An article at American Thinker about conspiracy theories and the moon landing caught my attention when the term vincible ignorance was introduced and defined as the “stubborn resistance to the truth and refusal to accept it, no matter how overwhelming the evidence in its favor is.”
Coined with the intention of being applied to various positions on Catholic dogma, the terminology has useful application in a more secular context. Invincible ignorance has been defined as an unknown that can never be known. A secular example of invincible ignorance might be the conditions that existed prior to the Big Bang singularity–we “know” the universe had an origin because we’ve been told evidence for the Big Bang exists, called redshift and cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB).
The consensus of physicists (although consensus is not science) is that a very small, highly condensed dot of material rapidly expanded to become this universe. We don’t know what existed prior to the Big Bang. We can only guess and speculate. It would be an example of vincible ignorance to know about redshift and CMB evidence and still reject the Big Bang evidence in favor of the steady state (eternal, unchanging universe) hypothesis.
While similar to the phrase I began using a while ago, the subtle difference between vincible ignorance and willful ignorance is knowing and rejecting the truth as opposed to simply avoiding it. The distinction appears to be useful, to be sure.
For example several years ago, while participating on an internet panel to discuss his personal beliefs as an atheist, physicist Sean Carroll claimed that he knew what happens at the moment of our death. Because Dr. Carroll is an acknowledged atheist and was speaking on a panel composed exclusively of atheists, it was logical to assume that Dr. Carroll thinks he knows the strict materialist’s “light-switch” theory of consciousness (meaning at the moment of death, our conscious mind permanently ceases to exist and our memories lost forever) is true. As a result I was inspired to correspond with Dr. Carroll asking if he had ever seen and evaluated evidence known as corroborated veridical NDE memories, in which accurate and detailed memories are recalled that were allegedly learned while the physical brain and spiritual mind were literally separated. Almost certainly, I would have mentioned the rather famous case of Pam Reynolds because it is one of my favorite examples of corroborated veridical information learned while mind and brain were not connected together.
To my disappointment and mild surprise, this highly regarded scientist showed absolutely no interest in looking at scientific evidence that might contradict his existing worldview. It was a very unscientific position for an alleged professional scientist to take, in my opinion. Dr. Carroll was perfectly comfortable with his own willful ignorance. He didn’t evaluate the evidence and then reject it; he simply refused to look at it, period.
Because he impressed me as an affable sort for an atheist and didn’t have to respond to my query in the first place, I decided not to press the matter. However, when a person claims to have solid, verifiable evidence to support such an amazing claim, it seems foolish to intentionally turn a blind eye to that evidence and reject the claim as false simply because it conflicts with personal beliefs. Personally, the more sensational the claim, the more curious I tend to become about any alleged corroborating evidence. It would be foolish for me to believe a claim just because it was coming from Dr. Carroll (an argument from authority), but it would be equally foolish to reject his claim without asking if he really did have evidence that might convince me his claim was true.
In Dr. Carroll’s case, his excuse for not looking was that he refused to consider evidence that would violate the laws of physics as he understood them. As a result, Sean Carroll remained willfully ignorant of the veridical evidence in Pam Reynolds’ NDE by just refusing to look at it.
Atheist philosopher Keith Augustine took the next step into vincible ignorance. In his paper titled “Hallucinatory Near Death Experiences“, Augustine concluded that Pam’s accurate memories were best explained as an example of anesthesia awareness, in spite of clear and incontrovertible expert eyewitness testimony that destroyed his theory. Without question, Mr. Augustine cherrypicks over the evidence in Pam’s case and ignores important facts in order to reject her claim.
No one knows with any real degree of certainty what happens when we die. Not me, nor Dr. Carroll, nor Keith Augustine. We might think we know with unfounded confidence in our own opinions, but beliefs are not knowledge. I’ve never had a similar experience to Pam Reynolds. People who have survived a near death experience do think they know what will happen, and perhaps they do know a little bit more about that particular subject of death than we do. At least survivors have a real experience OR a really convincing hallucination to use as their excuse for making an epistemic claim about death.
In an online forum Keith Augustine complained that Dr. Charles Tart criticized his paper without answering the crucial question about whether or not the clicking sounds were being generated in Pam’s ears at the time the alleged OBE observation of the conversation taking place. Yet all Mr. Augustine had to do was watch the video above, beginning around the 6:35 mark. He used his claim of ignorance to justify writing a paper that characterized her experience as a hallucination, which seems a bit dishonest, in my opinion. Lead surgeon Dr. Robert Spetzler adamantly confirms in a recorded interview that Pam was undergoing a process called burst suppression and could not possibly have overheard the verbal exchange between her surgeons during that stage of Operation Standstill.
Dr. Spetzler said on record:
At that stage of the operation, nobody can observe (or) hear in that state, and I find it inconceivable that your normal senses such as hearing, let alone the fact that she had clicking modules in each ear, that there was any way for her to hear those through her normal auditory pathways.
Dr. Robert Spetzler, BBC interview, approximately 6:35 mark
So why does Keith Augustine continue to pretend that his question hasn’t been asked and answered when it has? The problem seems to be Mr. Augustine doesn’t like the conclusion one would naturally reach if evidence of dualism can be established to be true, which clearly seems to have been the case with Pam Reynolds. All of the medical evidence, claims made on record, and witnesses in the room support the veracity of Dr. Spetzler, Dr. Michael Sabom, and Pam’s account.
When push comes to shove, there is only one word that any living person should assign to the concept of an afterlife, and that word is ignorance. Death will always be a mystery. We might like to think we know, but we don’t because we can’t. True knowledge will require firsthand experience.
When we claim to possess knowledge without the benefit of observation and experience, we exhibit an alarming hubris. Atheists tend to believe that our consciousness ceases to exist when we die. Like most theists, I believe that consciousness, or the mind, is not the same thing as physical brain tissue. And I believe there is clear and unmistakable evidence that shows that under stress or even deep meditation, the mind and brain can be separated, and the mind continues to learn while the brain is thoroughly incapacitated. Mr. Augustine’s problem is that he simply cannot afford for Pam’s account to be verified, so he argues against facts and reason with clumsy objections. The reverse, however, is not true. Even if Pam hadn’t had the clicking noises in her ears and it was determined that she had been able to hear her doctors in spite of the evidence that shows otherwise, her case is not the only example with corroborated veridical information learned during an out-of-body experience.
The cases of Michaela Roser, Rose Kopp, and a five-year-old little boy named Ryan, from rural Oklahoma: the evidence supporting each of those three cases is easily as good, if not even better than the evidence to support Pam’s claims.
Like Pam, Michaela Roser overheard a conversation during emergency surgery to save her life, except in her case, the conversation took place in the hospital cafeteria, well out of earshot and nowhere near the location of her physical body. Rose Kopp never left her home in Hawaii, but she was reportedly able to tell a sheriff in Louisiana critical information about a serial killer operating in his parish that led to his capture. A preschooler claimed to “remember” over 100 very specific details about the life and death of a complete stranger that were investigated using the scientific method and well over 90 percent of the boy’s claims were confirmed to be accurate.
Sean Carroll and Keith Augustine have similar problems. Pam Reynolds, Michaela Roser, and Rose Kopp’s stories require more than speculation about hallucinations and honest mistakes to be explained away with strictly “natural” explanations. Any claim that the evidence is false, distorted, or part of some elaborate conspiracy theory requires evidence to support it, not conjecture. These particular accounts have been selected because they would require conspiracy theories and the collaboration of disinterested parties, such as in one instance involving a sheriff and a serial killer on Death Row, in order to be proved false.
Most importantly for Carroll and Augustine, every individual claim must be falsified in order to justify their “strict materialist” worldview, or they can be described as making reckless and unsubstantiated claims about scientific evidence.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, correct? Yet we have numerous examples of extraordinary evidence that require either willful ignorance or vincible ignorance to be dismissed. That’s what atheists are ultimately forced to do–simply pretend that evidence that fails to support their argument doesn’t exist.
It’s easiest just to call these forms of ignorance what they really are: denial.
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