John Martin Fischer, a philosopher at the University of California at Riverside, will oversee a $5 million project to study “immortality.” As it happens, Mr. Fischer does not believe in the afterlife himself, but, with money from the Templeton Foundation, he will lead a three-year endeavor that will include multidisciplinary research projects, two conferences, translations of relevant philosophical work, and, naturally, a website. In a statement released by his university, which noted that this is the largest grant ever received by a humanity professor at Riverside, Mr. Fischer said:
“We will be very careful in documenting near-death experiences and other phenomena, trying to figure out if these offer plausible glimpses of an afterlife or are biologically induced illusions,” Fischer said. “Our approach will be uncompromisingly scientifically rigorous. We’re not going to spend money to study alien-abduction reports. We will look at near-death experiences and try to find out what’s going on there — what is promising, what is nonsense, and what is scientifically debunked. We may find something important about our lives and our values, even if not glimpses into an afterlife.”
Fischer noted that while philosophers and theologians have pondered questions of immortality and life after death for millennia, scientific research into immortality and longevity are very recent. The Immortality Project will promote collaborative research between scientists, philosophers and theologians. A major goal will be to encourage interdisciplinary inquiry into the family of issues relating to immortality — and how these bear on the way we conceptualize our own (finite) lives.
A few commenters have raised their eyebrows at the participation of theologians in this “uncompromisingly scientifically rigorous” project. (For starters, they are not scientists and do not use a scientific methodology.) Atheists, in particular, have long been skeptical of the Templeton Foundation, which they have accused of willfully muddying the distinction between science and religion. The foundation describes itself as “a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality. We support research on subjects ranging from complexity, evolution, and infinity to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will. We encourage civil, informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians and between such experts and the public at large, for the purposes of definitional clarity and new insights.”