Peter Mulacz (1), Erlendur Haraldsson (2), Etzel Cardeńa (3), Stanley Krippner (4), Christine Simmonds (5), Suitbert Ertel (6)
(1) Austrian Society for Parapsychology
Vienna, Austria
(2) Department of Psychology, University of Iceland
Reykjavik, Iceland
(3) Department of Psychology, University of Lund
Lund, Sweden
(4) Saybrook Graduate School
San Francisco, CA, USA
(5) Department of Psychology, Liverpool Hope University
Liverpool, UK
(6) Psychology Department, Georg-August-University of Göttingen
Göttingen, Germany
Where do we come from -- where do we go to? Questions like this one, or on the origin of the universe, or the evolution issue, or the meaning of all, have traditionally been addressed by religion and philosophy. Nowadays it is science that is asked such questions by society (of which the scientific community is a sub-set). Science owes society an answer and should meet such challenges and not leave the field either to the traditional religious or philosophical belief systems nor to pseudoscience; at least science should make clear whether or not a scientific answer on any such question is possible at all. In particular the issue of what happens to man after death -- a question linked historically to psychical research and parapsychology from their very beginnings -- is such question we should neither ridicule nor try to escape from, even if there are no definite answers. Thus, besides describing the problems in detail, the methodologies applied, and the achieved results of "survival" research, the difficulties in tackling this issue should be explained, and un- or pseudoscientific approaches (many of the purporting to be scientific breakthroughs) should be exposed and refuted.