a possible cause, of course, but there are others. How do you decide which is correct if there are no observations or experiments?” he asks.
Another major criticism is about experimental rigor and the need to apply sufficiently demanding methodological standards. According to Teixidó, in recent years there has been an “intellectual regression” that has made people forget already established basic principles: avoiding biases, distrusting anecdotal evidence, and not being swayed by prior beliefs: “The problem is that truly exhaustive rigor filters are not being applied. When one is demanding, many of these investigations boil down to three things: innocent confusions, deliberate errors, or simple myths. It’s smoke.”
On the other side, Álex Gómez-Marín, senior researcher at the Institute of Neurosciences and tenured scientist at CSIC, who recounted the NDE he experienced in his book The Science of the Last Threshold (Temas de Hoy, 2025), argues that those who question its lack of experimental rigor are actually uninformed. “These kinds of experts always say, in the name of science, that they know it’s not true, when in reality they don’t know. And that has put many obstacles in research and made many people who experience these phenomena feel foolish, crazy, and alone. That is unscientific and unethical.”
In this dispute, it is worth recalling the foreword Albert Einstein wrote in 1930 for Mental Radio, a book by writer Upton Sinclair dedicated to none other than telepathy. The father of relativity did not accept Sinclair’s experiments as valid; on the contrary, he considered them beyond what a natural investigator would deem conceivable. But he did not dismiss them either: he regarded Sinclair as a scrupulous observer, whose “good faith and reliability cannot be doubted,” and reasoned that if those results were not due to telepathy but to some unconscious influence of one mind over another, the phenomenon would still be of great psychological interest. Neither credulity nor rejection: curiosity and rigor.
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