The Case against AV as a stepping stone to PR

Last year I wrote a couple of blog entries on RaBIT’s campaign website (http://wp.me/p18Zxl-92 and http://wp.me/p18Zxl-9k) that detail how it makes promises that it can’t keep. It tries to sell the sizzle while ignoring the lack of beef. I’ve written many other pieces on electoral reform issues but these two will give you an idea of the lack of depth to RaBIT’s analysis.

Some people said that their main reason for supporting RaBIT (Ranked ballots are more commonly called Alternative Vote – AV or Instant Runoff Voting – IRV) was that it could be a step toward to PR. In fact, RaBIT tried to get electoral systems expert Dennis Pilon to agree with that in a public forum last year. You can see this at http://vimeo.com/52788545. Their question is at 21:45. Pilon of course takes the careful academic approach and doesn’t specifically say that it can’t happen.

The basic facts surrounding AV as an incremental step toward PR is that it has never happened. While Pilon mentions Australia, it is actually unusual in that it has stuck with AV for a century. No other jurisdiction has used AV for anywhere near that long. Other jurisdictions that tried AV, notably 3 Canadian provinces and 5 U.S. states, all abandoned AV after a period and simply reverted to their previous system.

More to the point, only one Canadian province has subsequently revisited electoral reform and that only after half a century elapsed since it abandoned AV. The other provinces and states that tried AV have yet to reconsider electoral reform.

Conversely, several Canadian provinces that did not experiment with AV have seriously looked at electoral reform recently. New Brunswick and Quebec have conducted studies into electoral reform while PEI and Ontario have brought the matter to referendum.

It is therefore reasonable to conclude that AV not only is not an incremental step to further reform but is in fact an impediment. After trying AV and finding it wanting, jurisdictions simply revert to their former system and give up on the idea of electoral reform.

American electoral reform expert Douglas Amy (see https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy/articles/irv.htm) goes on further to note that “In addition, it is unclear how reformers would be able to easily shift political gears after the adoption of IRV and begin to promote a change to PR. They would have to turn from enthusiastic supporters of IRV to severe critics of that system – an inconsistency that would surely not go unnoticed by the public, the media, and policymakers.”

It’s worth noting that Dr. Amy’s criticisms are in the context of the American system, which has weak election finance controls. When you move it to a jurisdiction without political parties (that establish candidate branding) and strong election finance controls (i.e. Toronto), other problems may arise.

Because AV reduces the impact of vote splitting, cooperative campaigns which would simply split the vote under our current system actually reinforce one another under AV. This allows moneyed interests to finance multiple campaigns to control the messaging in an election.

In short, there is good reason to expect that switching to AV would increase the stranglehold elites already have on our municipal elections.

Scottish electoral systems expert James Gilmour produced a chart based on Toronto’s last municipal election that shows just how little room there is for AV to actually change the results (http://www.fairvotetoronto.ca/resources.html). Even in our last election, which was unusually close, only 5% more votes would be brought into play.

I will note that these are people’s secondary choices. AV actually gives fewer people their first choice of representative because when it does change a result, it does so by electing someone who was not the first choice of the largest block of voters.

Unfortunately this doesn’t mean that the system is more proportional. It usually means that it eliminated a vote split that would have given a minority candidate a shot at election. For example, in the Calgary mayoralty race, Naheed Nenshi would have lost under AV while under first past the post he was able to win when the right wing vote split. By trying to always elect the majority candidate, AV can actually be less proportional than our current system.

While AV’s problems with electing minorities are well known, that hasn’t stopped groups from trying to minimize them. I have heard RaBIT use San Francisco as an example of how AV helped minorities win elections. Unfortunately this simply isn’t true. San Francisco used to elect its Board of Supervisors using Block Vote, which meant that the white majority got to elect everyone. When they switched to single-member districts, the geographic variations in ethnic mix let minorities win some elections. I go into this in more detail in my blog article at http://wp.me/p18Zxl-cQ.

These topics are not simple. AV is superficially appealing so that it’s easy for an enthusiastic advocate to sell it to people who aren’t well versed in electoral reform issues. In the real world however, its “benefits” are at best unproved and most likely don’t exist. There are good reasons to believe that AV will be harmful to the cause of electoral reform.

Toronto needs real change, not just a cosmetic fix.

Public Schooling

With all the kerfuffle over Ontario’s teachers and extra-curricular activities, it’s probably time to remember that there is another pressing educational issue. Given the election of a new Pope, we should reflect on the special treatment Ontario gives to Roman Catholics. They are the only religious group to get their own publicly funded school system.

Other provinces have done away with two school systems.  Apparently the world didn’t end nor the government fall.

Duplicate school systems are expensive and divisive. I remember when I was growing up and only seeing some of my friends at school. The rest were bussed to another school further away.

The busing costs money as does the maintenance of duplicate buildings and staff. In some areas we have separate and public schools next to each other. In other areas one school or another is closing because enrollment is down, forcing children to travel longer distances.

Now there are two ways to eliminate the duplication. They both involve creating a single board responsible for all the schools and creating a common curriculum.

The difference whether you main a strictly secular curriculum or allow religious education of the parent’s choice. The former course has been adopted not just in Canada but around the world in nations that value separation of religion and state.

The other option is less common but not unknown. Manitoba, for example, uses this approach.

The reason a choice needs to be made is that it is unconscionable from a human rights standpoint, as the United Nations has repeatedly affirmed, to give one religion special treatment the way our education system does.

The reason for choosing the second option is that parents are already voting with their dollars by sending their children to private religious schools. These schools are often expensive and they are hard to regulate. Who knows what is being taught to (or even being done to) the students.

Its not as if government inspection of private institutions of any kind has a stellar record.

If we bring these students back into the public fold then the government won’t need to spend so much effort regulating the vast numbers of private religion-based schools.

There will still be some parents who will send their children to private schools anyway. That will remain their right, but they will no longer have to do it because they want their children to receive instruction in their faith as part of the school day.

And far fewer children will  be wondering why their friends go to another school. With everyone attending a single school system, perhaps we can even learn to get along a little better.

Fact Checking

National Post columnist Andrew Coyne recently wrote a column on the recent removal from office of three members of Fair Vote Canada’s Toronto Chapter executive. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised but I actually was at just how much he got wrong. Simple fact checking was not done.

Coyne’s column is called Toronto voting proposal might be last shot at electoral reform in Canada

Andrew Coyne got one thing right – the Toronto voting proposal might be the last shot at electoral reform in Canada. That is, if it succeeds. It’s not as if the Alternative Vote / Instant Run-off (AV/IRV) proposal hasn’t been tried in Canada before. It was used in three Canadian provinces before they reverted to our current first past the post system. It’s also been used in Australia for the better part of a century.

No jurisdiction has ever moved from AV/IRV to any proportional system. They have mostly reverted to first past the post or, less commonly, stayed with AV/IRV.

Andrew Coyne not only ignores Canada’s history with AV/IRV but seems ignorant about our current municipal electoral system mix. The system used in Toronto is usually called First Past the Post but is known more formally as Single Member Plurality (SMP). It’s distinguishing features are single-member districts electing the candidate who gets the most votes.

Neighbouring Oshawa recently adopted Block Vote to elect its city and regional councillors. Block vote uses multi-member districts to elect a block of representatives by plurality. Each voter gets as many votes as there are candidates so that the same group ends up electing all the councillors.

This is widely considered one of the worst voting systems. You can read my recent column The Elites of San Francisco for an example of how it failed the voters.

Toronto used to use a hybrid Block Vote, with 28 two-member districts. This system was slightly worse than our current one because 28 different groups gained representation instead of our current 44.

Some other Canadian cities use other methods for electing their city councils. While Coyne is correct that none of them use AV/IRV or proportional representation, Canada is not lacking examples of bad ways to elect municipal governments. We don’t need another.

Certainly Toronto’s change to SMP in 2000 or Oshawa’s more recent change to Block Vote hasn’t triggered a wave of electoral reform across Canada. What’s different about AV/IRV is that the Liberal Party of Canada and the Toronto Star have both recently endorsed AV/IRV. Moreover, the Conservatives are also comfortable with it (just like they were in Britain). This could give AV/IRV the push it needs to replace SMP federally.

Either way, the adoption of AV/IRV spells the end of electoral reform – not because it is an improvement over our current system but because it isn’t. It taints all other electoral reform proposals because it changes so little. Why bother with reform when it doesn’t seem to make any difference?

So what’s wrong with it? The list of its failures is long. It uses a more complex ballot that would require new voting equipment and centralized vote counting. It allows candidates to bypass campaign spending limits by running cooperative campaigns. Women and visible minority candidates find the barrier to election is raised.

Given that these groups are already severely under-represented on council, why should we consider a measure that could reduce their numbers? Rather than worrying that one candidate won with 20% of the vote, shouldn’t we be looking at why our city council looks nothing like the city it supposedly represents?

AV/IRV rarely changes the outcome of elections either. In Australia and in the Canadian provinces that used it, fewer than 5% of first round leaders don’t win election. Given that under our current system, people already vote “strategically” for their second choices when they believe their preferred candidate can’t win, the number of races that AV/IRV would actually alter would be even less than 5%. It would elect the same council our current system does.

Nor is the final winner necessarily the most broadly popular candidate. The winner can depend on the order candidates are dropped from the counting.

To make matters worse, Toronto City Council cannot even legally use AV/IRV. It requires changes to the provincial legislation governing municipal elections.

On the other hand, there are many proven systems that are better than AV/IRV that can be implemented directly. Toronto City Council doesn’t need to ask the province to allow it to implement Single Non-transferable Vote, Limited Vote or Cumulative Vote, three systems that are more widely used than AV/IRV and that have been shown to improve representation.

The interesting thing about these systems, and about proportional systems in general, is that they employ multi-member districts. Multi-member districts are common across Canada for electing city councils and are used in most cities around the world. Multi-member districts are necessary (but not sufficient) for proportional representation (block voting uses multi-member districts but is less proportional than almost any other system).

Ranked ballots on the other hand are not currently used in Canadian municipal elections. Nor are they necessary for proportional representation.

So not only is the reform Coyne wrote in favour of currently illegal but it is also far less common than the reform city council can implement directly. And it is unnecessary to improve our electoral system.

Moreover with a minor change to the system Toronto used to use, we could improve representation simply by reverting to two-member wards but give voters only one vote each. By combining wards into their 22 named districts with each district electing two councillors, we should see a significant increase in diversity on council.

Merging wards into three or more councillors per district would be even better.

There are solid reasons why British voters rejected AV/IRV following a much larger public debate than Ontario’s 2007 referendum or even City Council’s own deliberations. If AV/IRV was such a good system, why is City Council trying to sneak it in without consulting the public and experts on electoral reform?

There is of course more than one group campaigning for electoral reform in Toronto. The AV/IRV group were not expelled from Fair Vote Canada for supporting AV/IRV despite Coyne’s report that they were. They were removed from the Toronto Chapter executive for violating Fair Vote Canada’s conflict of interest policy – they were running a campaign opposing the Chapter’s own campaign for real electoral reform at city council.

They remain members of Fair Vote Canada but are not allowed to hold an office that would put them in a conflict of interest.

The defeat of AV/IRV hasn’t stopped electoral reform in Britain. Quite the contrary, with the thrashing the phony AV/IRV reform got at the polls, real electoral reform is moving forward again. The city council vote on AV/IRV won’t end electoral reform in Canada either. Its defeat could however signal politicians of all stripes that Canadians won’t be fooled by a cosmetic change.

That was the final thing Coyne got wrong in his column.

Asking the wrong questions

The questions you ask determine the answers you get. This doesn’t just apply to opinion poll. It’s an undeniable fact of life.

Part of the scientific method is to ask questions with answers that are testable. That is, the model you are proposing must make verifiable predictions that differ from the currently accepted model.

Einstein’s theories did this. For example, his model of motion differed from Newton’s but only at higher speeds than Newton’s model had been tested at. At normal speeds, like whizzing around in near earth orbits, Newton’s laws are good enough but when we are talking about satellite communications, you need to incorporate Einstein’s corrections.

We don’t need to be rocket scientists to see how asking the wrong questions can lead to the wrong answers however. The Roman Catholic church has been severely criticized for its handling of sexual abuse. This is largely because their focus was on “what is best for the Church” and not “what is best for the victims?”

They were successful for a long time in protecting the church and less so at preventing priests from re-offending by moving them to areas where they would have less contact with juveniles. Unfortunately justice was not served for their victims.

In a different case, we have recently seen former Conservative adviser Tom Flanagan pilloried for remarks he made about child pornography. However, I personally question whether he really deserves all the abuse heaped upon him.

Child pornography and sexual abuse is not a simple issue. It’s easy to express disgust at the abusers but harder to protect the victims. Nor are all those engaged in the practices equally abhorrent.

For example, 1950′s rock & roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13 year old cousin. In many cultures such marriages were not uncommon and they were legal in some U.S. states, including the one where he got married. Interestingly, it was his third marriage! He originally married a girl who, at 17, was three years older than him.

While Jerry Lee Lewis’ early personal life was condemned at the time and would be illegal today, he wasn’t the classic “child abuser”. He was a product of a different culture that promoted early marriages.

He is definitely in a different category from those who rape babies or prepubescent girls, not to mention those who get sexual excitement from the idea of having sex with underage girls (Roman Polanski comes to mind here).

Then there are those who produce child pornography. The photographing of nude babies and young girls continues an older tradition of painting or sculpting them. However the filming or photographing of them being raped is a recent and absolutely abhorrent innovation.

Conversely, the recent popularity of teenagers “sexting” is merely an example of extremely poor judgment. No one should argue that a teenage boy receiving a nude picture from his girlfriend is a criminal act. Nor should we make criminals of young teens engaging in sexual activity no matter how we feel about it.

That’s why our current laws focus on the relationship between the people having sex as much as their age. Two teens fooling around is a cause for concern for their parents while a coach molesting his high school team is a criminal offense.

However, Tom Flanagan’s problems don’t stem from these issues. He was talking strictly about viewing child pornography. It’s into this mine field that I will now step.

Tom Flanagan opined that viewing child pornography shouldn’t lead to jail time. This is a question of how to best protect the potential victims of sexual abuse, not a question of whether we think child pornography should be acceptable in our society.

This first issue is whether jail time serves to rehabilitate them. There is a plethora of evidence that prison is both useless and expensive for protecting society from criminals of any type. While some small percentage of them may not re-offend, most end up going back to their old ways after release. Merely locking someone up does little to change their mind set.

On the other hand, child abusers are notoriously difficult to rehabilitate. At least locking them up keeps them away from children for a while.

The second issue is whether access to child pornography leads to more or less child abuse. There are some studies that suggest that many potential abusers find viewing child pornography as an acceptable substitute. Many people believe instead that child pornography leads to child abuse. Neither position has enough scientific data to form a good basis for public policy.

It’s also possible that the two groups, abusers and viewers, don’t have much overlap. Certainly it’s possible to be excited by an action movie without wanting to engage in a high-speed car chase oneself. In this case the question comes down to whether having more viewers would result in more abuse and/or abusers.

I confess that I don’t have a clue about this. And after all the uproar over Flanagan’s remarks, I don’t know any more than I did before. Neither Flanagan nor I have the kind of expert knowledge to debate reasonably on this topic.

The various journalists who have weighed in on it seem to be in the same position. We’ve seen a lot writing about how horrible child sexual abuse is. Most also point out that the pornography the viewers watch requires children to be abused to be made. But I have yet to see anyone able to reasonably argue that lessening the criminal sanctions against possession, or strengthening them for that matter, will have any impact on the number of victims or reduce their suffering.

Even the argument about the pain the victims feel when their images turn up years or decades later seems somewhat contrived. Getting anything out of circulation when there is an ongoing demand for it is difficult. In an underground group such as those who share child pornography, I would imagine that getting rid of every instance of a particular image or video must be almost impossible.

Again, I don’t know. Police have some idea of how effective their operations are but I don’t know of any study that shows images and videos are removed from circulation as a result of the arrests.

Nor do I have any idea of how much child pornography is new as opposed to recirculated older material. However the thriving market for regular pornography, or Hollywood movies, Broadway plays or books, would make one believe that newness can be important and that people lose interest in older material.

While some Hollywood movies, etc. get re-shown periodically as classics, most drop out of circulation after their initial run. The number of books in circulation today is very small compared with the number of volumes written. If the same dynamic holds true for child pornography then police efforts to remove it from circulation may be redundant or even counterproductive.

My point to all this is that focusing on the social need to abhor child pornography and those who look at it, not to mention our fascination with seeing public figures dragged through the dirt, we’re missing the real debate.

Yes, child pornography is vile. And yes, those who watch it are sick individuals. However, where do we go from here? Out of all the chatter, not one specific program has been proposed. Flanagan, not child pornography, has become the issue that must be dealt with.

The one thing I’m sure of is that I will not be doing any research into child pornography. The Flanagan affair proves once more that some issues are too hot to touch. How do we protect our children from sexual abuse is a question that may have to be answered by some future generation. The detailed, testable questions that need to be answered may be beyond our ability to ask.

Unbiased reporting

Journalism isn’t what it used to be and probably never was. However, I note that at one time, journalistic integrity meant reporting what actually was going on, at least to the best of  your understanding. You’d listen to the various points of view then report on what fit the facts best.

The modern trend is simply to report all sides of the issue as if they were equally valid. Facts are viewed as subjective, tainted by the particular world view of the reporter.

This is of course nonsense. My world view is nothing like Newton’s but gravity still works the same way (more or less). Seat belts still save lives according to massive amounts of statistics and testing on survivability. There is an independent reality that, while we may not understand it, still affects all of us.

We may not understand everything about the universe, but it is far older than 6,000 years. Indeed, so too is the Earth and the human species. Our medical science may not be perfect but antibiotics do kill bacteria with varying degrees of effectiveness. While that fact may not be directly usable to promote health, it certainly saves lives.

If we don’t approach issues using facts and evidence, nothing can ever be resolved. We may not always make the best decisions but at least we can begin to understand why things didn’t work. No other approach can do this.

However, what I find interesting is that while reporters like to present all sides of the issue, the same doesn’t hold true for the publications they work for. Many newspapers, for example, have a business section but how many have a labour section?

Horoscopes and religious columns are common but science columns aren’t. Nor do we see disclaimers about these topics being only one side of the “debate”.

In short, what is currently called unbiased reporting is merely a front for pushing a particular agenda. Keep the public believing that science has no special status, that there is only the business side to economics, and they won’t question the lack of action of climate change or the manifest failure of neoliberalism to deliver real benefits to working people.

It’s been said that freedom of the press only applies to those who own one. With the Internet, everyone can publish their ideas, although finding readers is another matter. On the Internet however, even the shabby modern standards of journalism don’t apply. Facts and evidence aren’t necessary when the public has been conditioned to accept subjective reality.

Scott Adams’ Dilbert character once said “if reality is subjective, why does my life suck?” Indeed, if there is no independent reality, why is life so hard for most people?

You don’t have to be a Darwinian to appreciate that life is a struggle. Thomas Robert Malthus explained it centuries ago, long before Darwin, but people today only like to point out he got some details wrong.

I’d be trying to stop the tide by complaining about the lack of facts and evidence on the Internet. Still, we can try to do better.

The Elites of San Francisco

The city of San Francisco is the poster child for advocates of Alternative Vote (AV) these days because since switching to runoff elections, visible minorities have been elected in large numbers. Prior to the switch, the city council (called the Board of Supervisors) was pretty much white.

What they don’t tell you is that San Francisco didn’t just switch to run-off elections, they also switched to single-member districts. This, not the run-off elections, is what made the real difference. Moreover, the city originally switched to sequential run-offs and only moved to AV in 2002 (mainly as a cost-savings measure).

Prior to 2000, supervisors were elected at large in overlapping terms, so that half were elected every two years. This was done using Block Vote, so that each voter would vote for as many candidates as there were positions up for election. This means that essentially the same people elected all the board members.

When they switched to individual districts, representation naturally diversified because not all districts had the same ethnic mix.

It’s worth noting also, that like in other jurisdictions that adopted AV, few (if any) candidates who led the first round failed to win election. In other words, the run-offs actually had no impact. The city could have saved money and used a simpler ballot to achieve the identical result.

It’s also worth noting that San Francisco has a reputation as a progressive city. It was one of the first to elect an openly gay supervisor (Harvey Milk) back in 1977 (interestingly, this was when they first tried single-member districts – they reverted to at-large elections after Milk and Mayor Moscone were assassinated, deeming single-member districts too divisive). Its current board of supervisors actually contains an excess of visible minority members.  It’s difficult to credit AV for this since the candidates would have won under first past the post too.

It’s far more likely that progressive voters are simply demonstrating their progressiveness in the wake of the Obama elections. This will probably subside as voters get used to electing a racially diverse council.

Since the key reform was switching to single-member districts, does this mean that single-member districts are good? Of course not. What it means is that the Block Vote system was bad. While splitting up the city into districts meant that the same group of voters no longer elected everyone, a better reform would have been to replace the block vote.

Block Vote is worse than single-member districts because the latter allows for some regional diversity in who wins while Block Vote doesn’t. Neither system is very good and neither system is proportional, no matter how you count the votes in single-member districts. AV and first past the post are both winner take all systems.

However, if San Francisco had kept the at-large members but used a proportional system like Single Transferable Vote, they would have elected their board of supervisors in a way that reliably reflects voter preferences. With district sizes of 5 or 6 (keeping the current overlapping terms), about 85% of the voters would be represented under STV.

The 800,000 people of the City would have a city council that represents the overwhelming majority of its citizens. Instead, each councillor is elected by about half the population – and may not even be the first choice of many of his supporters. Overall, close to half the population don’t have the representative of their choice.

Each district’s supervisor is still elected by the city’s elites. It’s just that now the elites vary from district to district. Real reform, like STV, gives people the effective votes that AV and first past the post denies them.

Proof of No Heaven?

Dr. Eben Alexander’s recent book Proof of Heaven is apparently based on his near death experience. I admit I haven’t read it nor do I have any great desire to. I’ve read some critiques and reviews of it that give me enough of an idea about what it’s about to realize this book is probably not worth reading.

Dr. Alexander is a neurosurgeon who fell victim to a bacterial infection that got into his brain. During the course of the infection, he died but then came back. He had a near death experience (NDE) which affected him greatly and he wrote a book about it.

He believes that during this experience, he went to heaven and communicated with God. He believes his experience proves that there is a heaven.

It’s possible, even likely, that Alexander’s cerebral cortex did shut down – equating to brain death – but that certainly proves nothing. Memory, after all, is a physical process. If it did shut down, he would not have memories of what happened during that period.

In an NDE, electrical activity in the brain diminishes to imperceptible levels. During the shutdown process, the brain becomes incoherent. Once shut down, nothing happens. The sufferer would not be aware of even the passage of time. During the restart, the brain again goes through a period of incoherence.

It’s during these two periods that NDEs may be experienced. However, they are only interpreted after the patient regains consciousness.

Now an NDE is a profound experience, certainly greater than drug-induced “religious experiences”. After all, it’s not just drugs messing with your mind but a near-complete shutdown and restart that affects the entire physical structure of the brain. But that does not constitute proof any more than any other “religious experience”.

Dr. Alexander’s credentials should make him more sensitive to the role of evidence but instead he has allowed himself to be overwhelmed by his NDE. However, I note that his experience in talking with God has not given him any extraordinary knowledge or ability. He hasn’t presented any world-shaking religious insights nor told us anything that he couldn’t have told us before his NDE.

In fact, I suggest that NDEs actually better constitutes evidence for the non-existence of God and heaven. After all, a God who makes the universe operate wouldn’t call people before their time, only to send them back again. A supernatural process would have people’s “souls” stay in their body until their time was finally up. NDEs by their very frequency seem more like a natural process associated with the shutting down of the brain.

Religious types claim that God calls those people to give them the experience. Unfortunately there is no way of testing this. However, not all people who have NDEs actually live to turn their lives around. Some die from the same thing that caused the initial NDE. What would be God’s point in doing that – giving people a taste of heaven hours or minutes before calling them permanently?

So far as a separate existence independent of ones body goes, again evidence is lacking. Everything we know about the mind suggests that it is a product of the brain. The brain itself is a hungry organ, consuming a significant chunk of the body’s energy. If it wasn’t necessary for the mind, why would the brain even exist?

And why does brain damage correlate with personality or intellectual changes?

As I wrote recently in my post Angels in America, people who have had NDEs don’t come back with knowledge that they couldn’t have had without that experience. Nor does Dr. Alexander – apart from the direct experience of the NDE that allowed him to write his book.

A heaven would be wonderful, I suppose. However those seeking evidence through NDEs are missing an essential point. Heaven isn’t part of the natural world while NDEs seem to be. They no more constitute proof of heaven than a drug-induced hallucination constitutes proof of God.

However NDEs do suggest a method for how heaven came into the human culture. People have recovered from near death long before modern medicine made it almost routine. Their experiences, recounted in simpler times, would be interpreted, as Dr. Alexander has done, as religious revelation.

I’m not trying to put a damper on people’s beliefs but evidence still must be presented before we start calling something a proof. In the case of NDEs, their existence is evidence against a heaven, not for one.