Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven: A Brief Introduction in Plain Language (4 page)
Authors: J. Steve Miller
Future scientific evidence may disprove
the big bang theory and quantum mechanics and relativity and many of the other
scientific theories that currently make the most sense in the light of our
current observations and experiments. Yet, scientists believe these theories
because
today’s
evidence clearly weighs in their favor. Future evidence
is an unknown that can’t be accounted for.
Objection #6: Many NDEs
are reported years after the experience. Thus, as with all stories we tell and
retell, we tend to embellish them until they only faintly resemble the original
experience.(18)
Reply
#1: Some researchers interviewed their subjects as soon as possible after the
event, often while they were still in the hospital.(19)
Reply
#2: When these same subjects were re-interviewed many years later, researchers
found the stories to remain remarkably unchanged.
They were not embellished.
(20)
These
follow-up studies give us reason to trust the accuracy of stories reported to
other researchers years after the experiences. As a person I interviewed said
of her NDE, which occurred 38 years ago, “I remember it like it was yesterday.”
Objection
#7 - Researchers probably bias their observations because they’re typically
people who already believe in the afterlife.(21)
Reply: Of the researchers I
read, almost all of them indicated that they dismissed the validity of NDEs
before they studied them.
Van Lommel specifically stated that
prior to his research, he was a thoroughgoing materialist and reductionist, meaning
that he didn’t believe in God, heaven, or valid religious experience. As he
stated, “That death is the end used to be my own belief.”
(22)
Prior to
Dr. Rawlings’ (
Beyond Death’s Door
) encounter with an NDE, he “had
always thought of death as painless extinction.” To him, religion was “all
hocus-pocus.”
(23)
Dr. Sabom studied NDEs to refute them, to prove that
they could be explained naturalistically. It was not until he’d researched for
a year that he began to believe people truly left their bodies.
(24)
Later,
Sabom would conclude,
“
I have searched for such an explanation [naturalistic]
over the past five years and have not yet found one that is adequate.”
(25)
Sartori
dismissed the first NDE she encountered as “wishful thinking.”
(26)
None
of the researchers I read appeared in any way to have started out as paranormal
advocates who set out to study NDEs to prove their worldviews.
According to Dr. Bruce Greyson, professor
of Psychiatry & Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia and one
of the most respected researchers in the field, “Most near-death researchers
did not go into their investigations with a belief in mind-body separation, but
came to that hypothesis based on what their research found.”
(27)
Objection
#8: The descriptions of hospital rooms and doctors doing CPR could be explained
by everyone’s familiarity with television hospital scenes.(28)
Reply #1: This might explain
some reports. But when researchers speak of corroborating events, they don’t
consider such general reports as “I saw nurses dressed in white and a doctor
beating on my chest.”
Stories used for corroboration include
unexpected
details that someone couldn’t have guessed. For instance, during open heart
surgery, one patient observed, from outside his body, his cardiac surgeon
“flapping his arms as if trying to fly.” He reported his NDE and the quirky
movement to his cardiologist, who showed great surprise that he could have
known that. The explanation? This surgeon had a peculiar habit. If he had not
yet scrubbed in and wanted to avoid touching anything with his hands, he would
hold his hands against his chest and guide his assistants by pointing with his
elbows. The researcher confirmed this event with the cardiologist, Dr. Anthony
LaSala.
(29)
Reply #2: Dr. Sabom set up a
control group of cardiac patients who did not report NDEs.
When
he asked what they thought happened during resuscitation from cardiac arrest,
they made significant errors, as opposed to the accurate descriptions by NDErs.
(30)
Objection
#9: It’s only natural that they should dream of the afterlife, since they’re
psychologically primed by the common belief in an afterlife.(31)
Reply #1: A visit to the
afterlife was NOT expected by those who didn’t believe in the afterlife, which
was a large percentage of van Lommel’s subjects in Holland.
Reply #2: Much of what they
experienced was totally unexpected, even by people who believed in an
afterlife.
First of all, many, if not most, didn’t think they were
dying. For the great majority, their experiences didn’t come toward the end of
long-term illnesses like cancer, where people know they’re about to die and
thus psychologically prepare for death. Rather, many have a chest pain and
suddenly flat line, so that there’s no chance to think, “I’m dying.” In van
Lommel’s study,
“Most
patients experienced no fear of death preceding their cardiac arrest; its onset
was so sudden that they failed to notice it.”
(32)
Even for those who have indicators that
they’re in danger of death, remember that the first psychological reaction
people experience when confronted with possible death is often denial, not
acceptance.
(33)
So expectations of death wouldn’t seem
to impact an event before which most weren’t expecting death. Consistent with
this observation, in many NDEs, when a person hovers above his body, it takes a
moment for him to figure out that he’s dead. Obviously, he wasn’t expecting to
die.
It’s also relevant how many report being
astounded
at various points in their experience. They were astonished
that they could see their bodies from above. They were astonished that nobody
in the room could see them and they could go right through people. I could go
on and on. Why would they have been so astounded if this were precisely what
they were expecting? Of the hundreds of experiences that I read, I found no
person reporting, “It’s exactly the experience I expected to have when I died.”
The reports were quite the opposite.
As researchers have discovered,
“Experiences often run sharply counter to the individual’s specific religious
or personal beliefs and expectations about death.”
(34)
Reply #3: Even for those
raised in church-going families, the typical NDE experience isn’t at all what
they’d expect.
If I believed I was close to death, I’d
be expecting my
final
death rather than a death I’d return from. Thus, drawing
from my childhood exposure to Christianity, my mental picture of death consists
of me standing in line, waiting to see a God with a visible body who sits on
His throne.
I certainly don’t have an expectation of
first meeting loved ones in a place void of space and time where I hover over
my hospital bed, communicate wordlessly to deceased relatives, travel through a
tunnel, etc. In fact, I wouldn’t expect any of the elements listed by Moody, at
least not in the manner that people report experiencing them, even though I
believe in an afterlife.
Again, if I thought I was dying, I’d
expect what I picture for a
final
death, not an intermediary experience
from which I’ll return.
Reply #4: Although today
many people have heard or read about NDEs, thus giving a subset of today’s
population some idea of what to expect, this certainly wouldn’t explain the
cases when Moody did his interviews in the 1970’s, before this was widely
reported.
Objection
#10: Some experiences conform to cultural expectations.(35)
Reply #1: Often the
differences mentioned weren’t differences in the experiences themselves, but in
their
interpretation
of the experience.
For
example, a Jew may report that he saw Jehovah; a Christian reports that she saw
Jesus; a Muslim reports that he saw Allah. But upon further questioning, they
may have each seen and spoken with a great bright light, which they
assumed
was to be identified with the God of their spiritual heritage.
(36)
Reply #2: If these
experiences are directed by God, it makes sense that He might personalize the
experience to make it meaningful and comforting for each subject.
Example:
When children have NDEs, they often see their deceased pets rather than dead
relatives (of which a five year old may not know any).
Reply #3: Once again, the
really astounding thing about these experiences is the remarkable similarity of
experiences, regardless of sex, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status,
education, or religious (or irreligious) preference.
This
has been demonstrated in well over a dozen studies.
(37)
Objection
#11: Parts of NDEs have been induced by electrically stimulating the brain or
being disoriented as a pilot.
Pilots on long, boring
flights have been known to see themselves from outside the plane, looking in on
themselves. During electronic stimulation of the brain, some people have seen
certain body parts from a position outside the body.
Response #1: These
experiences seem vastly different from the ones experienced in NDEs.
A
visual of your body in the distance (memories we could easily pull from our brains,
since we typically imagine ourselves from a bird’s eye view, for example,
imagining ourselves walking along a beach) is far different from a visually
stunning, interactive, direct communication with deceased friends and relatives
and a personal life review discussed with a being of light.
Response #2: The
much-heralded reports of electrical stimulation, magnetic stimulation, and
epileptic seizures causing NDE-like experiences have been investigated and
found unconvincing.
They show no “striking similarity” to NDEs.
(39)
Temporal lobe seizures produce “random disorganized experiences.”
(40)
Ernst
Rodin, Medical Director of the Epilepsy Center of Michigan and Professor of
Neurology at Wayne State University, stated: “In spite of having seen hundreds
of patients with temporal lobe seizures during three decades of professional
life, I have never come across that symptomatology [classic components of NDEs]
as part of a seizure.”
(41)
Objection
#12: Fighter pilots, during rapid acceleration, sometimes experience tunnel
vision, pass out, and dream of friends.(42)
Reply: These experiences
have been studied extensively and are very unlike NDEs.
The
dreams are reported as dream-like, not experienced with the extremely vivid,
life-changing force of an NDE. The pilots see
living
friends and
relatives in their dreamlets, not
dead
people. The so-called tunnel
vision experienced by pilots is the absence of peripheral vision, not the
perception of a tunnel or the experience of moving through a tunnel. (It’s
caused by the reduction of blood pressure in the eyeballs, preceding a
temporary loss of vision.) There’s no life review. It doesn’t end with a
decision to return. The dreams aren’t consistent at all – one will dream about
being at home with his family, another in a grocery store, another floating in
the ocean on his back.
(43)
Objection
#13: Oxygen deprivation can lead to certain elements of an NDE.(44)
Reply #1: In many NDEs, the
subject wasn’t deprived of oxygen.
In some cases NDEs occurred before
any physiological stress
(45)
, like an imminent traffic accident
(46),
or in a hospital where the oxygen levels in the blood were being carefully
monitored.
(47)
Reply #2: Researchers who
are cardiologists are intimately familiar with the impact of oxygen deprivation
in their patients, yet reject the depleted oxygen hypothesis.
It’s relevant that van Lommel, Sabom, and Rawlings are not only practicing
physicians, but cardiologists – and not just your average cardiologists next
door. Dr. Rawlings taught other physicians as part of the National Teaching
Faculty of the American Heart Association.
(48)
Dr. van Lommel is a
world-renowned cardiologist. Dr. Sabom was assistance professor of medicine,
division of cardiology, at Emory University Medical School. It’s an essential part
of their daily medical practice to understand and monitor the impact of anoxia
(no oxygen) and hypoxia (reduced oxygen) on their patients, particularly during
a cardiac arrest, where anoxia can cause brain damage in as little as three to
five minutes.
