Templeton gives $5 million to study immortality claims
Promising an “uncompromising scientifically rigorous” approach, a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, says he has received a three-year $5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to research beliefs and traditions about an afterlife and how those ideas affect humans.
“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,” said John Martin Fischer, the principal investigator of the Immortality Project, in a July 31 news release.
Some questions to be addressed, Fischer said, are why Americans who report near-death experiences consistently describe a tunnel with a bright light at the end of it, whereas in Japan individuals often find themselves tending a garden.
