Near-Death Experiences: The Evidence

what is the evidence for near-death experiences can any of these stories be trustworthy uh do they tell us anything about life after death and potentially the existence of god well this is a question that is fascinating to me i got to tell you about three years ago and teaching the resurrection class at biola i started thinking i'm looking into near-death experiences totally skeptical not thinking there would be a piece of valid evidence at all after reading our guest today's work and other ones i was pleasantly surprised at some of the evidence for near-death experiences so uh dr steve miller thanks so much for coming on thanks for having me well to let our audience know that we're going to jump right into the evidence for near-death experiences you're an associate professor of philosophy at kennesaw state university i didn't realize this but it's the second largest university in georgia you teach classes on introduction religion death and dying critical thinking and you've written on the exists of god death that experiences and near-death experiences i first heard about your book which i'm going to hold up which is just called near-death experiences by a mutual friend of ours a colleague of mine at biola jpmorland and when jp says something that gets my attention i read this book and walked away i was like oh my goodness there is more to this than i imagine in fact even here at biola your book is assigned in some classes on the mind and the body so let me just start by asking you this question what sparked your interest in examining and studying near-death experiences well for one thing i became a believer when i was in high school and immediately after making a decision for christ i began to go through periods of doubt uh when i would hear something about evolution some of my friends could just say oh well that's just all wrong and go on with their lives and i would say hey what about that and i'd have to read both sides of issues and i think the holy spirit was the one who was who was convincing me of the truth but the what the holy spirit used was evidence and i just had to read both sides of everything when i went to the bible the bible was very clear that in the gospel of john jesus didn't have a problem with evidence he claimed that he was giving evidence to the disciples so all through my life i've been had a skeptical mind when somebody would say something make some kind of truth claim i was always saying what's the source where does this come from or the source is good i was always weighing evidence that was a part of my spiritual life and so uh when somebody said about 10 years ago hey have you read this book heaven is for real i said well no i mean because i really didn't think there was any evidence there i studied apologetics and evidences all my life and uh they and but just as a favor i read it as as an apologetic work i didn't think it was that strong it was just someone's testimony it had some characteristics that i thought okay they seem to be a sincere family and and whatever but there's always a possible profit motive of publishing a book but on the book on the back of the book somebody said i believe it was a physician who said i've studied near-death experiences and this uh this person's testimony is consistent with the experiences that we're studying and i thought somebody's been studying this stuff so uh i went back and began studying the research not just reading a bunch of people's testimonies but looking at the academic research that had been done on near-death experiences tell me what surprised you most because you went to this with a skeptical eye and by the way five pages in your book i kind of resonated i was like thank you for not just believing this is true just like being skeptical and demanding evidence but diving into this what kind of surprised you because you've been studying this for over a decade now well i was just surprised that there was any research any real research and it was not done through seminaries it was not pastors these were academic physicians neurologists people who were uh within their fields to study it and in fact i'm just going to read this off in order to get the numbers right but before i did my study um i found out that over 900 articles on near-death experiences were published in the scholarly literature and this is this is like the lancet one of the top medical journals in the world okay so psychiatry critical care quarterly these are the secular best of the best journals in their area and there were over 900 articles in magazines in journals and in the 30-year period after moody produced his seminal work that was 1975 55 researchers or teams published at least 65 studies of over 3 500 near-death experiences now i was shocked what i thought is we need to get away from these personal testimony books and things on the internet they're good but they just let us see we need to go back and see what research has been done because we don't know these people's motives what's going on in their lives we need to get it solid evidence somebody needs to kind of summarize where we are in this research and see if there's any real evidence for the afterlife there that's what pulled me in your book in terms of how much you just take an introduction to the topic was a great starting place for me you wrote in 2012 what came out just in 2017 you and i were talking about this book is it's called the science of near-death experiences this was published it's all by peer-reviewed journal articles in the missouri medicine the journal of missouri state medical association between 2013 and 2015. so people might dismiss near-death experiences they might question what the evidence follows from it but to say that there's not serious academic careful research and many scholars questioning their materialistic world view is just simply false we're seeing a shift so to speak in our midst even though we may not know where it goes all right we're going to jump into the evidence and those of you who are joining us if you have questions about near-death experiences we will come to those but let's get on the same page first the obvious question is you're a philosopher so give us a definition what do we mean by a near-death experience well i think it's easiest just to describe one uh there are typical elements of a near-death experience people will have like let's say a cardiac arrest and at that point you have cessation of heartbeat you have cessation of breathing that's called clinical death so that person's brain should shut down at that time there may be some kind of minor something going on in the brain but they are not having a vivid conscious experience while this is going on but after these people are are shocked back to reality and become conscious uh they number one they don't tell anybody what they experienced sure because they're afraid they're to be sent to the mental ward or whatever so they typically especially they don't tell their doctor they might tell a nurse they might tell a family family member but as people begin interviewing these people they found out number one they would find themselves floating over their body if they were being resuscitated they would actually see the resuscitation going on then they may look into the corner of the room and see a tunnel and they may go through this tunnel on the other side they may see a landscape of incredible beauty and uh talk to deceased relatives or uh angelic beings they may have their entire life reviewed during they will say my entire life i went through it with this being of light who knew everything and reviewed my life then it actually has closure that rather than just being jerked back in the middle of a sentence examine your dreams sometime as a comparison when the alarm rings i'm in the middle of a conversation i'm really doing something stupid who knows what's going it's just stream of consciousness nonsense in these the whole scenario makes sense and it has closure at the end typically uh he'll you'll have a conversation with someone who and you try to determine is it my time to come back or should i stay i want to stay but what do i need to do and then you come back and find yourself in your body so that is a near-death experience that was a fascinating point where you make in your book you talk about difference between dreams and between a near-death experience that dreams you wake up suddenly and it's jarring but near-death experiences seem to have a consistent narrative of a beginning a middle and an end like a story where there could be a kind of design argument that could be made here i haven't heard anybody fully develop this i'm not putting on my eggs in that basket but that's a significant difference between dreams and between near-death experiences for which somebody could make a kind of design argument now tell me very briefly then my next question after this will be i want to know what you find evidentially significant but one of the things that surprised me was that even non-western countries will report very similar kinds of near-death experiences this isn't just in america in the west you have hindus you have muslims you have atheists what are the common experiences that people have and report when they have a near-death experience let's start there and then let's shift to what makes some of these evidentially significant sure well under naturalism you'd expect that either this is something that is being caused by our expectations our cultural expectations our worldview expectations but it's uh that just doesn't make sense because um even among christians but between the bible and the kind of fanciful ideas we have from the media we kind of expect that when we die we'll come before god or we'll stand in line then it's our turn we talk to god and we find out whether we're getting into heaven or not we're not expecting a near-death experience we're expecting final death and so the last thing we're expecting is to come out of our bodies and look back and see what's going on on the operating table that's the la that's just not something we're expecting besides when someone has a heart attack uh they're not thinking about the afterlife our first reaction tends to be denial or let's say i'm drowning i'm thinking of how can i get up to the air i'm not thinking of my theology at that time so the expectations don't explain it the similarity this this regular experience that we're seeing globally but if it were something physical then then you would expect for example you'd expect that when i came back to if it were a hallucination or if it were some kind of a dream it would just stop right in the middle why is this a consistent story as if it's directed when you're watching a movie when you're watching a film on tv romantic comedy comes to the end guy you know he loved her then they hated each other now they're back together and you know but it doesn't stop in the middle of a chase scene right the movie has an ending well that means you've had a director that planned this thing that yes you're right this needs to be explored in much more depth i start off the discussion in my book but there's and so what do we see globally i went to uh dr long's site where he collects people just turn in their ends their experiences and i looked for all the experiences that were in not only other countries but countries that differ very much world view wise from america to compare them and what i found was astoundingly they're coming out of their bodies they're looking back and seeing their body on the table they're going through some go through a um some kind of a tunnel others will go through and i'm talking about even within our culture sometimes it may be more of stairs that are going up and going into somewhere but they're going somewhere they see angelic beings they see deceased relatives it is just extremely similar now they may call some of the things something different in another culture like if if you're a muslim and you see god well you're going to call him allah right because that's who god is to you and so and if you're in another country you may call him by the name of one of your guys but you recognize them as is i think they're seeing the same thing they just may call it different names because of their culture and there are some slight cultural differences as well i think the way people are dressed on the other side if you think about it if this is a non-corporeal existence then what what's the fashion over there do we expect to see the same thing why would you even need clothes on the other side if the temperature is perfect so i think that we see what people on the other side want us to see that that that feels culturally um easy on us to be able to get the message we need to get so there's slight differences but why why is there any similarity at all and it's a very consistent experience this is something that would not be predicted by naturalism so i i want you to jump off this and tell me if you agree i assume you do but what got my attention with the near-death experiences is not that people say they saw loved ones not even that they come out and have life change i have met multiple people who have shared near-death experiences with me steve and said it changed our life that wasn't enough to convince me about this what convinced me is when people were able to report information that they could not have known in the physical state in which they were in so in this book by i mentioned earlier the science of near-death experiences which again is the university of missouri press they've got a documentation of nine cases of people who have a near-death experience seeing a loved one who is dead come back and discover that that person had died and it was unbeknownst to them that's a moment that says wait a minute there's other experiences people saying i left my body and i saw these particular facts in another room in another operating table they describe it when they not only were not physically there but they were physically brain dead evidently for me that was the point that gave me pause and said wait a minute if we're purely physical beings how could you have access to this information that's the part where they become evidentially significant do you agree disagree would you add anything to that i would just say this has been studied very well i'll mention a couple of places that's been studied uh dr sabham who was a he was a skeptical cardiologist when he first heard about near-death experiences and uh the nurse who was sharing about them challenged him said well you're a cardiologist uh why don't you interview some of your some of your patients he said none of my patients have ever experienced anything like this they would have told me he went out and started interviewing his patients and many of them were saying yes we went to the other side and he said so his skepticism stayed with him he said that this just can't can't be true but he decided to do a study and pretty much to prove moody wrong in his original book on their death experiences and to say that no that they're not really coming out of their bodies about i think about a year into his study he realized no they were out of their bodies the way he did this is he had a uh he had one group of his patients who claimed to have come out of their bodies and watched their resuscitation from above then he had another set of his patients who did not have a near-death experience so he asked both sets what happened in your resuscitation now the ones that had not seen it from above of course they didn't see anything so they just had to imagine what might have happened from what they've seen on tv or reports uh sabon said all of them got it wrong he said you think of resuscitation as being just exactly the same every time he said but there are nuances of difference in the way it's handled he said the people who did not have the experience always got it wrong the people who had the experiences got it right in in fascinating detail and so he became a believer in this he started going going to a more conservative church and learning the bible and he said this is uh and now he was not just your average cardiologist next door he was teaching cardiology at emory and this is this is a very good book uh since we're showing these books here and trying you know you got to go the opposite on these things recollections of death a medical investigation this is not for your casual reading this is for somebody who likes to see how he was thinking scientifically as he went through this so yes and then you have individual cases that are just incredible that are well documented let's so we're going to come back to some of those individual cases but you've laid out what a near-death experience is why you're convinced by it when they're evidentially significant let's run through some of the common naturalistic responses we hear and uh one of my viewers a friend says it really well so i'm gonna put the question up here and ask you uh he says i was recently trying to show the supernatural is real to an atheist and i brought up ndes and he said they were just the brains last ditch effort of something and ndes have been debunked your thoughts i've tried to read the significant uh writings by people who try to debunk near-death experiences and i welcome people from any world view chiming in on these things again these are not necessarily primarily christians that are arguing this these are just researchers who found something that was fascinating and they thought this couldn't be this wasn't what i was taught in medical school would happen because they were typically taught more of a naturalism there's a naturalistic explanation for everything typically these researchers like van laml and holland or sabom they were mostly secular thinkers who were brought to believe this was a true experience with the afterlife just because of the weight of the evidence so um now to me so when i read these people and i try to if give me something to read if there's something i haven't seen from a naturalistic perspective but when i read them typically they've not really read a lot of of studies they've just heard something and they're repeating it they tend to read other atheists and what they've said about near-death experiences rather than actually taking a book like pim van lummel's consciousness beyond life uh you know his patience in holland they tend to be very secular why are they having these out of body experiences and and what's going on and he's the one who actually published his in the lancet okay very well respected the the people that i see arguing against it i don't get the feeling that they've ever even read these books because they seem unfamiliar with the evidence they make big claims to to say that it's been debunked well people yes have argued against it but typically they're not going into the research let me go back to one other thing and mention on this line um okay so let's say i think the questioner was saying that it was just physical things that were causing the near-death experiences but if that were so what about sabom's study how did they know what was going on if if everything's physical there they couldn't have seen it with their eyes or heard it in some way in that condition sabone said okay as a practicing cardiologist who knows a lot about what happens when your heart stops when you stop breathing these people had to been out about their body to see that let me give you one more example of that um and i'll just read this to get it right so i don't fumble around with it but one and this is on uh i think cbs or something you can go on youtube and actually see her but um but there was a lady who had pamela reynolds so she underwent a risky brain surgery that required lowering her body temperature to about 50 degrees fahrenheit draining all the blood from her head i mean if you drain the blood from your head she had to have a a tumor taken out of course if you don't have any blood it's not going to start bleeding so it makes sense by three primary tests a silent eeg an unresponsive brain stem no blood flow through the brain she's clinically dead yet after the surgery she reports being very much alive during the surgery viewing the procedure from outside of her body she described an accurate detail a conversation that transpired during the surgery basically during the surgery uh one of the physicians was having a hard time finding a vein in her leg and was talking about it now this time the blood was drained out of her head when this conversation happened okay there was everything was unresponsive even if she could have heard something she had something in her ear that was clicking a hundred decibel clicks assaulting her ears over 10 times per second to monitor the brain activity she couldn't hear anything everything was covered her eyes were covered everything was covered except for the area on her head where they were doing the surgery and yet she described in detail some of the instruments that were used dr sabom actually studied this to see what happened he said i've never done a surgery like this he asked for pictures of the instruments and they were just like she described them so if it's all just something physical how do you explain that and can i give one other example yeah go for it let me let me sum up very quick and then come back to this example so the question was how do we know near-death experiences aren't generated by the brain when somebody says to me near-death experiences have been disproved they were generated by the brain i would say oh that's interesting how do you know that i'm actually really curious the person who says this how do they know near-death experiences have been debunked and how do they know their projection of the brain that's a claim to knowledge i'd like to know how this person knows that second are these cases that dr miller is giving where somebody is technically brain dead blood drained from their brain there's no reported brain activity and they're able to report information that they couldn't have physically known from that location that tells us that something more is going on here than the brain so if those accounts are true and there's dozens and dozens of carefully documented cases then it challenges this reductive kind of explanation that narrows it just down to the brain so last thing i want to hear the story some parts of near-death experiences could potentially be explained by the brain whether it's an increase in chemicals causes certain future or maybe jar memories like we are fully conceding that some parts of near-death experiences could have a brain explanation but what they can't do is account for all of the data that's been carefully recorded which tells us more is going on than the brain so that was bringing it together for folks give another story like the one you shared of pamela reynolds that that uh advances the idea you're making here well one thing to realize is that these experiences are extremely common uh when they did surveys of the united states australia germany it's like from four to six percent of the population claims to have had such an experience so this is not some anomalous thing that's like one in a million that we're reading about uh where hey somebody maybe maybe pamela reynolds just guessed what happened and if you got millions of people having surgery somebody's going to guess it right but you've got four percent of the population that's about one out of 25 people what i realize and what's very powerful about this is that you can start talking to people within your circles of trust number one i think i'll tell the person who wrote in go ahead and read whatever your friends have read that that debunked it but then go and read these studies on the other side that's what i've always done to try to come to the truth of things but um so i was writing my book on on near-death experiences a relative had come to visit a cousin who i've known uh just at family gatherings he's a history teacher has a master's degree in history real sharp mind just a person you'd love and my mom said hey uh tell bucky what you're writing on and i said well i'm writing on near-death experiences he says oh i've had three of those i said seriously so this is when i began to realize these things are common they're all around us but naturalism has been so strong it's just made cowards of all of us and we won't talk about these things so bucky says okay here's one of what happened to me he said i was laying in bed i was sleeping one night middle of the night about three o'clock in the morning i feel a weight on my chest like something huge has dropped on my chest uh i came out of my body looked down at my body i saw like a a uh so this is a partial uh experience he he saw a tunnel kind of up in the corner of his room there were some angelic like beings i think he mentioned that were around then he went back into his body and uh just woke up in a cold sweat and sat on the side of his bed immediately the phone rang and from about 90 miles away a nurse was calling to say that his dad had just had a fatal heart attack now that's called a um that's that's called a shared death experience now you say it's just things going on in the brain that are causing this this is the dying brain these are things that happen in the dying brain bucky's brain was not dying okay he experienced something that his dad was experiencing 90 miles away he didn't even know his dad was ill now you don't know bucky you don't know me so you really ought to kind of question whether i'm telling you the truth or not all i'm saying is start talking to people around you and you'll start hearing that it's people you do trust that don't have any reason to be lying to you who are telling these things now let's broaden what bucky experienced a little bit now sean you mentioned that um i believe in that missouri or whatever book you were reading what was it where is it from it's called science and near-death experiences university of missouri press missouri okay university of missouri press so uh you mentioned something about people knowing that someone had died before they had died something along that line well that's what bucky experienced actually i found out back in the late 1800s some of the top people at cambridge decided to study this they did a survey and it was very well done these are people from oxford and cambridge doing this study and they um they surveyed 17 000 people in the general population this was chartered by a international psychological association they said we keep hearing these things we want to get to the bottom of it so they found that like around 10 percent of people said that they had seen someone who wasn't physically there now it turns out the largest subcategory of that were people who had seen someone who had just died but they didn't know about the death so they narrowed this down and they said hey there's a way to test this uh statistically we know the odds of a person dying at any given time so let's collect all of these that were within a 24-hour period that somebody saw somebody who died maybe they were overseas maybe they'd not seen them in years they certainly didn't know they were sick this is evidential right okay but how could the timing be well we could know um statistically that if if people are just guessing or they happen to have a vivid dream at the same time and it's just chance we know about how many chance happenings should happen with that many people it turned out when they ran the statistics there were 440 times as many people having these experiences as would have been expected had it just been uh a chance occurrence so what i'm seeing a lot of people like shermer has a broken afterlife he had an experience actually that was pretty wild the only way he can explain his own experience is to say to say that well hey there are billions of people out there we just happen to have a lucky experience and i want to say hey shermer get into the research this has actually been researched and see what it says there's just way too many of these happening to be explained away by chance well i think it's really interesting that aj iyer a very influential atheist from a generation ago described one but um we're going to come to some of the worldview implications and the comments some people have asked what falls for this for the world view but let me kind of run through uh some of these for example one one of the some of the common naturalistic uh responses here uh if everyone has a soul so there's this mind that exists apart from the brain why wouldn't everyone have a near-death experience well i think that's only a problem if you assume that there's some physical trigger that causes the soul to separate from the body i don't i don't if there is i don't think we've identified it uh maybe for some people it's when their breathing stops and their uh respirat their respiration and their heart stops but maybe it's something different maybe it's when certain brain cells cease to function or go into dormancy that they have something like that we don't know what the trigger is therefore some may be experiencing the trigger physically and some may not or maybe it's not triggered by something physical at all maybe this is just like kind of like a vision and uh god wants certain people to have this experience because of some need in their life and and maybe others he doesn't that's not really a big issue to me unless there's something i'm missing okay no that's i i think that's fair it doesn't follow that if somebody's body and soul and some have near-death experiences that everybody would necessarily have a near-death experience there could be some trigger or cause that's unknown to us that's not discovered yet that's driving it and just because we don't know it and doesn't happen every time doesn't overturn that it does happen sometimes i think is is the point which is helpful how about this one um why can't out of body experiences be accounted for by a good guess i've heard this like look the pam reynolds case if you're in an operating room you're gonna be able to guess certain things you see in an operating room why can't we explain away some of the phenomena that people described in a different locale as simply being a good guess well i think the study back in the late 1800s it found that even whether you were guessing or whether it was just pure chance the odds were just way at 440 times as many as you would say if somebody were guessing uh i think the saubom study again going back to him he was saying that all of his patients who did not have near-death experiences guessed it wrong so we're not that great at guessers and things like that as we think we are and sometimes they're hearing conversations in another room where they weren't even there so i i just don't these type things have been studied and there's no good evidence that people could guess of this nature i mean but lucky wasn't guessing he wasn't i mean he just had an experience and it was his dad you know i mean how do you explain that timing that exact timing now if bucky were having an experience like that every week and one time it was right you could say oh okay by chance at some point it's going to happen but it's not like one of a million dreams this was a very special event that happened where you wake up in a cold sweat same thing happened to my wife she um you know you start talking to people and you find them everywhere i thought why haven't you ever told me this but one night i believe it was after she graduated from high school she had this vivid dream of her grandmother in a casket and she just woke up in a cold sweat it was not an ordinary dream she told her sister about it afterwards and sure enough in about a month her grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer and died a few months later wow but uh but these are typical mark twain had a uh vivid experience like that and he was no preacher for sure so uh there is beyond chance in guessing from all the research we've seen so far what about wishful thinking some have argued that there's like a desire for certain things and say the afterlife that there would be a god who would love me that i would see somebody and out of a positive experience with them or i talked with a fellow had a near-death experience and he said i was kind of held by my father and loved couldn't this be a projection of some deeper psychological need that we have why doesn't that explain away near-death experiences well it doesn't seem to explain why atheists would have an experience like this because i would think that they're hoping that they're right and that they're going to experience nothingness at the end i hear a lot of people saying oh but everybody just wants there to be we just can't stand the thought of life ending i don't know where they do their research for me i've never really had a problem with nothingness life's been pretty hard for me my first wife died of cancer leaving me with little children i've been taking care of aging relatives for the last 25 years i've always got more than i can accomplish to me it sounds like if you died and that was it it'd be like that's a relief no more responsibilities it doesn't bother me at all so i'd like to see some research that shows that everybody's just longing for this afterlife i think actually most people just live in denial about death and don't think about it very much until they have to but wishful thinking again wishful thinking does not explain why sabom's patients knew knew what was going on in their resuscitation you know that does not explain how pam reynolds was able to see those things i mean how many people when they're having a heart attack or wishing oh i just wish i could be up to where i could get a better view of the resuscitation nobody's nobody's thinking about those things so many things about the near-death experience that i didn't even mention typically when people go to the other side they'll talk about how time seems to change and disappear there's no time a place you're in a some kind of a place where time is different and space is different where they see something way off and can be there immediately or hear what's going on and and time just seems to disappear who's expecting that i mean i'm not expecting it from a christian standpoint the bible doesn't talk about that why would there be this common experience they're not wishing for that i think that's really fair there's two things that caught my attention that made it seem not projection is the negative ndes that people have uh one study suggested about five percent i'm sorry one out of five ndes were negative and some of these are terrifying for people demonic type beings hellish figures so why would you project that i think it's a fair question and second some of the kids who have near death experiences there are times where kids have had enduring death experience come out of this and adopted religious beliefs different than their parents and caused a lot of friction and pain in the family there's just so many cases that don't match at all what we would expect based on people's own testimony if these were mere projections i like your answer better than mine but let me add to it uh i think that uh bringing up children that's very interesting um that was noticed by a great physicist back in the early 1900s when he started studying deathbed experiences and he would talk about children having these experiences before they died and often they would meet with angels on the other side and none of them spoke of angels as having wings although our culture not the bible but our culture always talks about angels with wings and yet none of these children would talk about it in fact more recently one um one woman was interviewed uh she was in talking to her child who kept talking about seeing things on the other side and uh she and and she wanted to identify with her child to be acting like she was believing and uh she said when the child was talking about seeing angels she asked her moms mommy do you see angels and and she said oh yes i see them and the child was pretty smart she said okay uh what do they look like and the mother said oh the one i see has these huge wings and the child said mom you don't have to lie to me they don't have wings wow and so if if it's if it's caused by cultural expectations or what you want you would think it would be the way you see it other children would say uh somebody will say oh on the other side there's uh going to be all these mansions and say well i don't see any mansions you know where are the mansions actually that could be probably better translated dwelling places they would see people being places but that the cultural expectations are just not being seen often especially with children okay so a common one is lsd like can't people who have lsd have these spiritual almost out of body kinds of experiences if we can mirror these near-death experiences by taking a drug isn't that good reason to believe that there's ultimately a physical kind of explanation for this phenomena well it's an interesting parallel i'm glad that people have studied that typically when i see people saying oh well lsd it's just they produce these near-death experiences and it's just the same thing they say the same thing about dmt about ketamine or ketomine you know they'll say but when i go into it do this if you want to research that out just go on the web don't look at lsd and near death experiences just look at people's lsd experiences look at their experiences with various drugs like dmt they're there are some parallels in the sense that they feel like it's real they feel like there's something significant happening outside of the body and they're they're getting some great insight on reality that they never had before well that's that's a parallel a general parallel but if you read their experiences they're not coming out of their bodies looking at a hurting body going through a tunnel to have a personal conversation with the being of life they're just they're just random crazy stuff and it's kind of like and one guy nelson who's a neurologist who wrote a book against near-death experiences he he cited a study saying that when people pass out he said hey they have these same things when they pass out it's just physical and i went and looked at the study and sure enough some people who passed out heard kind of vague mumbling in the background but they couldn't make it out well when nelson started reporting is like oh they hear voices just like they do in ndes and i'm thinking none of this sounds anything like a near-death experience you hear a little mumbling it's kind of like me saying i throw things in the kitchen occasionally and uh patrick mahomes and other professional football players throw footballs on a football field it's really the same thing well it's the same in that we're both throwing things but they're totally different when you look at the near-death experience and compare that to what's going on that that's a helpful distinction i think one of the responses i see people who don't buy this will say well look if you trigger this part of the brain or you give lsd you have a near-death type experience but if we are body and soul we wouldn't deny that those are possible the challenge would be that those kind of experiences can't capture all of the data we have about near-death experiences and fall short especially in the cases like you said when people know things that they couldn't know in that brain states uh let's see what person said this one other thing if i could yeah one person said near-death experiences look pretty naturalistic as long as you ignore all the supernatural characteristics and that's one thing that i tend to see people lsd experiences are they seeing things that have been corroborated here on earth do they know that somebody else died when they couldn't have known it in any other way if you ignore the supernatural elements there are some parallels but it's a very different experience go ahead i'm sorry to cut you off no that's that's great that's helpful let's shift to what you think follows world view uh for world views from this now in the back your book you say this challenge is determinism and a lot of the cases that i'm reading people are saying there's the sense of choice will i go back to life will i change my life and it undermines this deterministic worldview i think that's interesting but you also say it challenges the naturalistic worldview now we've been kind of jumping around this explain it but why do you think near-death experiences at least challenge naturalism well science one of the big things in science when we run the scientific method is we say what what does your hypothesis predict so let's say there are two hypotheses there's a dying brain naturalistic hypothesis over here and then there's the uh afterlife hypothesis that people are really coming out of their bodies what would these predict well i really don't think that naturalism would predict we've talked about this that there would be closure at the end of this experience where you're actually coming back naturalism would predict that when your heart starts back your breathing starts back in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a story or whatever so it just doesn't predict that naturalism would predict that children would be pretty much having experiences that go along with their simple world views and would would not be coming back reporting the experience naturalism would predict that a child would be scared to death at the point of death because they're about to leave everything they know there was a book let me recommend this little book not many people have talked about it she was a yale professor um retired now but uh it's called a window a window to heaven by diane comp md uh she's retired now uh that she was teaching at yale she said when she went into her practice which was pediatric oncology she uh was kind of a cross between an atheist an existentialist she watched her how to describe herself so she was just fully pretty much a naturalist and then she went and began to to to to really meet and spend time with her patients who were children and dying of cancer she was so shocked to find these children saying things like that they were excited to go to the other side one child got some kind of a free vacation thing to florida probably to disney world and they were saying uh hey are you excited about that trip and said well yeah but i'm but i'm more excited about going to heaven and they're like this is not predicted by naturalism what's happening it wasn't like some of their parents were all that spiritual but they were having visions toward the end of life that that were convincing them that they were seeing people on the other side they were seeing great vistas they were seeing pets that had died in the past they were spending time in a place that was more like home than their home here and they they would kind of break the news to their parents typically i don't think people tell children that they're about to die it's such a foreign concept to them you just try to ignore that and say oh you're feeling better today whatever but these children would say that they knew they were going to die they had been told by someone on the other side and they were looking forward to going there and this changed diane comp's life because she said what what could be happening to these children they are having they're not just having vivid dreams they think it's real and that to me is one of the things that shows that that's an evidence that these things are real how do i know i'm talking to sean mcdonald right now and not having a dream well it's because this is more vivid than a dream i interviewed a guy he was a minister of men in a former church i was attending the pastor said he doesn't hardly tell anybody about this experience but when he was he had some kind of septic condition that had set in and they they didn't know whether he was going to live or not when he came to he said that he had had conversations with uh with with like angelic beings on the other side and they talked about it and determined that it would be good for him to come back he said i couldn't even talk but i knew i i knew that i was going to recover all these other people didn't know they were really worried but he said i couldn't communicate with them he said i knew i was going to come and i said well well just tell it was just me and him sitting in a little office and i said well well tell me just how real was it was it kind of like a dream or like a vivid dream he said he looked at me and i said no it it it was real i was there he said no it's it's realer than this conversation we were having i was there now that needs to be thought through evidentially even if you don't trust the testimonies of other people these death bed experiences where people start seeing the people on the other side angels and deceased relatives when they've studied it recently in hospices where they asked the patients every day have they had these experiences over 80 percent of the patients are having these experiences now even if i don't trust other people's experiences can i why can't i believe my future self that if i'm very likely to have one of these experiences that i'll be saying it's real i think that there's this needs to be thought through philosophically and apologetically because there's something here these people are not saying it's a vivid dream they know it's real they may have been atheists before and they're they may say i'm still i'm still unsure about god or whatever but there's another side there was somebody here to take me to the other side i think we need to think that thing through a little more clearly about realer than real that that is so interesting i literally myself i'm gonna have to think about this through a little bit more because you're right i hadn't quite pieced that together that these cases people say i just know it was clear it was precise and there's no doubt about it uh what causes that where does that come from that's a very fair question i think uh to ask let me ask you a false for this there's been a few uh questions that have come through about jesus and kind of some other worldview implications that follow i've kind of looked at this similar to jp moreland and gary habermas in their book i think is it beyond death or immortality beyond death and they say this isn't special revelation like scripture an angel a prophet it's more general revelation because people at different world views across cultures across races across ages have these kind of supernatural experiences and affirms that you're more than the body and at least minimally there's life after death evidentially speaking now because i'm a christian when i hear stories of people describing heaven it fits within my narratives so i believe a lot of those stories but i don't know that i can find them as evidentially significant because they can't be corroborated in the same way when you look at these stories do you agree with that do you think it's a kind of natural revelation that challenges naturalism says there's more to us than the body and there's at least a minimal kind of life after death do you agree with that or would you say it even tells us more well i suppose we've got the most evidence uh that you're actually coming out of your body there's more to us than just a physical body and a physical brain that's the strongest evidence because we do have that corroboration but um you know some testimonies are talking about other things that they heard from the being of light or heard from an angel like we were talking about mary neal and her hearing that her son was going to die in the future and that kind of sounds like something else was going on more than just a separation from the body and if they had a realer than real experience where they actually saw their body from outside of their body i tend to believe them when they say they went and had their life reviewed by a being of light and they saw angels and others it just seems to me to fit together now that doesn't mean that i believe everything somebody says about a near-death experience now think about it okay right now we're trying to get uh we're wanting to take a shot so that we can resist covet when you when these things are studied a certain percentage of people get well a certain percentage of people maybe get sick all kind of weird things happen there's always a a minority of people who have strange symptoms a lot of women get preg report getting pregnant was that caused by it i mean they're all kind of anomalies that happen so that's why i tried to stay away from just reading the heaven tourism books of all these people reporting their private experiences i don't know these people i don't know whether to believe them or not and so if they start reporting weird theology and things i don't go oh my goodness i have to believe this because i believe in near-death experiences guys god says that miracles can happen in the bible but also there are fabrications of miracles god talks about prophecy in the bible but there's also false prophecy so i think in the same way there are going to be false reports of near-death experiences there's going to be some patients who actually have a near-death experience but also maybe they have a hallucination or maybe some of these people are not totally mentally there they have mental illness and they're reporting so you don't believe everything that you hear that's biblical okay don't believe everything that you hear and um but but i do believe there's good evidence that they're actually see i wouldn't say it's heaven it's not a final heaven like that happens after the final judgment and new heavens and new earth i'd say it's more of a vestibule to heaven some of the jews believed in like seven levels of heaven uh the apostle paul taught about going to the third heaven well maybe there are different levels how can we know why should we restrict our view of what all is a part of heaven i call it a vestibule probably we haven't really gone all the way through to the whole thing but this other side and i think it's god and i think it's angels that's really interesting i i appreciate that you don't want to read too much into this but also don't want to dismiss accounts and try to look at them carefully and critically um and in a sense skeptically but also charitably in that sense i think that's a fair way to approach it i appreciate that hey those of us who are joining us we're obviously getting towards the end but i really want to recommend your book near death experiences i told you that i have uh just one book near death experiences when i teach my class on the resurrection i spend just about an hour hour and a half talking about near-death experiences because obviously it doesn't get us to resurrection but it's a part of a larger case that there's life after death that we're not just body that we're soul and i cite and use this book extensively so anybody watching this going you know what i want to go a little deeper again check out uh steve miller's book near death experiences and then i also would really recommend this book called the science of near-death experiences which is by university of missouri press a bunch of medical doctors and peer-reviewed journals and again if you don't buy it fine i would just encourage people to read it charitably and with an open mind and evaluate it and one of the common themes that i found among near-death experience researchers is a sense of surprise like wow not sure i expected that going into this there's more here and some of that i think is like you alluded to earlier that we've heard kind of bad stories that have been just popularized those bad stories shouldn't take away from the careful documentation by doctors who are not all christians who are really looking into this so i really uh appreciate you coming on appreciate your thoughts now i'm gonna ask you just one or two more questions we'll wrap up i wanna i wanna respect your time but how has studying near death experiences for over a decade plus affected you personally well i told you how growing up i went through periods of doubt and questioning and i've continued to have to work work through things as i've gone along in life to me it's just like if i were to deny that near-death and deathbed experiences were truly experiences with the afterlife i i just have i i don't know how i would explain that naturalistically it's like i would have to think that there's some kind of international conspiracy where people get together and say okay here's what we're going to say happen to us i would have to explain away why these children know they're going to heaven and are excited about dying of all things i'd have to explain this realer than real experience that and when i talk about talking to these people these are sane people just like me and you people that i respect level-headed people why they're telling me they've been there now if it's four percent of the population that's experienced this then uh again one out of 25 that's millions of people imagine sean let's say we're in a court of law and uh you are in a jury and you're trying to make a decision on something there's certain types of evidence that people now this is something i hear atheists say they'll say well i just don't trust any personal experience uh testimonies you know you uh you know so you've got to accept some but the but especially important or when people say uh when someone is giving an eyewitness testimony and it's going to hurt them in giving the testimony that's why most people don't talk about these experiences that they've had they're afraid people will think they're crazy they're afraid they'll be sent to the psych ward also in death bed experiences these people are about to die um i saw i believe it was an episode of gun smoke with my mom when i was taking her and marshall dylan was interviewing he he talked to somebody who was dying and he told somebody later he said death death has a way of scaring people to the truth people don't tend to want to just make up things when they're dying so we need to listen to them and you know what i find out through these it just gives me an assurance that we're on the right track there is an afterlife and in none of these experiences have i seen anybody showing off their super bowl rings showing off their degrees on the wall all these things that we think are so important you know what it's really just about god and love and people and valentine's day is coming up and some of you are thinking what am i going to get no no you need to be thinking of who are you going to give something to who am i going to make feel special and when people have their lives reviewed they see what these other people were thinking when they treated them harshly or when they cut them down it's all about god it's all about love it's all about other people and it's not about all these things we get so wrapped up about it just gives me an assurance that we're on the right track love god love people you know it is interesting minimally you could say one lesson from this that god could be telling us is exactly what you said it's a kind of natural revelation that strips away what doesn't matter and focuses on what do what really does matter you have another book you've just written sent me i apologize i've not had a chance to go through it and send you my thoughts but we'll have you back on to talk about it it's on deathbed experiences and why i think your near-death experience research you're kind of taking what other people have done and saying here's how you understand it in one volume i think you're doing some fresh research on this that other people have not tackled so it's probably when do you expect that that will be out on deathbed experiences i'm trying to get out by the end of this year okay all right good well let me know months ahead we'll have you back on and we will we will talk about this and cover it you know i'll tell you one quick story i'm not charismatic steve i'm just skeptical when i honestly want to hear about miracle claims and near-death experiences i'm just naturally skeptical it's how god's wired me i've always been that way i go and i study at a local cop shop and one more and i was like you know i'm gonna go to a different one and i met a guy there for years i see him studying about um he works at a local church and leads the men's bible study i always see him at this other one every few weeks well he comes walking into this uh coffee shop i've never seen him at before comes up sits down he says can i sit down and share something with you like out of blue i was like sure he goes can i share a near-death experience with you and he shares this moving emotional powerful story i don't know him that well we've just had some conversations at the end he goes what do you think i said well i came to this coffee shop and right in front of me and i pulled out of my backpack i said i have all these books on near-death experiences because i just sat down to write some lectures on this and let me tell you you're not crazy and i started walking through the data with him and he was just blown away now i'm sure someone could explain that away is a coincidence but the more i read some of the stuff the more i pause i'm like wow there's something powerful here that would at least encourage skeptics to consider with an open mind and not just write it off so check out uh steve miller's book near death experiences a great place to start hey we've got some interviews coming up on some topics that'll be really interesting we have one coming up on cannabis and the christian interestingly enough can christians smoke pot marijuana how should we think about this uh we're going to talk about the case for capitalism and socialism next week with jay richards will not want to miss that three of my favorite people coming on to do behind the scenes interview wayne grudem has agreed to come on nancy pierce seen lee strobel to just talk about kind of a lot of stories they haven't shared publicly people that influenced their lives books that shaped them just experiences that they've had that shaped them as people and ministers those are some of my favorite interviews to do so make sure you hit the subscribe button and a little notification so you know when these interviews are coming up uh very soon last thing again this channel is sponsored by biola apologetics so we would love to have you come study with us we just started steve this is good for you to know because i know people ask you we now have a fully distanced program where people don't have to come out to campus and it's the top rated apologetics program we have students from every profession like every walk of life ages races you name it who are like i just want to study apologetics and we've got a first-class uh uh team we'd love to help you that so if you look in the notes below there's a link to that we'd love to have you think about joining us so steve hang on don't disappear i kept you a couple minutes over than i had promised but thanks everybody for joining us i look forward to seeing you on our next interview coming up soon have a great night thank you so much

Channel: Dr. Sean McDowell

Views: 22,545

Rating: 4.8874559 out of 5

Keywords: NDE, NDEs, near-death experiences, tunnel, afterlife, heaven, hell, proof, God, evidence

Id: fhqLc6GPu-U

Length: 64min 55sec (3895 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/smilelaughenjoy]

It was an ok video, but one of them mentioned being into christian apologetics, and the other suggested denying NDEs that don't fit with their view of the bible.