Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven: A Brief Introduction in Plain Language (3 page)

Chapter 3
A Collage of Near-Death Experiences

NDEs
aren’t rare. Studies found four percent of the populations of Germany and the
USA reporting that they had experienced one. That’s over one out of 25 people,
or over nine million Americans.
(1)
But if you don’t hear about them from
friends and family, don’t be surprised. People tend to keep these experiences
to themselves, fearing that people will think they’re crazy.
(2)
This
helps explain Colton not immediately sharing his NDE with his family. (Alternatively,
perhaps Colton delayed because he was still ill immediately following his NDE. Additionally,
since a four-year-old might not realize the unusual nature of his experience,
it’s understandable that he might not bring it up until a relevant conversation
prompted him.)   

Researchers
share the fascinating details of thousands of NDEs. I’d recommend reading many
experiences in their entirety to get the full impact. I also recommend interviewing
some NDErs face to face. There’s something very compelling about hearing a
person you trust share his or her experience.

At
this point, I should lay out in a bit more detail what I mean by a near-death experience.
Rather than tell full stories, which are readily available in many other works,
I’ll put together the exact statements of many NDE reports, drawn from NDE
researchers and my own interviews, to form an abbreviated, coherent story. Note
that most people experience some of these elements, but not all. For example,
some might leave their bodies, view the medical team trying to revive them,
talk to a few deceased relatives, then return to their bodies, without
experiencing a tunnel trip to a being of light. Note also that most of them
struggled to put their experiences into words. It seems that no earthly
experiences provide close enough analogies.

So
here are some first-hand reports from the other side.
(3)

I’d never heard of a near-death experience,
and I’d never had any interest in paranormal phenomena or anything of that
nature.

I suddenly became aware of hovering over
the foot of the operating table and watching the activity down below around the
body of a human being. Soon it dawned on me that this was my own body. I also
heard the doctor say that he thought I was dead. (Later he confirmed saying
this, and he was astonished to learn that I’d heard it. I also told them that
they should mind their language during surgery.)

I was there. I was on the other side.
It’s simply too much for human words. Our words, which are so limited, can’t
describe it.

It was real – as real as me sitting
across from you and talking to you now. Nothing could ever convince me
otherwise.

I didn’t have to think, I knew
everything. I passed through everything. At once I realized: there’s no time or
space here.

I saw the most dazzling colors, which
was all the more surprising because I’m color-blind.

All the pain vanished and I began to
experience the most wonderful feelings. I couldn’t feel a thing in the world
except peace, comfort, ease. I felt that all my troubles were gone. I’ve never
felt so relaxed. I’ve never felt this happy before. It was so emotional that I
can’t possibly describe it.

I was overcome with a feeling of peace
that I’d never known on earth…. An overwhelming feeling of love came over me,
not the earthly feeling I was quite familiar with, but something I can’t
describe.

What I saw was too beautiful for words.
I was looking at a magnificent landscape full of flowers and plants that I
couldn’t actually name. It all looked hundreds of miles away. And yet I could
see everything in detail. It was both far away and close. It was completely
three-dimensional and about a thousand times more beautiful than my favorite
holiday destination in spring.

I was always surrounded by loving
spiritual beings of light.

I had the impression that this was a
different dimension altogether. And if anything was missing it was our earthly
conception of time!

Everything was suffused with an
indescribable love.

The knowledge and messages going through
me were so clear and pure.

I talked with Mr. Van der G., the father
of my parents’ best friend. When I told my parents after waking up, they said
to me that Mr. Van der G. had died and been buried during my coma. I couldn’t
have known that he was dead.

I saw both my dead grandmother and a man
who looked at me lovingly but whom I didn’t know. Over ten years later my
mother confided on her deathbed that I’d been born from an extramarital
affair…. My mother showed me a photograph. [It was] the unfamiliar man I’d seen
more than ten years earlier.

I went through this dark, black vacuum
at super speed. You could compare it to a tunnel, I guess. The darkness was so
deep and impenetrable that I could see absolutely nothing; but this was the
most wonderful, worry-free experience you can imagine.

I saw a bright light, and on my way
there I heard beautiful music and I saw colors I’d never seen before. The
light…was of a kind that I’d never seen before and that differs from any other
kind such as sunlight. It was white and extremely bright, and yet you could
easily look at it. It’s the pinnacle of everything there is. Of energy, of love
especially, of warmth, of beauty. I was immersed in a feeling of total love.

…from the moment the light spoke to me,
I felt really good – secure and loved. The love which came from it is just
unimaginable, indescribable. It was a fun person to be with! And it had a sense
of humor, too – definitely! I
never
wanted to leave the presence of this
being.

My whole life so far appeared to be
placed before me in a kind of panoramic, three-dimensional review, and each
event seemed to be accompanied by an awareness of good and evil or by an
insight into its cause and effect. Throughout, I not only saw everything from
my own point of view, but also I knew the thoughts of everybody who’d been
involved in these events, as if their thoughts were lodged inside me. It meant
that I saw not only what I had done or thought but even how this had affected
others, as if I was seeing with all-knowing eyes. And throughout, the review
stressed the importance of love. I can’t say how long this life review and
insight into life lasted; it may have been quite long because it covered every
single subject, but at the same time it felt like a split second because I saw
everything at once. It seemed as if time and distance didn’t exist.

It was clear to me why I’d had cancer.
Why I had come into this world in the first place. What role each of my family
members played in my life, where we all were within the grand scheme of things,
and in general what life is all about. The clarity and insight I had in that
state are simply indescribable.

I had wanted to stay there…and yet I
came back. Back to the pain and to the doctor’s deafening screams and slaps.
I’m furious, incredibly furious! From that moment it was a real struggle to
live my life inside my body, with all the limitations I experienced at the
time…. But later I realized that this experience was in fact a blessing, for
now I know that the mind and body are separate and that there’s life after
death. My worldview underwent a radical transformation.

As
people examine their NDEs from every angle, they reject suggestions that their
experiences were visions or vivid dreams or hallucinations. They believe they
actually experienced the other side. That’s why they hesitate to share it with
their doctors or even friends and family. It would be easy to say, “Hey, I had
the most fascinating, realistic dream during surgery! Want to hear it?”

But
they can’t say that.

They
believe it was
real
,
more
than a dream, putting them in the
uncomfortable situation of having a life-changing experience that they fear nobody
will believe. Not knowing how common these experiences are, they keep it to
themselves or share it privately with a trusted soul-mate.
(4)  

When
van Lommel re-interviewed patients at two years and eight years after their
NDEs, they reported life changes that differ significantly from his control
group of people who had heart attacks with no NDE. For example, they have no
more fear of death, see the vast importance of love, gravitate toward helping
professions, and show greater empathy and compassion. They’re also less materialistic
and often a bit uncomfortable living in a material world where so few
understand enhanced spiritual values.
(5)

Chapter 4
Naturalistic Explanations

People
suggest many possible explanations for NDEs, and we should welcome their
thoughts and analyses. Science progresses as researchers dream up every
conceivable explanation (or hypothesis) and evaluate which explanation makes
the most sense in light of the available data.

Of
course, one explanation is that NDEs are real experiences with life after
death. I’ll consider the arguments for that position later. But first, let’s consider
some objections to this position. Moody
(1)
, Sabom
(2)
, van Lommel
(3)
,
Sartori
(4)
,
and the other primary NDE researchers seriously
consider naturalistic explanations, but ultimately find them inadequate in
light of their findings.    

Since
this book is introductory rather than exhaustive, I’ll briefly discuss some of
the
primary
naturalistic suggestions, while noting other sources (see extended
discussions in my endnotes and appendices) for those who wish to explore
further. For a more in depth discussion, I’d recommend
Science and the
Near-Death Experience
, by Chris Carter. The entire book (almost 300 pages)
is dedicated to evaluating naturalistic hypotheses in a thoughtful,
well-researched, well-reasoned manner.

I’ll
divide these explanations into five general categories: materialistic,
theoretical, methodological, psychological, and physiological. If it becomes
boring and tedious (some early readers had a low tolerance for detail) feel
free to hit the main points, get the gist, and move to the next section rather
than give up and miss the positive evidence altogether.   

Explanations from a
Materialist Worldview

Objection
#1: The mind doesn’t exist separate from the brain. Thus, the mind can’t
survive the death of the brain. NDEs must therefore be produced solely by the
brain.(5)

According
to this objection, what we call “mind” is typically viewed as a higher function
of the brain, the mind being totally dependent upon the brain to function
properly. Proof: As we age, our minds tend to work less efficiently. An elder
may say, “My mind’s not what it used to be.” But if the mind were separate from
the deteriorating brain, why wouldn’t our minds be just as sharp at 100 years
as they were at 25? And what about mind-altering diseases like Alzheimer’s,
which impact such mind functions as personality and decision making? If the
mind were
independent
of the brain, why would it appear to be totally
dependent
upon the brain for its function?

In
light of these observations, many argue that what we call “mind” must be purely
a function of the brain. As such, the mind couldn’t exist apart from the brain
and near-death experiences must be explained solely in terms of brain function.

Reply #1: Decrease in mental
functions could just as easily be explained by the brain functioning as a
receiver.
Imagine that you’ve never seen a radio. You turn it on
and hear music. But where does the music come from? Is the music contained
completely in the radio, much like the music in a CD player is contained in a
CD within the player? 

Several observations would support the
“everything’s in the machine” hypothesis of the radio. First, if you drop the
radio, the speakers may thereafter produce an annoying buzz. Second, if you
twist the tuner too hard, it becomes difficult to change to different music. It
would be easy to conclude from these observations that the music is totally
dependent upon the radio and contained solely in the radio. “Since damage to
the radio results in damage to the sound,” you might reason, “the music must be
solely contained in and produced by the radio. If the radio were destroyed, the
music would be destroyed with it.” 

But in the case of the radio, your
observations would have led you astray. The radio doesn’t
produce
the
music; it’s merely a
receiver
that allows you to
hear
the music.
Granted, the condition of the radio impacts the quality of the music that you
hear through it. But the invisible waves that carry the music to the radio are
still carrying the music whether your radio is in a condition to receive it or
not. If the radio dies, the waves that carry the music don’t die.

Similarly, van Lommel, Carter, and many
others surmise that the brain functions as a receiver for the mind. The mind
connects with the brain while we are in our body, but isn’t dependent upon the
brain for its existence. Damage to the brain impacts our ability to
access
our minds, much as damage to a radio impacts our ability to access radio
signals. This hypothesis would seem to be just as compatible with our
observations (mental decline during Alzheimer’s, aging, etc.) as the hypothesis
that the mind is merely a function of the brain.
(6)

Reply #2: NDEs provide
strong evidence that the mind is very much alive and well while the brain is
dead.
Corroborating evidence details the mind’s activity
outside of the body (e.g., hovering over the body observing the details of
surgery, returning with details learned from deceased relatives, etc.). We’ll expand
upon this point in Chapter 5.  

Objection
#2: I’m a very scientific person; I believe what I can see and touch. A brain I
can see. But disembodied minds remind me of ghosts and goblins and fairies,
which lie beyond the reach of science, since I can neither see nor touch them.(7)

Reply: Science now
recognizes that the tiny building blocks of matter aren’t solids that we can
see and touch.
They’re more like invisible waves – more mind-like
than particle-like. Granted, the entire concept of disembodied minds appears
rather foolish to some scientifically minded people – but perhaps only to those
who slept through the scientific breakthroughs of the 1900s, or failed to fully
break from the older scientific paradigms. Early physicists tended to view solid
atoms as the smallest bits of solid matter. They felt matter could be fully explained
with mathematical descriptions of how those atoms moved around, bounced off one
another, and combined to form new things.

But now we know that atoms aren’t solid.
In fact, they’re 99.999 percent empty space.
(8)
And even the parts of
the atom wandering around in all that empty space aren’t really “solid.” We’ve
never “seen” electrons with our eyes, even after our most powerful visual
microscopes magnify them. We see their
effects
, so that we know they
exist, but we have difficulty figuring out precisely what they
are
. We
know they’re
there,
but we can’t know their exact location when we’re
not observing them. In fact, scientists have strong evidence that electrons don’t
actually
have
a location until they’re observed. In their essence, they
seem to be more like invisible waves than observable particles, yet their
activities affect what we call physical things.

If this seems strange to you, welcome to
the wacky world of quantum physics! As bizarre as they are, these qualities of
subatomic particles have been confirmed over and over by numerous experiments
and are taught today as standard scientific knowledge.  

My point? Scientists work
with invisible, nonmaterial stuff (like electrons) every day. This nonmaterial
stuff interacts with and provides the building blocks for what we call physical
stuff. Just because you can’t see it or feel it or fully comprehend it doesn’t
mean it doesn’t exist. We know electrons exist, not because we can see them,
but because we observe their effects.

So it seems to me rather
unscientific to dismiss the possibility of independently functioning minds
outright, just because we can’t see them. If we find sufficient evidence of
their effects, we’d do well to believe in them even though we don’t fully
understand them. 

As astronomer V.A. Firsoff
wrote,

“To assert there is
only
matter
and no mind is the most illogical of propositions, quite apart from
the findings of modern physics, which show that there is no matter in the
traditional meaning of the term.”
(9)  

Groundbreaking physicist
Werner Heisenberg put it this way,

“Atoms are not
things
.
The electrons which form an atom’s shells are no longer things in the sense of
classical physics, things which could be unambiguously described by concepts
like location, velocity, energy, size. When we get down to the atomic level,
the objective world in space and time no longer exists, and the mathematical
symbols of theoretical physics refer merely to possibilities, not to facts.”
(10)
 

The revered Cambridge and Princeton
mathematician and physicist James Jeans wrote:

“The
stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe
begins to look more like a great thought than like a machine. Mind no longer
appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we ought rather
hail it as the governor of the realm of matter.”
(11)  

Theoretical Objections

Objection
#3: If everyone has a soul, shouldn't everyone who suffers cardiac arrest have
an NDE?(12)

Reply #1: Perhaps all have
the experience, but not everyone remembers it.
For
example, people with frightening near-death experiences sometimes mention the
experience immediately after being resuscitated, but then immediately forget
the experience, perhaps due to repressing it.
(13)  

Reply #2: Perhaps the
trigger for NDEs isn’t a cardiac arrest, but another physical activity that
sometimes, but not always, accompanies cardiac arrests.
As
research shows, many who have NDEs don’t experience a cardiac arrest. This
suggests that a physical trigger, if one exists, may be other than the cardiac
arrest itself.  

Reply #3: Perhaps the
trigger isn’t physical at all.
Remember, it’s not their
final death, just a
brush with
death. If there is indeed a God, He knows
the NDE is a parenthesis in earthly life, not a final entrance into the
afterlife. Perhaps He allows only those who need a glimpse of the other side (e.g.,
for personal assurance or a challenge to life change) to get a glimpse of
eternity.
(14)

Objection
#4: Sometimes what people see on the other side doesn’t jive with reality, like
encountering people who aren’t yet dead, mythological creatures, or making predictions
that don’t come true.(15)

Reply #1: These may be
pretty rare, because these specifics haven’t been described in any of the
reports from large-scale studies I’ve read.
For example,
concerning predictions (true or false), Moody notes that they occur in “an
extremely small percentage of NDEs”.
(16)
I did my own study of 100 complete
NDEs on Dr. Long’s NDERF site. None of these contained any of these elements,
indicating to me that they must be extremely rare.  

Reply #2: We’d expect a few
quirky stories to be mixed in with the mainstream.

We expect anomalies to surface from time
to time, since during an extended trauma people might have multiple experiences
that get confused. Surely, in such a state, we’d expect the occasional report
that confuses hallucinations and vivid dreams with their NDEs as they come in
and out of consciousness, sometimes numerous times. Surely, with massive trauma
to the brain, someone may experience not only a legitimate NDE, but later
hallucinate Barney and Big Bird, later confusing the two memories. If such
experiences were
typical
of an NDE, we’d have reason to question the
totality of the experience. But they’re apparently not typical.  

Reply #3: A subset of people
who report these experiences may be a bit loony, or prone to lie or to use
their experience for their own purposes.
A corrupt radio preacher
may report that, in his NDE, God told him that the world would end by the end
in 2015. But if the world doesn’t end, that hardly calls into question all
reports from the other side.

Objection
#5: But you can’t be 100 percent sure that there’s no natural explanation.
Science may one day completely explain NDEs as a result of purely naturalistic,
material causes.(17)

Reply: True. And if that day
comes, I should reweigh the evidence and humbly conclude, “Wow! Was I wrong
about NDEs!”
But unfortunately, I can’t transport
evidence from the future and weigh it to make up my mind today.