Can science prove that there is an existence beyond death? The question has traditionally belonged to religion and philosophy, but a growing group of doctors, neuroscientists, physicists and other researchers are examining whether phenomena such as near-death experiences, reincarnation and consciousness might provide evidence of something beyond the material world.
According to the El País, the debate is presented as part of a broader revival of interest in spirituality. The newspaper notes that scientists around the world are increasingly investigating subjects such as heaven, reincarnation and the immortality of the soul, even as much of the scientific community remains sceptical about whether the scientific method can meaningfully address them.
The renewed interest has also reached popular culture. El País points to the growing public fascination with spirituality, including Rosalía’s turn towards mysticism and the conversion of Ernesto Castro, described as the “philosopher of 15-M”, to Christianity. Researchers who argue for the possibility of a transcendent reality have also found audiences on the internet and in bookshops.
Their arguments range from fundamental questions about the origins of life to reports of extraordinary experiences. Engineers Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, for example, use what they regard as the extraordinary transition from inert matter to living organisms to argue for the existence of a creative intelligence in their book Dios. La ciencia. Las pruebas, published by Funambulista in 2023. The book has sold more than 250,000 copies in France.
Other researchers focus on phenomena that are more anomalous or less extensively studied, including children who claim to remember previous lives and near-death experiences, or ECMs. These are intense episodes reported by people who have survived situations in which they came close to death. Some describe leaving their bodies, passing through a tunnel or encountering an intense light.
The study of such experiences is not new. Research into near-death experiences dates back to the 1970s and the work of psychiatrist Raymond Moody. Decades ago, psychiatrist Ian Stevenson documented alleged memories of previous lives that he regarded as evidence relevant to reincarnation. What has changed, El País reports, is the scale of current interest, which has produced a boom in books and public appearances and made some of their authors prominent figures on podcasts and online platforms.
Nor are all those sympathetic to such questions outsiders to mainstream science. El País points to cardiologist Valentín Fuster, winner of the Príncipe de Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research, who wrote the foreword to Ego y supraconciencia, published by Planeta in 2025 by surgeon Manuel Sans Segarra, who has a distinguished career at Bellvitge University Hospital. Robert W. Wilson, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who discovered the background radiation that confirmed the Big Bang, wrote the foreword to Bolloré and Bonnassies’s book.
One of the most influential recent accounts came from Eben Alexander, an American neurosurgeon who worked for 15 years at Harvard Medical School. In November 2008, bacterial meningitis left him in a coma for a week. After regaining consciousness, he described what he interpreted as a genuine journey into the afterlife. His account contained elements reported by many people who undergo near-death experiences: an out-of-body experience, the sensation of rising beyond the body, encounters with beings of light or deceased relatives and an instantaneous but detailed review of one’s life, accompanied by an overwhelming sense of lucidity, peace and love.
Alexander argues that his experience could not have been an ordinary hallucination. His reasoning is that an experience of such intensity could not easily have been produced while key areas of his brain were inoperative during the coma. He also distinguishes what he considers a near-death experience from a conventional hallucination, describing the former as structured, persistent in memory and capable of producing lasting effects.
“Life after death has been proven beyond any doubt from a scientific perspective,” Alexander says in the account reported by El País. “What happens is that some people are not interested enough to find out.”
That conclusion, however, remains deeply contested.
A study led by neuroscientist Charlotte Martial of the University of Liège, published in Nature Reviews Neurology last year, offers a different interpretation. The researchers proposed a model incorporating decades of research and explaining near-death experiences through a cascade of neurobiological processes occurring in a brain subjected to extreme stress. Reduced oxygen, increased carbon dioxide and changes in electrical brain activity can produce intense neuronal activity and a massive release of neurotransmitters, potentially generating experiences that are coherent, emotionally powerful and deeply memorable.
The dispute points to a larger problem: what exactly can science investigate? Near-death experiences may be real experiences in the sense that people genuinely report them, but establishing what caused them is a different matter.
Philosopher Carlos Blanco, author of Conciencia y mismidad, makes this distinction clearly. “We could demonstrate that those people have seen something, not that that something was really there,” he says. The fact that something cannot be observed, he adds, does not necessarily mean that it does not exist. There is, he argues, a difference between the order of being and the order of knowing.
Science does sometimes infer entities that cannot be observed directly. Electrons are detected through their effects, while black holes are inferred from the way they affect surrounding matter and light. But philosopher of science Óscar Teixidó argues that this comparison has limits. Electrons and black holes leave measurable and consistent traces. A consciousness existing outside space and time, by contrast, leaves no equivalent physical evidence.
The question of God presents a similar problem. Some arguments begin with observable features of the universe: its laws, its order and physical constants that appear finely adjusted for life. From these observations, proponents infer a cause and identify that cause as God. Blanco argues that this is essentially a return to older philosophical arguments associated with thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas.
But an observed effect does not necessarily establish one particular cause. The universe might have arisen by chance, might simply exist eternally, or might be part of a multiverse. God remains a possible explanation, Blanco says, but without observations or experiments there is no scientific method for determining that it is the correct one.
Critics of research into transcendent phenomena also question experimental standards. Teixidó describes what he calls an “intellectual regression” in which established principles such as avoiding bias, distrusting anecdotal evidence and separating observation from prior belief have been neglected. In his view, insufficiently rigorous filters can reduce some investigations to innocent misunderstandings, deliberate errors or myths.
Researchers on the other side of the debate reject the suggestion that the field lacks scientific seriousness. Álex Gómez-Marín, a senior researcher at the Institute of Neurosciences and a CSIC research scientist, has described his own near-death experience in La ciencia del último umbral, published in 2025 by Temas de Hoy. He argues that critics who dismiss such phenomena in the name of science may themselves be insufficiently informed.
Such disagreements leave the central question unresolved. The scientific community has tools for investigating measurable phenomena, but whether those tools can establish the existence of a reality outside space and time remains disputed.
The history of science itself offers a caution against both certainty and dismissal. In 1930, Albert Einstein wrote a foreword to Mental Radio, a book by writer Upton Sinclair devoted to telepathy. Einstein did not accept Sinclair’s experiments as proof of telepathy. He considered them beyond what a researcher of nature could reasonably regard as established. Yet he also refused to dismiss Sinclair’s observations outright. He regarded him as a careful observer whose good faith and reliability could not be questioned, and suggested that even if the results were not caused by telepathy but by some unconscious influence of one mind upon another, the phenomenon could still be of considerable psychological interest.
That position provides an unusual way of framing today’s argument. The question of whether consciousness survives death remains unresolved, not because every claim has been proved false, nor because every extraordinary experience constitutes evidence of an afterlife. The difficulty lies in determining what kind of evidence could actually distinguish between competing explanations.
As El País’s account makes clear, the debate therefore extends beyond the question of whether God or an afterlife exists. It concerns the boundaries of scientific knowledge itself: what can be observed, what can be inferred and what remains, for now, a matter of interpretation or faith.
Between credulity and outright rejection lies a more demanding position: curiosity combined with methodological rigour. That may be the only reliable way to investigate experiences that are deeply meaningful to those who report them while remaining scientifically difficult to explain.
