Originally posted by Kepler
Let's not get ahead of ourselves here, science hasn't explained life yet. This is a good thing, if everything had been explained already we'd have to find something else to occupy enquiring minds.
It all depends on what people want to understand by the term "explain" and also what they think are the boundaries of "science."
One role of scientific thinking is to clarify and define the topic in terms that make research possible. So for example, the notion of "life after death" is rather hard to do experiments on as it stands, but out of body experiences (OBE) and near death experiences (NDE) are reasonably specific and can be studied more systematically.
While both are subjective experiences that does not make them unavailable for research. We can narrow down conditions under which such experiences are reported and investigate those. For example, a standard test of OBE is to place a distinctive object or image somewhere out of sight, say on the ceiling of an operating theatre, and find out if the people reporting OBEs can describe the hidden objects. (Never - is the result).
Brain studies reported in the linked article establish what the central nervous system is doing during one of these reported expriences. It suggests that OBE and NDE each have quite distinctive patterns of brain activity.
Psychological studies investigate characteristics of people reporting thse experiences and studies also look at the type of people and the contexts in which people choose to believe in them and the way they use these reports to support other belief systems.
Scientists do not dispute that people have these experiences. Indeed, they take their reports seriously and investigate to learn as much as possible about them. What they have learned as a result by systematic research tells us a lot about how the human mind functions while of course the field will permit a lot more work in the future. Of course these results are often concerned with describing and defining, not necessarily explaining in a full sense. But then, for much of what happens in the natural world, description is the primary goal so that we know what we are discussing and often that is more than sufficient.
Religious people want to use the reports as evidence supporting other claims, such as life after death, but of course the support is not actually there in the evidence. We have fairly good evidence, for example, that OBEs are not out of the body at all, but entirely internal, psychological phenomena. Anecdotal claims to the contrary do not survive scrutiny.