Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven: A Brief Introduction in Plain Language (5 page)

Reply #3: Many experiments
have been done with oxygen reduction, so that the impact is well known. Reduced
oxygen produces mental laziness, irritability, difficulty concentrating,
difficulty remembering.
As the oxygen supply dwindles further,
the person becomes more disoriented and confused until he passes out. When the
oxygen is cut off entirely, the brain ceases to function. This is precisely the
opposite of the experience reported by those with NDEs, who speak of extremely
vivid experiences, heightened clarity of thought, and extreme peace. In the
thousands of cases where researchers have progressively reduced the oxygen
supply to their subjects, not one has reported an NDE.
(49)

Reply #4: We can often
pinpoint the time of the NDE, ruling out the NDE occurring just before blacking
out or immediately prior to resuscitation. 
Reports from outside
the body as to what was happening in the hospital room seem to rule out the NDE
occurring just before blacking out or immediately prior to resuscitation. 

Reply #5: An NDE is very
different from experiences caused by lack of oxygen.
A
British Royal Air Force pilot experienced high altitude anoxia, then years
later experienced an NDE. He reported that the two experiences were completely different.
(50)
 

Reply #6: Let’s imagine, for
the sake of argument, that if you deprive your brain of enough oxygen, it will
produce a full-blown NDE. Would this actually prove anything?
After
all, the more you deprive your brain of oxygen, the nearer you come to death.
Thus, are you really saying nothing more than “taking a person close to death
tends to produce a NDE?” But we already knew that. Drain a person of a certain
amount of his blood and he may experience an NDE. Collide head on with a
transfer truck at 70 mph and you may experience an NDE. Cut off your oxygen long
enough and you might experience an NDE.
(51)

Reply #7: Finding the
trigger may not explain the experience.
Imagine that I say to a ten-year-old,
as we both stare at my computer, “It’s beyond me how I can type a few words
into the search box on my browser and a video trailer for ‘The Hobbit’ plays
for me.” The child might reply incredulously, “It’s this button, silly old man –
pressing the ‘on’ button makes it all happen!” 

Well, of course pressing that button
starts the computer. But discovering the computer’s “trigger” doesn’t get us
any closer to explaining the inner workings of a computer. 

So theoretically, even if scientists one
day shock a part of my brain that triggers a high definition, fully interactive
near-death experience, they’ve done nothing more than found a trigger that
makes it happen. The deeper questions would remain unanswered:

·
        
“What’s
actually happening?”

·
        
“Is
the experience I triggered coming solely from the brain, or did I merely find a
trigger in the brain that opens a gate to the other side?”

·
        
“Why
is it happening?”

If an NDE were purely naturalistic – a vivid
visual experience that’s somehow hard-coded into a large number of brains,
awaiting someone to push the go button (via oxygen deprivation, an electrode to
the brain, etc.) - why is it that
this
very predictable experience,
rather than an infinite number of other possible experiences, is hard coded
there? And what worldview would best explain its presence in the brain – an atheistic
or theistic worldview?

If the NDE experience were not an out-of-body
experience, but were merely a high definition, interactive dream experience
hard-coded in the brain, then from the atheist worldview it would seem that NDEs
should produce some kind of significant survival benefit, otherwise classic
Darwinism would imply that the experience would have never evolved and
survived. But what possible survival benefit might that be? Rather than causing
those who experience NDEs to yearn for a longer earthly life and expend their
resources to make that happen, NDEs instead cause people to view their earthly
lives as less desirable and focus more on the well-being of others rather than
their own survival.   

More useful than the current NDE, from a
naturalistic standpoint, might be an experience whereby the being of light
reviews, with great displeasure, instances where the subject consumed Big Macs
and Twinkies while avoiding vegetables and exercise.

I’ll
let three of the most respected authorities in NDEs – Dr. Bruce Greyson, Dr.
Emily Williams Kelly, and Dr. Edward F. Kelly, sum up the current state of
research on physiological explanations.

“…theories proposed thus far consist
largely of unsupported speculations about what might be happening during an
NDE.
None
of the proposed neurophysiological mechanisms have been shown
to occur in NDEs. A naturally occurring ketamine-like substance, for example,
has not been identified in humans (Strassman 1997, 31). Moreover, some of these
proposals, such as the role of expectation or the presence and effects of
anoxia, are
inconsistent
with what few data we do have.”
(52)

Reflections on Naturalistic Explanations

We
could talk about many other explanations, which have also been considered and
found inadequate over the past 35 years of NDE study:

·
        
Natural
chemicals released by the body during trauma can have a euphoric effect. (While
these might explain a feeling of peace, they hardly explain the appearance of
all the specific elements of NDEs.)
(53)  

·
        
The
impact of drugs administered during cardiac arrest. (But what about NDEs in the
absence of these drugs?)
(54)

·
        
Perhaps
those who experience NDEs are prone to delusions. (Subjects are typically
screened for this. Studies have found them psychologically healthy, not
differing from those who don’t experience NDEs regarding “age, gender, race,
religion, religiosity, intelligence, neuroticism, extroversion, anxiety, or Rorschach
measures.”
(55)

·
        
Perhaps
patients are making things up. (But why the consistency of their stories? And
what are their motives, since most NDErs are extremely reluctant to tell their
stories, for fear of being ridiculed?)
(56)

·
        
Perhaps
NDEs are a deception by Satan. (So why do the experiences motivate people to
seek God, love people, and practice godly virtues?)

·
        
Perhaps
not one, but multiple physiological and psychological factors converge to
produce the experience. (See my appendices on two such attempts: Susan Blackmore’s
‘Dying Brain Hypothesis,’ and Dr. Kevin Nelson’s book,
The Spiritual Doorway
in the Brain.
)

Summary of Naturalistic Explanations

None
of the naturalistic hypotheses I studied came anywhere near explaining this
experience. As one thorough review of the studies on NDEs (up to 2005) concluded,

·
        
“…research
has not yet revealed a characteristic that either guarantees or prohibits the
occurrence, incidence, nature, or aftereffects of an NDE.”
(57)

·
        
“…very
little evidence exists that supports any of these hypotheses.”
(58)

Other
literature reviews concluded similarly.
(59)

If
this is indeed the current state of research, what is to be made of occasional articles
with sensational titles that boast that naturalistic explanations have been
found? For example, in 2011,
Scientific American
published the article “Peace
of Mind: Near-Death Experiences Now Found to Have Scientific Explanations –
Seeing your life pass before you and the light at the end of the tunnel, can be
explained by new research on abnormal functioning of dopamine and oxygen flow.”

Articles
of this nature that I’ve read fail to show an even basic familiarity with the
wealth of NDE research over the past 35 years. Instead, they just repeat the same
worn-out hypotheses that have been shown inadequate time after time during decades
of research.
(60)
For a review of this popular
Scientific American
article, see Appendix #2.   

The
present state of research finds naturalistic explanations inadequate. But this
doesn’t mean that we must instead accept a hypothesis that invokes the supernatural.
One could always argue that better naturalistic explanations may present
themselves in the future. Yet, the evidence presented in the next section makes
doubtful the potential of any hypothesis to explain NDEs as purely naturalistic
phenomena.

Chapter
5
Do NDEs Provide Compelling Evidence That God and Heaven Exist?

As I
said in the preface, when making decisions, we typically seek sufficient
evidence rather than the absolute proof that can be obtained only in predefined
fields such as math. I can prove absolutely that 1 + 1 = 2, but only because we
agree to a definition of each of those symbols and because my little equation
currently refers to nothing in the real world.

But what
if my wife says, “Check the house before we go to bed. How many people are
here?” I might peek in every room and report, “I count only two of us.” (Applying
my math, Cherie plus me equals two.) But upon reflection, once I introduced
real objects into the equation, I also introduced doubt. After all, did I
really check
every
closet
and
the attic? And even if I checked
the house thoroughly, how could I know with absolute certitude that one of our
stealthy teens didn’t climb in through a window immediately
after
I
checked his room?   

My
point? There will always be evidence pro and con for any decision we face and
multiple hypotheses can be set forth to explain any phenomena. So in the same
way that we make most of life’s important decisions, whether they be in our
personal lives (“Should I marry her?”), in a scientific field (“Is relativity
correct?”), or in a courtroom (“Is he guilty?”),
we’re
weighing the
evidence to decide which hypothesis best fits the data  we’ve observed.
Some
call it
inferring to the best explanation.
 

While
many arguments have been forwarded to try to explain NDEs naturalistically,
don’t let the number of proposed explanations cloud the issue. We could spin
new hypotheses all day long.
(1)
But at the end of the day, our task is
to decide which explanation best explains the data.   

To
simplify matters, we have only two broad explanations before us: 

Explanation #1 -
The
spiritual explanation
- In a near-death experience, the
person is truly alive, with a fully functioning mind, in a nonmaterial,
spiritual world outside the body. 

Explanation #2 -
The
naturalistic explanation
- The NDE experience can be
explained solely in terms of brain function. It may be caused by lack of
oxygen, psychological expectations, or a host of other naturalistic causes. If
it can be satisfactorily explained in naturalistic terms, there’s no need to
postulate an independently functioning mind and heavenly realms.   

Above,
we examined the main explanations put forth to defend a naturalistic
explanation. Now we’ll look at the evidence for the spiritual explanation. As
you read, ask yourself the question, “Which of these two explanations (hypotheses)
best accounts for the known facts?”  

Exhibit
#1
- Reports (from outside the body) of the hospital room or
accident location provide corroborating evidence.

According
to Moody,
“Several doctors have told me…that they are utterly baffled
about how patients with no medical knowledge could describe in such detail and
so correctly the procedure used in resuscitation attempts, even though these
events took place while the doctors knew the patients involved to be ‘dead.’”
(1)

Here’s
an example:

A
comatose man was found in a park and given heart massage by passers-by. Upon
arrival at the coronary unit, while he was still comatose, a nurse removed the
man’s dentures and put them in a crash cart. After about ninety minutes, his
blood pressure and heart rhythm stabilized, but he remained comatose and was
transferred to intensive care. Over a week later, he came out of his coma and
was transferred back to the coronary care unit, where he spotted the nurse and
said, “…you know where my dentures are.” He described the crash cart, with
bottles on top of it, and the sliding drawer underneath, where his dentures had
been placed.
He said that he watched the entire scene from above, outside his body. Further,
he accurately described the room and those who were present, noting that he was
very concerned that they might stop trying to resuscitate him. The nurse
confirmed everything, including the fact that during their attempts at
resuscitations, they were “extremely negative about the patient’s prognosis.”
(2)
 

This
isn’t an isolated example.
(3)
The books and studies I read presented an
abundance of cases with specific, corroborating evidence.
(4)
Evidence of
accurate perception while outside the body might involve finding objects that were
lost, accurately reporting specific conversations they heard while under deep
anesthesia, identifying unexpected or unusual objects, seeing people in another
room doing an activity like praying, giving vivid detailed descriptions of the
operating procedure, seeing someone on the other side who they didn’t know had
died,
meeting someone on the other side who they’d never met and/or knew
existed (like a still-born sibling or their real father - who could be later
identified with pictures), etc.
(5)
   

Cases
claiming corroboration are scattered throughout the professional literature.
(6) 
 Fortunately, Professor Janice Holden, Chair of the Department of
Counseling and Higher Education at the University of North Texas, identified over
100 such cases, noting the publication and page numbers. Many more corroborated
cases exist, but she chose to exclude, for example, autobiographical books,
books that didn’t report a systematic study of NDEs, and “single case studies
described outside the peer-reviewed literature.” She included only incidents
where people were actually near death. (Those who want to read a large number
of cases with corroboration can use Holden’s collection in Appendix #8 as a
starting point.)

If I
were an atheist, this evidence would make me squirm. Attempts to explain this
naturalistically appear to fall woefully short. If these are merely good
guesses, as some suggest,
(7)
naturalists should put forth a reasonable hypothesis
as to why people guess so extraordinarily well during NDEs. (Or perhaps great
guessers, for some naturalistic reason, tend to have NDEs. Let them compete on
Jeopardy.) As the evidence stands today, good guessing falls short as an
explanation, once you read the cases in detail.
(8)

Dr.
Sartori, in her five-year prospective study of NDEs in the United Kingdom,
tested the “good guesses hypothesis.” She asked cardiac patients who didn’t
report seeing their bodies to try to guess what happened during their resuscitation.
According to Sartori:

“Twenty-eight of these patients were
unable to even guess as to what procedures had been performed. Three reported
scenario based on things they had seen in popular hospital dramas on TV and two
guessed about the scenario. All had errors and misconceptions of the equipment
used and incorrect procedures were described. Many guessed that the
defibrillator had been used when, in fact, it had not. ...This contrasted
significantly with the surprisingly accurate accounts made by patients who
claimed to be out of their bodies and observing the emergency situation.”
(9)

Cardiologist
Michael Sabom did an exceptional job of questioning his NDErs about their
operating procedures. Skeptical from the start about the reality of their
claims to out-of-body experiences, he slowly came around after he saw how
detailed and accurate they could be in their descriptions. Sabom notes that
each resuscitation can differ in significant ways, making it very unlikely they
could guess which procedures, in what order, were used in their cases.
Concerning one patient, Sabom reports,

“When I asked him to tell me what
exactly he saw, he described the resuscitation with such detail and accuracy
that I could have later used the tape to teach physicians.”
(10)
   

Imagine
you’ve been chosen for jury duty, deciding a case where a doctor has ordered
his patient to enter a psychiatric ward because, after her cardiac arrest, she
claimed to have visited heaven and spoken to angels. The defense argues that she
is perfectly sane and actually visited heaven. The prosecution argues that such
events are impossible and all who claim them are delusional. During eight hours
of testimony, the defense lines up 100 NDErs to testify that they too made the
trip to the other side. Accompanying each NDEr are doctors, nurses, and family
members who verify things seen and heard while outside their bodies. Would this
evidence be compelling to an unbiased jury?

Exhibit
#2
– NDErs Report Enhanced Mental Functions While their
Brains were Severely Compromised.  

NDEs
can’t be explained by brain processes if the brain isn’t functioning well
enough to produce vivid consciousness. This is what initially baffled van
Lommel concerning his early patients who experienced NDEs. The experiences
occurred when their brains were apparently not functioning.
(11)
To expand
upon this for his readers, he wrote entire chapters on “What Happens in the
Brain When the Heart Suddenly Stops?” and “What Do We Know About Brain
Function?”
(12)

Atypical
cases of consciousness while under anesthesia or during cardiac arrest do exist.
An extremely small percentage of people (.18 percent, or less than two out of
1,000)
(13)
have reported brief episodes of consciousness under general anesthesia.
For those who do experience consciousness (sometimes due to improper
administering of anesthesia),
it’s not pleasant.
(14)
There have
been cases of people experiencing brief consciousness during CPR
(15)
,
before the heart establishes a rhythm of its own. But the reason such cases are
written up in the literature is that they’re so rare.

By
far the typical experience reported by those undergoing anesthesia or experiencing
cardiac arrest is no memory of anything. In such circumstances, the brain is unable
to either maintain consciousness or form memories.
(16)
Yet, during this
time, NDErs consistently report, not vague, confused consciousness, but vivid, “realer
than real” consciousness. It’s like their brains are on hyper drive, some
reliving their entire lives within a brief span of time. And their memories, as
we have seen, far from being cloudy and fleeting (as we’d expect from a
compromised brain) are retained so efficiently that decades later they report
remembering each detail as if it happened yesterday.   

Corroborating
evidence from studies of patients observed in the hospital room during their
out-of-body experiences confirms that many NDE’s couldn’t have been vivid
dreams that occurred immediately prior to unconsciousness or during the early
stages of resuscitation. Other medical data argues against patients piecing
together information they picked up while still conscious. During the brief
moments when the brain is losing or regaining consciousness, due to loss of
blood flow to the brain (e.g., in cardiac arrest) or anesthesia, brain function
is disorganized and confused. Memory is also severely impacted.
(17)
 

Here’s
an example (which we summarized in the preface):

Pamela
Reynolds, a thirty-five-year-old mother, underwent a complex surgery to repair
a giant aneurysm in a cerebral artery. As reported by cardiologist Michael
Sabom and Neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler, in preparation for the surgery they
lowered her body temperature to about 50 degrees Fahrenheit and drained all the
blood from her head, so that her brain was had ceased functioning by all three
clinical tests - “her electroencephalogram was silent, her brain-stem response
was absent, and no blood flowed through her brain….” Additionally, her eyes
were taped shut, she was put under deep anesthesia, brain stem activity was
monitored with “100-decible clicks emitted by small molded speakers inserted
into her ears” and her entire body, except for the small area of the head they
were cutting on, was covered completely.

During
this time, Reynolds experienced a vivid NDE where she watched part of the
surgery and reported back to the doctors what she saw - describing in minute
detail the specialized instruments they used for the surgery. For example, she
described the saw as looking “a lot more like a drill than a saw. It even had
little bits that were kept in this case that looked like the case that my
father stored his socket wrenches in when I was a child….  And I distinctly
remember a female voice saying: ‘We have a problem. Her arteries are too
small.’ And then a male voice: ‘Try the other side.’”

The
instruments were covered prior to her surgery, so there’s no way she could have
seen the instruments beforehand. She went on to describe passing through a
tunnel, talking to deceased relatives who looked like they were in the prime of
life, and being sent back to her body to wake up at resuscitation. Note: Reynolds
describes her NDE as a continuous, uninterrupted narrative, from the onset of
her surgery till she was sent back from the other side and regained
consciousness.