What's Your Pillow?

Remember peek-a-boo?  It's the whole, cover up your face with your hands and then move your hands so the baby staring at you can see your face, thing.  Every single time you reveal your face, the baby loves it, laughs and smiles ensue.  It's almost like the baby thought you were gone, and then suddenly came back.  Actually, it's exactly like that.

Peek-a-boo is an "object permanence" game, meaning a game that shows if an infant has gained object permanence or not.

Object permanence is the term that defines if a child believes in the existence of something even after they cannot see it.  Try this similar game out; ya know, next time you have a baby handy.

Let the baby play with a ball, then take the ball away and put it under a pillow.  If the baby immediately leaves the ball for other interests, there's no object permanence, the baby literally thinks the ball no longer exists, if the baby actively tries to move the pillow, then he/she has learned that objects can still exist even if you cannot see them. 

The ball isn't gone from existence just because your eyes don't see it, it's always there, like a forever ball. 

I have a friend who, aside from being atheist, is also an extinctivist.  That means he believes in absolutely nothing after death, well, did believe in nothing after death. 

Several years ago his mother died, and he shared with me an occasional feeling that she was still around.  It was fascinating watching him try to form the words to adequately express his feelings.  His face would contort and as he stammered he'd throw out phrases like "being watched", "a presence", and "it feels like she's in the room with me." 

The sensitivity of the event made it un-wise for me to bang the bible and preach about evidence of an afterlife.  He knew me as a Christian and I decided the most "Christian" thing I could do would be to meet his needs, and at that time he needed comfort. 

I mentioned to him that his thoughts about his mother reminded me of object permanence.  I explained how from the time we're infants we learn that things really don't just stop existing.    I told him about the whole baby, ball, and pillow thing; how the lesson for the baby is to learn to move the pillow, and then it gets the ball.  How object permanence is an essential and fundamental rule we learn at a very young age, and it helps us make sense of a world that's too big to see all at once. 

My friend turned to me with a somewhat distressed voice, "So what's my problem then, why can't I believe or see this stuff, what's my pillow?"

His pillow, in not so many words, was a lack of faith, or more perfectly written, a strict adherence to the scientific method that prevented faith from being part of his world. 

A scientist has to "see" things to believe them.  It has to be viewed, measured, and repeatable. 

When the ball has gone behind the pillow the baby learns to tell its self, "it's still there, it's still there, it's still there," even though the baby can't "see" the ball.

This is, in a very basic sense, our first flirtations with faith.

We learn then, to trust that things we cannot see, might actually still exist.

Once we learn this, peek-a-boo become rather boring, the adult moves their hands away and goes "here I am!!!!"  and the baby stares back blankly as if to say, "of course you are, you always were there." 

Then, somewhere around 4th grade, we're taught to believe in only what we see, measure, and observe. 

The infant inside us immediately objects, "but what about the ball and the pillow?"

Psychologists have studied children's thoughts on afterlife for many years.  Any study you look at will follow the same basic results. 

Age 3-8 somewhere around 90% of children will tell you there's an afterlife, and many of these children understand very clearly that your body dies and your brain stops working.  After that, it depends upon the type of education received.  A secular education will yield something closer to 50-50 results, children who do, or don't, believe in an afterlife.  A religious education will keep the numbers where they were during ages 3-8. 

Did you know that death is impossible to prove from the first person perspective? (ie. how do you prove to someone that you are dead?)  Did you know scientists still disagree about when the actual moment of "death" is?  It confounds science through multiple layers.

The truth is, my friend must at some point move his pillow.  There is so much about death and what happens after that we'll never see, know, or measure until we're there.

Maybe the closest thing to being scientific about the afterlife came from CS Lewis.  "If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world." 

If that's the case, then the other world has to be somewhere.

Go Deeper:  Here is one of the more fascinating studies about children and the afterlife, for those who ask for sources.

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2006/01/26/when-you-die-do-you-know-youre/

Part II Contains: Christians don't believe death is the end, but what do we do with things that are impossible to objectively answer, ie, the afterlife and what specifically happens?  Does Jesus have anything to say about it?  Also one possibly hilarious story.