Chapter 30

Answering the “Heaven Tourism” Critics

Here is one of the most frustrating things about the debate over near-death experiences: critics love to lump everything together. A four-year-old’s story about sitting on Jesus’s lap? Same category as a prospective, peer-reviewed cardiac arrest study published in The Lancet. A bestselling memoir with no medical documentation whatsoever? Tossed in the same pile as over a hundred verified cases catalogued by three researchers who spent decades tracking down witnesses and medical records. A retracted book by a boy who admitted he made the whole thing up? Apparently that settles the matter for all NDE research, forever.

This is not fair. And it is not good reasoning. But it happens constantly.

In this chapter, we need to do something that many critics have failed to do: draw a clear, honest line between the popular “heaven tourism” genre—the bestselling books that tell dramatic stories of visits to heaven—and the serious, peer-reviewed, scientifically rigorous research on near-death experiences. These are not the same thing. They are not even close. And the weaknesses of the first category do absolutely nothing to undermine the strength of the second.

I want to be upfront about something. I share some of the critics’ concerns about the popular heaven tourism books. Some of them are poorly documented. Some of them contain theological claims that don’t hold up under scrutiny. At least one of them was an outright fabrication. The critics are right to raise these issues. Where they go wrong—badly wrong—is in treating the problems with popular accounts as if they discredit the entire field of NDE research. That is like saying that because a tabloid newspaper once published a false story about a political scandal, investigative journalism itself is unreliable. The logic simply does not hold.

A. The Critics’ Argument: Heaven Tourism Is a Problem

The critique of popular NDE books comes from several directions. Some critics approach it from a theological angle, arguing that these books contradict Scripture and lead people astray. Others approach it from a scientific or methodological angle, arguing that the books are unverifiable, sensationalized, and driven by profit motives. Both types of critique have something valuable to offer. The trouble starts when the critics draw conclusions that go far beyond what the evidence supports.

The Theological Critics

Jim Osman, in Selling the Stairway to Heaven, offers sharp theological critiques of three bestselling heaven tourism books: Don Piper’s 90 Minutes in Heaven, Todd Burpo’s Heaven Is for Real, and Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven.¹ His concerns are substantial. He argues that these books elevate personal experience above the authority of Scripture, contain theological claims that contradict the Bible, and encourage readers to look to human testimony rather than God’s Word for assurance about the afterlife.²

Osman’s critique of Piper is particularly pointed. He observes that of the 205 pages in 90 Minutes in Heaven, only fifteen are actually devoted to describing Piper’s time in heaven.³ The details Piper does provide are, in Osman’s assessment, remarkably thin. Piper claims he never actually entered the gates of heaven—everything he saw was outside the gates. Most strikingly, Piper states that he never saw Jesus or God the Father during his entire ninety minutes.⁴ Osman rightly asks: how can one spend ninety minutes at the threshold of heaven without encountering the One who is the very source of heaven’s joy?

Osman also flags a troubling inconsistency. In his book, Piper explicitly says he did not see God. But at a later speaking engagement, he told an audience that he did see God “way down the golden road up on a hill on His throne.” When confronted about this contradiction, Piper gave an answer that was, to put it gently, not satisfying.⁵ Contradictions like this are a serious problem. If someone is asking us to take their account of heaven as reliable, consistency is not optional.

Osman also devotes a full chapter to critiquing Heaven Is for Real, the story of four-year-old Colton Burpo. The book was written not by Colton himself—he was a preschooler—but by his father, Todd Burpo, the pastor of a Wesleyan church in Imperial, Nebraska. Osman raises fair questions about the reliability of a small child’s testimony, especially one filtered through a parent who is actively writing a book about it. Colton’s revelations about heaven emerged not all at once but gradually over the course of months and years, often in response to questions from his father.⁶ A skeptic does not have to be cynical to wonder how much of what eventually appeared in the published book was genuinely Colton’s unprompted memory and how much was shaped, even unconsciously, by a father’s leading questions and theological expectations. Todd Burpo already believed in heaven before Colton’s surgery. As Osman points out, Colton’s description of heaven turned out to be remarkably similar to what his father already believed—which is precisely what we would expect if a child were picking up on his parents’ expectations rather than reporting a genuine independent experience.

Osman also offers a thorough critique of Proof of Heaven by neurosurgeon Eben Alexander. Here the concerns are different but no less serious. Alexander describes himself as someone who had been a nominal Christian at best—practically a pagan, by his own admission. His NDE occurred during a week-long coma caused by a severe case of bacterial meningitis. The heaven he describes is strikingly non-Christian: he reports riding on a butterfly wing accompanied by a beautiful woman, communicating telepathically with a divine presence, and receiving messages about the nature of reality that sound more like New Age philosophy than biblical theology. Osman notes that Alexander lists Piper’s 90 Minutes in Heaven on his reading list without seeming bothered by the fact that his account of heaven is dramatically different from Piper’s.⁷ If both men genuinely visited heaven, why are their descriptions so radically dissimilar? And if they contradict each other, how can both be true? Osman sees this as a fatal problem for the entire genre.

Osman’s conclusion is blunt. He calls these books “cleverly devised fables” and insists that the discerning Christian should “reject such claims outright.”⁸ His overarching argument is that Scripture is sufficient, that no human experience should be treated as a supplement or confirmation of biblical truth, and that the heaven tourism industry is ultimately driven by celebrity status, book royalties, and movie deals rather than genuine encounters with the divine.

Lawrence’s Satanic Deception Theory

Raymond Lawrence, in Blinded by the Light, takes the critique even further. Lawrence is not content to say that popular NDE accounts are unreliable or theologically careless. He argues that the NDE phenomenon itself is satanic in origin.⁹ Lawrence writes as a former member of what he describes as an “NDE cult”—his own uncle, George Ritchie, was a well-known NDEr whose teachings Lawrence came to regard as spiritually dangerous.¹⁰

Lawrence catalogs the theological messages that he sees running through the popular NDE literature: universal salvation regardless of belief, the equality of all religions, salvation earned by good works rather than faith, reincarnation, the unimportance of church organizations, the idea that we will judge ourselves, and the elevation of experience over Scripture as the ultimate authority.¹¹ He argues that these messages are incompatible with biblical Christianity. Drawing on the work of John Ankerberg and John Weldon, Lawrence concludes that the Being of Light encountered in NDEs cannot be Christ, because the Being of Light’s messages contradict Christ’s own teachings in Scripture.¹²

Lawrence’s personal story gives his critique an emotional weight that Osman’s more straightforward theological analysis lacks. Lawrence describes how his uncle’s NDE teachings opened the door to what he experienced as demonic spiritual encounters during a youth retreat. These experiences, he writes, terrified him so deeply that he withdrew from any interest in Christ and spiraled into years of heavy drinking, drug use, and reckless living. He eventually came to faith in Christ through other means, but he attributes much of his spiritual damage to the NDE-influenced theology he absorbed from his uncle. The NDE messages, Lawrence writes, were “an NDE-occultic cake with a little scriptural icing”—they sounded Christian on the surface but were “in fact more in tune with New Age theology.”^12b

Lawrence also notes the enormous popularity of NDE books in secular culture. Moody’s Life After Life surpassed twelve million copies. Betty Eadie’s Embraced by the Light and Dannion Brinkley’s Saved by the Light both appeared on the New York Times bestseller list simultaneously.¹³ The NDE phenomenon, Lawrence argues, has infiltrated both secular culture and the Christian church, reshaping how people think about death, salvation, and eternity—and doing so in ways that directly oppose the gospel. NDE books have been studied in Sunday school classes. NDErs have appeared on Christian television programs like CBN’s 700 Club and TBN’s Praise the Lord. For Lawrence, this is not merely a cultural trend—it is a spiritual crisis. The church, he argues, has been “slow to recognize the Serpent in its midst.”

The Malarkey Retraction

Perhaps the most damaging blow to the heaven tourism genre came from within. In 2015, Alex Malarkey publicly admitted that his bestselling book, The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, was fabricated. After selling over a million copies, the young man whose name was on the cover confessed that he had made the whole story up.¹⁴ The publisher ceased publication. The retraction sent shockwaves through the Christian publishing world—and understandably so. If a million-copy bestseller about a trip to heaven turned out to be a lie, what reason do we have to trust any of the others?

The Malarkey case is worth reflecting on for a moment, because it reveals something important about the heaven tourism industry. Alex was a child when the accident occurred. His father, Kevin Malarkey, wrote the book. The story was marketed aggressively by a major Christian publisher. It sold enormous quantities. It generated speaking invitations, media appearances, and significant revenue. And through all of this, no one—not the publisher, not the editors, not the Christian bookstores that prominently displayed it—took the basic step of independently verifying the account. There was no peer review. There was no independent investigation. There was a compelling story, a sympathetic protagonist, and a massive market of readers who wanted to believe it. The system rewarded the story without ever checking whether it was true. That is the heaven tourism industry in a nutshell.

Hank Hanegraaff, the “Bible Answer Man,” also raised pointed concerns about popular NDE accounts. He documented theological problems in the claims of Don Piper and others, noting for instance that Piper claimed to speak authoritatively about heaven “from firsthand knowledge,” yet offered details that strained credulity—such as the claim that everyone he saw in heaven appeared at the same age they had been the last time he had seen them on earth, and that his grandfather still had his distinctive white hair and large nose.¹⁵ Hanegraaff also noted that Piper told a worldwide Christian television audience that because he had already died once, and people only die once, Jesus must return within his own lifetime—a breathtaking eschatological claim that goes far beyond anything Scripture teaches.

The cumulative picture painted by these critics is clear: the heaven tourism genre is unreliable, theologically dangerous, commercially motivated, and in at least one case an admitted fraud. Christians should reject these books and return to the sufficiency of Scripture.

B. Identifying Weaknesses: Where the Critics Overreach

I want to say plainly: there is real merit in these critiques. The Malarkey retraction was a scandal that deserved exposure. Osman’s observation about Piper’s contradictory accounts of whether he saw God is a legitimate concern. Lawrence’s warning about theologically careless NDE claims leading people away from the gospel is not unfounded. Some popular NDE books are sensationalized. Some are poorly documented. Some contain theological claims that cannot be squared with Scripture. I agree with the critics on all of these points.

But here is where the critics make a serious mistake—a mistake so fundamental that it undermines the entire thrust of their argument. They treat the weaknesses of popular accounts as if they invalidate the entire field of NDE research. They fail to draw any distinction between a father’s retelling of his four-year-old’s story and a prospective, peer-reviewed cardiac arrest study conducted by cardiologists in a hospital setting. They act as if debunking The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven means there is nothing left to talk about.

This is a logical error, and it has a name: the fallacy of composition. It is the mistake of assuming that what is true of some members of a group must be true of all members. Because some popular NDE books are unreliable, all NDE evidence must be unreliable. Because Alex Malarkey fabricated his story, the hundreds of verified cases documented in peer-reviewed medical journals must also be suspect. This reasoning is simply invalid.

We see this fallacy in other areas of life all the time, and we recognize it immediately. Imagine a district attorney who refused to prosecute any murder case because a few wrongful convictions had been overturned by DNA evidence. “Some convictions were wrong,” he says, “so we can’t trust any of them.” That reasoning would be absurd. The correct response to wrongful convictions is not to abandon the criminal justice system. It is to improve the quality of the evidence and to distinguish between strong cases and weak ones. The same principle applies here. The correct response to fabricated NDE stories is not to dismiss all NDE evidence. It is to distinguish between unverified popular accounts and rigorously documented, peer-reviewed research—and then to evaluate each category on its own merits.

Consider an analogy. Imagine someone wrote a bestselling book claiming to have been abducted by aliens. The book becomes wildly popular but turns out to be filled with inconsistencies, and the author eventually admits to fabricating parts of the account. Would this mean that all of astronomy is unreliable? Would it invalidate the peer-reviewed data from the Hubble Space Telescope or the findings published in the Astrophysical Journal? Of course not. The fraudulent popular account and the rigorous scientific research exist in completely different categories. Only a deeply confused person would throw out the second because of the first.

Yet this is precisely what the heaven tourism critics do with NDE research. Osman, for all his careful theological work, never once engages van Lommel’s Lancet study. Lawrence never addresses the verified cases in The Self Does Not Die. They critique Don Piper and Colton Burpo while ignoring Sam Parnia and Janice Miner Holden. They demolish the weakest examples of NDE claims while never confronting the strongest evidence.¹⁶

There is a second weakness in the critics’ arguments. Osman’s position, in particular, rests on the assumption that Scripture alone should be our source of information about heaven, and that any personal experience claiming to shed light on the afterlife is automatically suspect. He writes that the discerning Christian should “reject such claims outright” and that if you want a true picture of heaven, you should “read the one given in Revelation and be content with it.”¹⁷

I hold a high view of Scripture. I believe the Bible is the inspired, authoritative Word of God. But I also believe that God is a living God who acts in the world. The Bible itself records visions, dreams, angelic encounters, and experiences of the divine that went beyond what had previously been written down. Paul’s vision of the third heaven in 2 Corinthians 12 is a case in point. Stephen’s vision of Christ standing at the right hand of God in Acts 7 is another. To say that God can never give anyone a genuine experience of the reality beyond this life—that any such claim must be automatically rejected—is a theological position that goes beyond what Scripture itself teaches.¹⁸

Lawrence’s satanic deception theory has its own problems. His argument essentially requires that every NDE, without exception, is the work of Satan—even the ones where people encounter Jesus, are told to follow Christ, and come back transformed in ways that bear genuinely good fruit. Lawrence acknowledges that there are a few cases where NDErs appear to have become genuine Christians as a result of their experience, but he dismisses these as God overriding Satan’s plan—a kind of theological special pleading that is hard to take seriously when applied consistently.¹⁹ As Gary Habermas has pointed out, the presence of counterfeit experiences logically presupposes the existence of genuine ones.²⁰

Moreover, Lawrence’s critique focuses almost entirely on the messages reported by NDErs—the theological interpretations they place on their experiences. He never addresses the evidence—the veridical perceptions, the verified details, the cases where clinically dead patients accurately described events they could not have known about through any normal means. This is a critical oversight. You can raise legitimate concerns about how people interpret their NDEs without addressing the hard empirical data, but you cannot pretend that addressing the interpretations settles the question of whether the experiences themselves are real.

C. The Pro-NDE Response: Two Different Worlds of Evidence

The heart of this chapter’s argument is simple: there are two entirely different categories of NDE evidence, and the critics consistently conflate them. On one side, you have the popular heaven tourism books—individual accounts, often written for a mass audience, frequently lacking medical documentation, sometimes theologically careless, and in at least one case fabricated. On the other side, you have decades of peer-reviewed, scientifically rigorous research conducted by medical doctors, cardiologists, neuroscientists, and academic researchers at major hospitals and universities. These two categories need to be evaluated separately.

What the Popular Accounts Look Like

The popular heaven tourism genre shares several common features. The books are typically written by the experiencer or a family member, not by a medical researcher. The experiences are usually described long after they occurred, often years or decades later. There is typically no independent medical verification of the details reported. The accounts are filtered through the author’s pre-existing theological beliefs, and the books are published by trade publishers with a commercial interest in dramatic, bestselling stories.²¹

Don Piper’s 90 Minutes in Heaven describes a traffic accident in 1989. The book was published in 2004—fifteen years later. It was published by a commercial publisher and became a massive bestseller, selling over four million copies. There is no independent medical documentation of his claimed time in heaven. The only evidence for his experience is his own testimony, and as Osman documents, that testimony contains internal contradictions.²²

Todd Burpo’s Heaven Is for Real describes the experience of a four-year-old child during emergency surgery in 2003, with the book written by his father and published in 2010. The revelations from Colton Burpo came out gradually, often in response to leading questions from his father over the course of months and years. No medical professional documented any NDE at the time it allegedly occurred. And the book was co-authored by a professional writer and published by a commercial house—it eventually sold over ten million copies and was made into a feature film.²³

Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven describes an NDE during a week-long coma caused by bacterial meningitis in 2008, with the book published in 2012. While Alexander is a neurosurgeon, his account has faced serious scrutiny from journalists and fellow scientists. An Esquire investigation raised questions about the accuracy of his medical claims and his professional history.²⁴ The heaven he describes—including riding on a butterfly wing with a beautiful companion—is so far removed from any biblical picture of the afterlife that even sympathetic readers have struggled to know what to make of it.

And then there is Alex Malarkey. A boy. A devastating car accident. A compelling story. A million copies sold. And then: “I did not die. I did not go to Heaven.”²⁵ The retraction was devastating, and it should have been. When someone fabricates a story about visiting heaven, that is a serious thing.

I do not say any of this to be cruel to the people involved. Don Piper suffered terribly in his accident. Todd Burpo clearly loves his son. Eben Alexander’s meningitis was a life-threatening medical crisis. These are real people who went through real ordeals. But the fact remains that their published accounts lack the documentation, verification, and scientific rigor that we would need to treat them as serious evidence. And when critics like Osman and Lawrence point this out, they are not wrong.

What the Serious Research Looks Like

Now let me show you what is on the other side of the divide. Because the difference between the popular accounts and the peer-reviewed research is not subtle. It is enormous.

In 2001, cardiologist Pim van Lommel and his colleagues published a landmark prospective study of near-death experiences in cardiac arrest patients in The Lancet—one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world. This was not a memoir. It was not a bestseller written for a trade publisher. It was a controlled, prospective study conducted across ten Dutch hospitals over a thirteen-year period, involving 344 cardiac arrest patients who were successfully resuscitated.²⁶ Of these patients, sixty-two (eighteen percent) reported NDEs. The study was peer-reviewed before publication, meaning that other scientists scrutinized its methodology before it was accepted for publication. Van Lommel’s team found that the NDEs could not be explained by medication, physiological factors, or psychological expectations. This study alone carries more evidential weight than every heaven tourism book combined.

Sam Parnia, a critical care physician and researcher, has devoted years to the AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) studies—multi-center, prospective investigations specifically designed to test whether cardiac arrest patients can perceive events during the period when their hearts have stopped and their brains show no measurable activity.²⁷ Parnia’s methodology involves placing hidden visual targets in hospital resuscitation rooms that can only be seen from a vantage point near the ceiling. If a patient reports an out-of-body experience and accurately describes the hidden target, this would constitute powerful evidence that consciousness can function apart from the brain. The AWARE studies have not yet produced the definitive “hit” on the hidden targets—partly because cardiac arrest is unpredictable and many resuscitations occur in locations without targets—but the studies have produced verified cases of patients accurately reporting events during cardiac arrest that they could not have known about through normal means.²⁸

Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, has studied NDEs for over four decades. He developed the Greyson NDE Scale, which is now the standard research tool for identifying and measuring the depth of near-death experiences. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including The Lancet, General Hospital Psychiatry, and the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.²⁹ Greyson’s longitudinal studies have shown that NDE memories remain remarkably stable over decades—unlike ordinary memories, which tend to fade and distort over time, and unlike fantasies or hallucinations, which tend to become more exaggerated with retelling.³⁰

Janice Miner Holden, a professor at the University of North Texas and editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies, conducted a comprehensive analysis of every published case of veridical perception during NDEs. Her review, published in the Handbook of Near-Death Experiences (2009), found that of all apparently non-physical veridical perceptions examined, ninety-two percent were completely accurate. Not a single case contained a perception that was later shown to be entirely wrong.³¹ Think about that. If these perceptions were hallucinations, confabulations, or lucky guesses, we would expect a much higher error rate. We would expect people to get things wrong at least some of the time. Instead, the accuracy rate is staggeringly high.

Jeffrey Long, a radiation oncologist, founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF), which has compiled thousands of NDE accounts from people around the world. Long’s research uses a systematic questionnaire to gather data, and his studies are not based on cherry-picked bestsellers but on a representative sample of reports submitted without editorial filtering. His findings, published in Evidence of the Afterlife and God and the Afterlife, show consistent patterns across cultures, ages, and belief systems—patterns that cannot be explained by cultural expectation or prior belief.³²

And then there is The Self Does Not Die by Titus Rivas, Anny Dirven, and Rudolf Smit. This book is perhaps the single most important evidence-based resource in the NDE field, and most critics of heaven tourism have never heard of it. The authors spent years—in some cases decades—tracking down and documenting cases of verified paranormal phenomena from near-death experiences. The book catalogs over one hundred cases, organized by type: cases where patients reported events in the operating room that were confirmed by medical staff; cases where patients perceived events happening in other rooms or other buildings entirely; cases involving after-death communications with people the experiencer did not know had died; cases confirmed by multiple independent witnesses; and cases verified by medical records.³³

These are not stories told at speaking engagements. They are not bestselling memoirs with movie deals. They are documented, verified, corroborated cases, many of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals. And the heaven tourism critics have never engaged any of them.

Specific Cases That Illustrate the Difference

Let me give you a few concrete examples to make the distinction vivid.

The “dentures man” case from van Lommel’s Lancet study is one of the most well-known verified NDE cases in the literature. A patient was brought into the hospital in a coma, and a nurse removed the man’s dentures during resuscitation and placed them in a drawer of a crash cart. The patient had no heartbeat for over an hour during resuscitation. A week later, when the patient was transferred to a different ward, he recognized the nurse and said, “Oh, that nurse knows where my dentures are.” He then accurately described the cart, the drawer, and where his dentures had been placed—all of which had occurred while he was deeply comatose with no heartbeat.³⁴ This case was reported by the nurse himself, documented in the context of a prospective research study, and published in one of the world’s premier medical journals. It bears absolutely no resemblance to Don Piper’s fifteen-page description of standing outside heaven’s gate.

Or consider the case of Pam Reynolds, which we addressed in detail in Chapter 5 of this book. Reynolds underwent a radical surgical procedure called hypothermic cardiac arrest (sometimes called “standstill surgery”), during which her body temperature was lowered to 60 degrees Fahrenheit, her heart was stopped, the blood was drained from her brain, and her brain showed no electrical activity on the EEG (the machine that measures brain waves). During this procedure, she reported leaving her body and observing the surgical instruments being used, including an accurate description of the Midas Rex bone saw that opened her skull—a tool she had never seen before. She described it as looking like an electric toothbrush with interchangeable blades stored in a case resembling a socket wrench set. She also reported overhearing a conversation between her cardiac surgeon and a female cardiologist about the condition of her femoral artery—a conversation that took place while she was fully anesthetized with her eyes taped shut and molded ear speakers emitting loud clicks in her ears.³⁵

These details were confirmed by the surgical team. They were documented in real time by a medical professional, Dr. Michael Sabom, who investigated the case thoroughly. This is not a story told at a church speaking engagement fifteen years after the fact. This is a medical case study with verifiable details.

The cases in The Self Does Not Die include dozens more like these. There is the case of a patient who, during cardiac arrest, perceived events happening in a room down the hall and correctly identified a specific object that had been placed there.³⁶ There are cases of patients who accurately described the specific actions of medical staff during resuscitation—actions that occurred while the patient had no heartbeat and no measurable brain activity.³⁷ There is the case of a cardiac arrest patient who correctly identified a nurse who had been clumsy during the resuscitation, a detail she could not have known about through any normal means.³⁸

These are the cases the critics need to confront. And they haven’t.

The Medical Professionals Who Changed Their Minds

One of the most telling features of the serious NDE research is how many of the researchers began as skeptics. This is not a field populated by people who started out wanting to believe. Pim van Lommel was a conventional cardiologist who had spent years treating cardiac arrest patients without giving much thought to what they experienced during their resuscitations. It was only when a patient described his own resuscitation in accurate detail—a resuscitation that had occurred while the patient had no heartbeat—that van Lommel began to take the phenomenon seriously. He went on to design one of the most rigorous prospective studies in the history of NDE research. His motivation was not to prove that heaven is real. His motivation was to find out what was actually happening to his patients.

Laurin Bellg, an ICU physician, describes a similar journey in Near Death in the ICU. As a critical care doctor, she witnessed dozens of patients reporting experiences during resuscitation that she could not explain. She did not start from a position of belief. She started from a position of clinical puzzlement. What she found, case after case, was that patients were reporting events they should not have been able to perceive—events that were subsequently confirmed by the medical staff who had been present.^38b These are not people who went looking for miracles. They are medical professionals who encountered something they could not explain and had the intellectual honesty to report what they found.

Michael Sabom, a cardiologist, is another striking example. He was openly skeptical of NDEs when he first read Raymond Moody’s Life After Life in the late 1970s. He set out to debunk the claims. Instead, he found that his own cardiac arrest patients who reported NDEs described their resuscitations with a degree of accuracy that far exceeded what a control group of cardiac patients could produce when asked to guess what a typical resuscitation looked like. Sabom became a careful, rigorous advocate for taking the NDE evidence seriously—not because he wanted to believe, but because the data demanded it.^38c

Contrast this with the heaven tourism genre. Don Piper did not submit his account to peer review. Todd Burpo did not use a control group. Alex Malarkey did not verify his claims with medical records—because there were no claims to verify. The difference between these popular accounts and the serious research is not a difference of degree. It is a difference of kind. They operate in entirely different categories of evidence, and treating them as equivalent is a profound intellectual error.

Why the Distinction Matters

J. Steve Miller, in his careful analysis Is Christianity Compatible With Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences?, makes exactly the distinction that the heaven tourism critics miss. Miller acknowledges the concerns of critics like John MacArthur and Hank Hanegraaff about the popular heaven tourism genre. He writes that their critiques were focused on “a plethora of personal NDE accounts in popular books, some of which became bestsellers.” These critics rightly noted that “we have no good reason to trust their accounts” since “the authors and family members are typically the only ones who either had or evaluated the experiences, and they have questionable motives: book sales and paid speaking engagements.”³⁹

Miller goes on to acknowledge that this concern is warranted. But then he draws the crucial line. He explains that while the popular critics were reading individual testimonies and finding them wanting, he was reading the professional research and finding it compelling. The two groups were evaluating completely different sets of data.⁴⁰ Miller’s point is important enough to state directly: questionable popular accounts do not cast doubt on rigorous professional research, any more than fake salvation testimonies rule out all legitimate conversions. That is, as Miller puts it, the fallacy of throwing out the baby with the bath water.⁴¹

Miller also makes a helpful observation about the methodology that separates good NDE research from the popular accounts. The professional researchers—van Lommel, Parnia, Greyson, Holden, Long—used scientific methods to separate fact from fiction. They employed control groups. They used standardized measurement scales. They conducted follow-up studies. They subjected their findings to peer review. They tracked down independent witnesses. They checked medical records. None of this characterizes the heaven tourism genre.⁴²

Jeffrey Long, in his NDERF research, was explicitly aware of the problem of selection bias. He noted that if he had based his study of, say, love in NDEs solely on popular bestselling books, critics could rightly object that these dramatic, atypical accounts became bestsellers precisely because they were unusual. Instead, Long used a representative sample drawn from sequential submissions to the NDERF questionnaire, with no experiences excluded on the basis of content.⁴³ This is what careful research looks like. It is a completely different enterprise from writing a bestselling memoir.

The Theological Critique Cuts Both Ways

There is another point that needs to be made. The theological critics of heaven tourism assume that if an NDE account contains elements that don’t match their expectations of what heaven should be like, the experience must be false—or worse, demonic. But this assumption is questionable on biblical grounds.

Miller raises a thought-provoking analogy. Imagine three people traveling to America from Europe, each landing in a different city. One describes the towering skyscrapers of New York. Another describes the beaches of Miami. A third describes the shipping industry of Savannah. All three are accurately reporting what they saw, but their descriptions are wildly different. The differences do not mean America does not exist or that the visitors are lying. America is a big place. And heaven, Miller suggests, is presumably bigger still.⁴⁴

The Bible itself gives us multiple visions of the heavenly realm that are not identical to each other. Ezekiel’s vision of the throne room of God (Ezekiel 1) looks very different from John’s vision in Revelation 4–5. Isaiah’s vision of the Lord on his throne (Isaiah 6) contains elements not found in either Ezekiel or Revelation. Paul was caught up to the third heaven and heard things that he was not permitted to repeat (2 Cor. 12:2–4). The Bible never claims to give us a complete picture of the totality of heaven. So why should we insist that every reported glimpse of the afterlife must look exactly like the scenes described in Revelation?⁴⁵

I want to be clear: I am not saying that every NDE account should be accepted uncritically. Some popular accounts do contain theological claims that contradict Scripture, and those claims should be evaluated and, where necessary, rejected. Betty Eadie’s Embraced by the Light, for instance, contains what MacArthur rightly identified as systematic theology rooted in Mormon and New Age thought, including the claim that she “remembered the creation of the earth.”⁴⁶ That kind of claim goes well beyond anything the Bible teaches and deserves serious pushback.

But there is a crucial difference between evaluating the theological interpretations that NDErs place on their experiences and dismissing the evidence that those experiences actually occurred. You can acknowledge that Betty Eadie’s theology is problematic while still recognizing that the veridical perception data from van Lommel’s cardiac arrest patients is powerful evidence for consciousness surviving bodily death. These are separate questions, and conflating them is an intellectual error that the critics consistently commit.

What About Alexander?

I should say a word about Eben Alexander, since his case is perhaps the most controversial in recent NDE literature. Alexander’s Proof of Heaven became a massive bestseller, and his credentials as a neurosurgeon gave his account a veneer of scientific authority. But Alexander’s case is complicated. His experience occurred during a week-long coma from bacterial meningitis—a condition very different from the cardiac arrest cases that form the core of veridical NDE research. His account contains no veridical elements in the strict sense. He did not report perceiving events in the hospital room that were later confirmed. His experience was entirely subjective—vivid and deeply meaningful to him, but lacking the kind of third-party verification that characterizes the strongest NDE evidence.⁴⁷

The Self Does Not Die does mention Alexander’s case, noting a possible after-death communication element: Alexander reportedly saw a woman during his NDE whom he later identified as a deceased biological sister he had never met. However, this identification happened months after the experience and the verification is weaker than in the strongest veridical cases.⁴⁸

My point is not that Alexander is lying or that his experience was meaningless. My point is that his case, precisely because it lacks veridical elements, falls into a very different category than the cases that form the evidential backbone of this book. A personal experience that changes your life is one thing. A personal experience that can be independently verified by third parties is something else entirely. The first may be deeply significant to the person who had it, but it cannot serve as evidence for anyone else. The second can. And the serious NDE research is filled with the second kind—cases where the details reported by the experiencer were checked against physical reality and found to be accurate.

The critics who debunk Alexander and then declare victory over the entire NDE field are committing a classic bait-and-switch. They attack the weakest case and then act as if the strongest cases have been addressed. They have not.

The Positive Case for Serious NDE Research

The evidence from the serious research does not depend on the credibility of any single popular account. Even if every heaven tourism book were pulled from the shelves tomorrow, the following evidence would remain completely untouched:

Van Lommel’s Lancet study demonstrating that NDEs cannot be explained by physiological, pharmacological, or psychological factors in cardiac arrest patients.⁴⁹

Parnia’s AWARE research documenting verified awareness during cardiac arrest when the brain shows no measurable activity.⁵⁰

Holden’s meta-analysis showing ninety-two percent accuracy in veridical OBE perceptions.⁵¹

Over one hundred verified cases documented in The Self Does Not Die, many confirmed by multiple witnesses and medical records.⁵²

Kenneth Ring’s research on NDEs in the congenitally blind, documented in Mindsight, where people blind from birth reported visual perceptions during their NDEs that were later confirmed.⁵³ This is a category of evidence that popular heaven tourism books simply cannot provide. How would a person blind from birth fabricate visual descriptions of their hospital room, the medical equipment being used, or the people present during their resuscitation? They had never seen anything in their lives. Yet several of Ring’s subjects provided accurate visual descriptions during their NDEs—descriptions that were subsequently confirmed by sighted witnesses. No heaven tourism book has ever been subjected to this kind of rigorous verification.

Greyson’s longitudinal research showing that NDE memories remain stable over decades, unlike hallucinations or confabulated memories.⁵⁴ This is significant because one of the most common objections to NDE accounts is that they are reconstructed after the fact—that the human memory fills in details and creates a narrative that never actually happened. Greyson’s research demolishes this objection. He tested NDE memories across intervals of up to twenty years and found remarkable consistency. The memories did not fade, drift, or grow more dramatic over time—as we would expect if they were fantasies or confabulations. Instead, they remained as vivid and consistent as memories of real events. This finding alone separates NDE memories from the kinds of unreliable memories that critics assume they must be.

Michael Sabom’s early prospective study in which cardiac arrest patients with NDEs accurately described their resuscitation procedures at a rate far exceeding chance, while a control group of cardiac patients without NDEs made numerous errors when asked to guess what their resuscitation looked like.⁵⁵

None of this evidence has anything to do with Don Piper’s book deal. None of it depends on whether Colton Burpo really sat on Jesus’s lap. None of it is affected by Alex Malarkey’s retraction. The serious research stands or falls on its own merits—and it stands strong.

D. Counter-Objections: Anticipating the Pushback

“But the Popular Books Are What People Actually Read”

A critic might respond: “Fine, but the popular books are the ones shaping public perception. Most people who think they know about NDEs learned about them from Heaven Is for Real or Proof of Heaven, not from The Lancet. Isn’t it responsible to critique the sources that are actually influencing people?”

Yes, it is. And I have no objection to critiquing popular NDE books on theological or evidential grounds. What I object to is the conclusion that critics draw from this critique. It is one thing to say, “This particular book is unreliable.” It is an entirely different thing to say, “Therefore, no NDE evidence should be taken seriously.” The first statement is sometimes true. The second is a non sequitur—a conclusion that does not follow from the premise. The responsible approach is to critique the popular books where they deserve critique and then honestly engage the serious research on its own terms. The critics consistently refuse to take this second step.⁵⁶

“The Serious Researchers Are Biased Too”

Another objection: “Even the peer-reviewed researchers have an agenda. Van Lommel, Greyson, and Long all believe NDEs are real. Aren’t they just as biased as the heaven tourists?”

Every researcher has a perspective. That is why science relies on peer review, replication, and transparent methodology. Van Lommel’s study was published in The Lancet after rigorous peer review. Parnia’s AWARE studies have been scrutinized by the medical community. Holden’s meta-analysis was published in the Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, an academic reference volume edited by scholars in the field. These researchers submitted their work to the scrutiny of their peers, and their peers found it worthy of publication. That is the mechanism by which science separates reliable findings from unreliable ones. It is not a perfect mechanism—no human system is—but it is a fundamentally different process from writing a bestselling memoir and going on a speaking tour.⁵⁷

And we should note something else: the skeptical critics of NDEs have also been given a fair hearing in the peer-reviewed literature. Marsh published his monograph with Oxford University Press. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin published theirs with Oxford as well. Susan Blackmore’s dying brain hypothesis has been published and discussed in academic journals. Keith Augustine has published critiques of NDE research. The scientific process has given both sides a platform. The difference is that when the evidence is weighed honestly, the skeptical explanations consistently fail to account for the strongest veridical cases. That is the conclusion of this book, and it is a conclusion built not on popular anecdotes but on the best available evidence.

“Couldn’t the Serious Research Just Be More Sophisticated Wishful Thinking?”

This is a deeper objection, and it deserves a thoughtful answer. The worry is that even the peer-reviewed research might be driven by a desire to prove survival of consciousness, and that the researchers might unconsciously interpret their data in ways that support their prior beliefs.

The answer to this is the data itself. The veridical cases are not matters of interpretation. Either the dentures man correctly described where his dentures were placed during a resuscitation he was not conscious for, or he did not. He did. Either Pam Reynolds accurately described a surgical instrument she had never seen, or she did not. She did. Either cardiac arrest patients in van Lommel’s study accurately reported events that occurred while they had no heartbeat, or they did not. They did. These are factual claims that can be checked, and they have been checked. The data is not a product of wishful thinking; it is a product of careful documentation and verification.⁵⁸

And we should note that the researchers themselves have gone to great lengths to rule out alternative explanations. Van Lommel specifically tested whether medication, fear of death, prior knowledge of NDEs, or physiological factors could explain the experiences. None of these factors predicted who would have an NDE and who would not.⁵⁹ Parnia designed the AWARE study with hidden visual targets specifically to eliminate the possibility that NDE perceptions could be explained by residual sensory awareness. Sabom used a control group to demonstrate that cardiac patients without NDEs could not accurately describe resuscitation procedures. These are not researchers engaging in wishful thinking. These are scientists taking every reasonable step to rule out normal explanations.

“But Scripture Is Sufficient—We Don’t Need NDE Evidence”

This objection comes specifically from the theological critics, and it deserves a careful response. The claim is that Scripture tells us everything we need to know about the afterlife, and that seeking additional information from human experiences is not only unnecessary but potentially dangerous.

I agree that Scripture is our ultimate authority. I agree that we should not build our theology of heaven on the testimony of a four-year-old or a bestselling author with a movie deal. But the question here is not whether NDE evidence should replace Scripture. The question is whether the veridical evidence from NDEs can serve as a legitimate form of corroborating evidence—evidence that confirms what Scripture already teaches about the soul, the conscious intermediate state, and the reality of life beyond death.⁶⁰

I believe it can, and I believe this is fully consistent with a high view of Scripture. The Bible teaches that human beings have an immaterial soul that can exist apart from the body (2 Cor. 5:8; Phil. 1:23; Rev. 6:9–11). The Bible teaches that there is a conscious intermediate state between death and the final resurrection (Luke 23:43; Luke 16:19–31). The veridical NDE evidence does not contradict any of this. In fact, it powerfully corroborates it. Patients who were clinically dead—whose hearts had stopped, whose brains showed no measurable activity—experienced consciousness, perceived real events, and returned with verified information. This is exactly what we would expect if the biblical teaching about the soul is true.

Think about this from an apologetics standpoint. We live in an increasingly secular culture where millions of people are being told by scientists, philosophers, and public intellectuals that consciousness is nothing but brain activity, that the soul does not exist, and that death is the end. The physicalist worldview is dominant in the academy. If we have empirical evidence—peer-reviewed, scientifically documented evidence—that consciousness can function apart from the brain, why would we refuse to use it? Is it not a gift from God that the very thing Scripture teaches about human nature is now being confirmed by the best available medical evidence? Is it not a powerful tool for reaching the skeptic who will not accept biblical authority but who might be persuaded by data published in The Lancet?

We do not use NDE evidence to determine doctrine. We use Scripture for that. But when empirical evidence from the real world lines up with what Scripture teaches, that convergence is worth noting. It strengthens the case for the biblical worldview. It provides a response to the physicalist who says there is no evidence that consciousness can survive bodily death. And it gives comfort to the believer who trusts God’s Word but is grateful to see the truth of that Word confirmed by the best available evidence.⁶¹

“The NDE Field Is Tainted by Association with the New Age Movement”

This is a variation of the guilt-by-association fallacy, and it comes up frequently in Christian circles. The worry is that because some NDE researchers and experiencers have New Age sympathies, the entire field must be contaminated. Lawrence, in particular, emphasizes the connections between NDE researchers and figures associated with the occult or with non-Christian spirituality.^61b

The problem with this reasoning is that it proves too much. Modern medicine was developed in part by researchers who were atheists, agnostics, and adherents of every imaginable worldview. We do not reject the germ theory of disease because Louis Pasteur was a Catholic, nor do we dismiss antibiotics because Alexander Fleming may have held views we disagree with. The truth of a scientific finding does not depend on the personal beliefs of the researcher. It depends on the quality of the evidence and the rigor of the methodology.

Van Lommel is a cardiologist whose study was published in The Lancet. Parnia is a critical care physician at NYU. Greyson is a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia. Sabom was a practicing cardiologist. These are mainstream medical professionals who published their work in mainstream medical journals. The fact that some people in the broader NDE field hold New Age views does not invalidate the findings of these particular researchers, any more than the existence of astrologers invalidates the findings of astronomers. We must evaluate the evidence on its merits, not dismiss it because of the company it sometimes keeps.

Besides, J. Steve Miller has shown persuasively that the content of NDEs is far more compatible with historic Christianity than the critics acknowledge. The surprising presence of Jesus in many NDE accounts, the scarcity of genuinely anti-Christian elements in the research literature (as opposed to the popular interpretations), and the consistency of NDE features with biblical teaching about the afterlife all suggest that the Christian critic who dismisses NDEs entirely may be throwing away evidence that actually supports his own worldview.^61c

Conclusion

The heaven tourism critics have done a service by exposing the weaknesses of popular NDE books. They are right that some of these books are sensationalized. They are right that the Malarkey retraction was a scandal. They are right that theological claims from NDE accounts should be tested against Scripture. On all of these points, I stand with them.

But the critics have made a profound mistake by treating the weaknesses of popular accounts as if they invalidate the entire field. They have critiqued Don Piper while ignoring Pim van Lommel. They have debunked The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven while never mentioning The Self Does Not Die. They have dismissed Eben Alexander while never engaging Sam Parnia. They have focused their firepower on the weakest evidence and ignored the strongest.

This matters, because the question at the heart of this debate is too important to be settled by attacking straw men. The question is not whether Don Piper’s book is reliable. The question is whether consciousness can survive the death of the body. The question is whether the soul is real. The question is whether the materialist worldview that dominates our universities and our culture is actually true—or whether the evidence points in a different direction entirely.

The serious, peer-reviewed research on near-death experiences is not heaven tourism. It is rigorous, evidence-based scholarship conducted by medical doctors, cardiologists, neuroscientists, and academic researchers. It includes prospective studies, verified cases, independent witnesses, medical records, and peer-reviewed publications. And it presents a powerful, multi-stranded case that consciousness can and does function apart from the physical brain—a case that no heaven tourism critique has even begun to address.⁶²

If the critics want to be taken seriously, they need to engage the serious evidence. Until they do, their argument is incomplete at best and misleading at worst. The baby is alive and well. They have succeeded only in throwing out the bath water.