Chapter 31
We have come a long way together.
Over the course of thirty chapters, we have walked through the strongest skeptical arguments against near-death experiences—from the neurological to the philosophical to the theological. We have listened carefully to Michael Marsh, to John Martin Fischer and Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, to Susan Blackmore, to Keith Augustine, and to the critics behind Selling the Stairway to Heaven and Blinded by the Light. We have given their arguments a fair hearing. We have treated them with respect. And now, in this chapter, it is time to step back and ask the big question: when you put all the skeptical arguments together, do they actually work?
My answer is no. They do not.
Not because the critics are stupid. They are not. Marsh is a medical doctor with a D.Phil. from Oxford.1 Fischer is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, who led a $5 million research project on immortality.2 Blackmore is a psychologist who has spent decades studying consciousness.3 These are serious scholars doing serious work. I want to be completely clear about that.
But serious scholars can be wrong. And the skeptics, I believe, are wrong—not because their individual arguments lack cleverness, but because their arguments, taken together, still cannot account for the full range of NDE evidence. This chapter is about why.
What we are going to do here is something the skeptics themselves have never done: look at all the evidence at once. The skeptics are masters of the individual case study. They can take any single NDE account and poke holes in it. They can raise questions about memory, about timing, about sensory leakage, about cultural conditioning. Taken one case at a time, their objections can sound reasonable. But the real question is not whether you can find possible problems with any individual case. The real question is whether the full body of evidence, taken together, can be explained away by the patchwork of physical mechanisms the skeptics propose. I am going to show you that it cannot.
The most sophisticated version of NDE skepticism does not come from Marsh’s neurology or Blackmore’s dying brain hypothesis. It comes from the philosophical framework that Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin lay out in chapters 8, 9, and 11 of their book Near-Death Experiences: Understanding Visions of the Afterlife. Their argument has two main parts, and both deserve careful attention.
The first part is what I call their piecemeal strategy. In chapter 11, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin openly acknowledge that no single physical explanation can account for all the features of NDEs. They know that hypoxia alone does not explain them. They know that temporal lobe seizures alone do not explain them. They know that endorphins alone do not explain them. They know that REM intrusion alone does not explain them. And they are honest about this—refreshingly so. But here is their move: they argue that we do not need a single explanation. Instead, they propose what they call a “preliminary blueprint or strategy for generating candidate explanations for empirical scrutiny.”4 The idea is straightforward. Different features of an NDE can be explained by different physical factors, working together in combination. You do not need one silver bullet. You just need a collection of ordinary explanations, each handling its own piece of the puzzle.
Their strategy has three steps. First, explain how the person got the information relevant to some part of their experience. Second, explain why that particular content showed up in the NDE. Third, explain when the experience actually took place—because, they argue, it may not have occurred when the person thinks it did.5
They apply this to the Pam Reynolds case as an example. Pam, they suggest, may have unconsciously registered auditory information during surgery. Terror management theory (the psychological desire to feel safe when facing death) may explain why this information showed up in her experience. And the conscious experience of hearing the conversation may have occurred not during the surgery itself but afterward, as her brain was recovering.6
The second part of their argument is an appeal to Occam’s Razor—the principle that, all things being equal, simpler explanations are preferable. In chapter 9, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin argue that even though multi-factor physical explanations may seem complicated, they are actually simpler than supernatural explanations. Why? Because supernatural explanations require us to posit the existence of a nonphysical consciousness that somehow interacts with the physical body—and nobody, they claim, has adequately explained how that interaction works.7 The mind-body interaction problem, they argue, makes dualism far more complex than it first appears. Multi-factor physical explanations, by contrast, fit neatly within our existing scientific understanding of how the world works.8
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin are careful to note that their strategy does not rule out supernatural explanations. They are not claiming to have disproved them.9 What they are claiming is that physicalist explanations deserve preference because they cohere with our broader scientific picture and avoid the daunting philosophical problems of dualism.
Marsh’s position, while less philosophically developed, runs in a similar direction. His central thesis throughout Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences is that these experiences “are likely to be generated by metabolically disturbed brains especially during the period when they are regaining functional competence.”10 He draws on a wide range of neurological mechanisms—the temporo-parietal junction, temporal lobe pathology, endorphins, hypoxia, CO2 narcosis, ketamine-like effects, dreaming parallels, and more—to build what is, in effect, his own version of a piecemeal strategy. Each mechanism handles one piece. Together, he believes, they explain it all.
Kenneth Ring, one of the pioneers of NDE research, originally challenged any neurological explanation to show how the entire complex of NDE phenomena—out-of-body experience, paranormal knowledge, tunnel, light, voices, deceased relatives, and more—would be expected to occur together in an authentic-seeming way as a consequence of specific brain events. Marsh quotes this challenge in his introduction and frames his entire book as an answer to it.59 Ring was demanding a comprehensive explanation. Not a collection of partial explanations for different features. A comprehensive one.
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin recognize that Ring’s challenge puts pressure on physicalism. Their response is essentially to redefine what counts as an adequate explanation. You do not need one comprehensive account, they argue. You just need a framework showing how various physical factors could, in principle, combine to produce the phenomena. And they are candid that their blueprint is exactly that: preliminary. They do not claim to have explained any single NDE in full. They claim only to have shown that physicalist explanations are, in principle, possible.60
This is an important concession that deserves our attention. The piecemeal strategy, by Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s own admission, does not actually explain NDEs. It argues that physicalist explanations are possible. That is a very different claim. Possibility is not actuality. And the fact that five decades of concerted research have not produced a complete physicalist explanation of even a single veridical NDE should give us pause.
Marsh’s version of the piecemeal approach is more neurologically detailed but suffers from the same structural problem. In his final chapter, he summarizes his position: the diverse neurological mechanisms he has catalogued across thirteen chapters are, taken together, sufficient to account for NDE phenomena.61 But he has not actually demonstrated how these mechanisms work together in a specific case. He has shown that the brain can produce tunnel-like experiences under certain conditions, that the temporo-parietal junction (the region where the temporal and parietal lobes meet, roughly behind and above the ear) is involved in body-image processing, that temporal lobe activity can produce feelings of presence. What he has not shown is how all of these mechanisms fire simultaneously, in a brain with no measurable electrical activity, to produce a coherent, unified experience that includes accurate, verified perception of real events. That is the gap the skeptics have never filled.
This is the strongest version of the skeptical case. Let me now show you why it fails.
The piecemeal strategy is clever. But it has a fatal flaw: it cannot explain the combination of features that appear in a single NDE.
Think about what a strong veridical NDE actually involves. A patient goes into cardiac arrest. Their heart stops. Their brain, within seconds, loses measurable electrical activity. During this period—while they are clinically dead—they report leaving their body, observing events in the operating room from a vantage point near the ceiling, accurately describing surgical procedures they could not have seen, sometimes reporting conversations happening in other rooms or even other buildings, encountering deceased relatives (sometimes relatives they did not know had died), experiencing a profound sense of peace and love, undergoing a life review, approaching a border or point of no return, being told to go back, and then returning to their body. When they wake up, they report these events with a clarity and coherence that astonishes the medical staff. Their reports are verified by the people present. And their lives are permanently transformed.
Now, the piecemeal strategy says we do not need one explanation for all of this. We just need a different physical explanation for each piece. Hypoxia for the tunnel and light. REM intrusion for the out-of-body feeling. Terror management for the deceased relatives. Confabulation for the veridical details. Temporal lobe activity for the mystical feelings. And so on.
But here is the problem. These explanations do not just need to work in isolation. They need to work together, in the same brain, at the same time, in a patient whose brain shows no measurable activity. The piecemeal strategy requires us to believe that five, six, or seven different brain mechanisms all independently fired in perfect coordination to produce a single, coherent, unified experience—in a brain that, by all measurable indicators, was not functioning at all.
Ironically, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin themselves provide an analogy that, I think, actually undermines their own position. In chapter 8, they use the example of a house fire to argue that single-factor explanations are inadequate: a gas burner left on, by itself, may not cause a house fire, but that does not mean the gas burner played no role when combined with other factors like an oil-soaked rag or a wooden countertop.67 Fair enough. But now apply this analogy to the piecemeal strategy. In a house fire, we can actually trace how the gas burner, the rag, and the wood interacted. We understand the chemistry of combustion. We can reconstruct the causal chain. Can the skeptic do the same for a veridical NDE? Can the skeptic trace how hypoxia, the temporo-parietal junction, endorphins, REM intrusion, terror management theory, and confabulation all interacted in one specific patient’s brain—a brain showing no measurable electrical activity—to produce a unified experience that included accurate perception of events in another room? No. The skeptic cannot. The fire analogy works only if you can show the causal chain. The piecemeal strategy cannot.
There is another way to see the problem. Consider what the piecemeal strategy asks us to accept about any single, strong veridical NDE. It asks us to believe, simultaneously, that: (1) the patient’s sense of leaving their body was caused by disruption of body-image processing in the temporo-parietal junction; (2) the tunnel and light were produced by hypoxia-induced excitation of the visual cortex; (3) the feelings of peace and love were generated by endorphin release; (4) the encounter with deceased relatives was constructed by terror management mechanisms; (5) the veridical perception of real events was the product of unconscious sensory registration and later confabulation; and (6) the timing of the entire experience was shifted, so that it actually occurred during the recovery phase, not during the period of cardiac arrest. Each of these is a separate, independent claim. Each requires its own evidence. And all six must be true simultaneously for a single case. That is not simplicity. That is a Rube Goldberg machine of explanations.
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin themselves conceded, in a 2014 paper, that any complete explanation of NDEs must account for all aspects of all NDEs.11 Rivas, Dirven, and Smit rightly point out that this principle presents a daunting challenge for the brain-production hypothesis, because it means the explanation needs to cover every element and every detail of each different NDE—including the paranormal ones.12
And then there is the Occam’s Razor problem. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin argue that supernatural explanations only appear simpler but are actually more complex because they raise the mind-body interaction problem. This is a fair philosophical point. Dualism does involve genuine puzzles about how the immaterial and the material interact. But Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s application of Occam’s Razor is one-sided. They count the costs of dualism but ignore the costs of physicalism.
What are those costs? The physicalist must explain how a brain with no measurable electrical activity produces lucid, coherent, hyper-real conscious experience. The physicalist must explain how a patient whose eyes are taped shut and whose ears are plugged with clicking devices (as in the Pam Reynolds case) accurately perceives events in the operating room. The physicalist must explain how a patient accurately reports a conversation happening in a hallway three floors away. The physicalist must explain why only a minority of cardiac arrest patients report NDEs if the dying brain is the cause. The physicalist must explain how congenitally blind people report visual experiences for the first and only time during an NDE. The physicalist must explain how small children report NDE elements identical to those of adults, before they could have been culturally conditioned. And the physicalist must explain how healthy bystanders report shared-death experiences at the moment of a loved one’s passing—when the bystander’s brain is not dying at all.
Each of these requires its own ad hoc explanation. Each requires a new assumption. Each requires the skeptic to say, in effect, “Well, that one can be explained by this mechanism.” By the time you have stacked all these explanations on top of each other, the piecemeal strategy has become far more complex than the hypothesis it was trying to avoid.
As philosopher Bas van Fraassen pointed out—and Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin themselves quote him approvingly—simplicity does not guarantee truth.13 True enough. But the same principle cuts both ways. If simplicity is not a reliable guide to truth, then Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin cannot use it to dismiss the dualist hypothesis. And if we are comparing explanatory adequacy rather than mere simplicity, the dualist hypothesis has a massive advantage: it actually explains the data.
Now we come to the heart of this chapter. I want to lay out, strand by strand, the cumulative case that we have built over the course of this entire book. Each strand, by itself, constitutes a serious challenge to physicalism. Together, they form a rope that is, I believe, unbreakable.
This is the strongest strand in the entire rope, and it is the one the skeptics consistently fail to handle.
Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, in The Self Does Not Die, documented 128 cases of NDEs with paranormal aspects that were confirmed by doctors, nurses, family members, or medical records.14 These are not vague anecdotes passed around the internet. These are verified, corroborated accounts in which the person reported accurate information they should not have been able to obtain through normal means. In two-thirds of their cases, the person’s vision was blocked, the object was out of physical line of sight, or the person was unconscious or clinically dead.15
Janice Miner Holden’s analysis of veridical OBE claims in the Handbook of Near-Death Experiences found that 92 percent of such reports contained accurate details, with none containing purely fabricated information.16 Ninety-two percent. That is not a number you get from hallucinating brains confabulating random details.
We discussed many of these cases in detail in Chapters 4 through 6. The dentures man from van Lommel’s Lancet study, who told the nurse exactly where she had placed his dentures during resuscitation.17 Maria’s shoe, found on a third-floor ledge exactly where she described it after her cardiac arrest.18 Case after case from The Self Does Not Die in which patients described events in other rooms, identified strangers they had never met, and reported details later confirmed by medical staff.
Marsh dismisses this evidence as insufficient. He claims that corroborative evidence for veridical NDEs is weak and that Pam Reynolds’s case is “most unimpressive” when “critically dissected.”19 But as we showed in Chapter 5, Marsh achieves this verdict only by setting the bar impossibly high—demanding a level of observational precision that no eyewitness, in any context, could provide. And he engages only a handful of cases. He does not engage the full body of over 100 verified cases documented in The Self Does Not Die, because that book was published after his. But the evidence exists, and it is devastating for the piecemeal strategy.
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin engage only two cases in depth: Pam Reynolds and the dentures man.20 For each, they propose possible physical explanations—unconscious auditory registration, memory reconstruction after the fact, alternative timing for the experience. These proposals are clever. But they do not account for the full range of veridical cases. They do not explain cases where patients reported events in other rooms. They do not explain cases where patients identified people they had never met. They do not explain the cumulative weight of 128 verified cases.
The piecemeal strategy says: we can explain the tunnel with hypoxia, the out-of-body feeling with the temporo-parietal junction, the veridical details with confabulation and lucky guesses. But when a woman in cardiac arrest accurately reports a conversation happening in a waiting room down the hall—a conversation she had no way of hearing, in a room she had never visited, involving people she had never met—the piecemeal strategy has no piece to offer. That is not a gap in the theory. That is its collapse.
Consider the implications. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin suggest that Pam Reynolds may have unconsciously registered auditory information and reconstructed it later. Even granting this for the sake of argument—and we showed in Chapter 5 that the explanation has serious problems—it cannot be applied to cases where the information was not available to any of the patient’s senses. When a patient in one room accurately describes events in another room, or identifies a shoe on a ledge outside a window they never looked through, or reports the specific location of dentures that a nurse placed in a drawer while the patient was clinically dead, unconscious auditory registration is not even a candidate explanation. The information simply was not there to be registered.
And this is not just one or two cases. The Self Does Not Die documents dozens. The sheer volume of verified cases makes it increasingly unreasonable to attribute each one to coincidence, lucky guessing, or reconstructed memory. As the cases accumulate, the probability that all of them have mundane explanations drops precipitously. At some point—and I believe we have long since passed that point—the reasonable conclusion is that these patients really did perceive what they say they perceived, from a vantage point outside their physical bodies.
Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper documented cases of congenitally blind people reporting detailed visual experiences during NDEs—visual experiences they had never had before in their entire lives.21 As we explored in Chapter 6, this is extraordinarily difficult for any brain-based explanation to account for. A person who has never had visual input cannot generate visual hallucinations from stored visual memories, because there are no stored visual memories to draw from. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin acknowledge that NDEs in the blind are a challenge, but their response—drawing on Oliver Sacks’s work on hallucinations in blind people—does not adequately address the specific cases Ring and Cooper documented, in which blind individuals reported accurate visual details of their surroundings that were later verified.22
Marsh addresses the neurological basis of OBEs in the blind in his discussion of body-image processing,23 but he does not engage Ring and Cooper’s specific cases. The piecemeal strategy, once again, has no piece for this particular puzzle.
Think about what this means for a moment. The physicalist account says that NDEs are produced by the brain. But the brain of a congenitally blind person has never processed visual information. It has no visual cortex that has been trained to interpret images. It has no visual memories to draw upon. If NDEs were the product of a dying or malfunctioning brain, a congenitally blind person’s NDE should be entirely non-visual—consisting of sounds, feelings, and perhaps tactile sensations, but not sight. Instead, these patients report seeing for the first time. They describe colors. They describe the physical features of the people around them. And their descriptions match reality. This is not what a malfunctioning brain produces. This is what genuine perception produces.
The skeptic might say, “Perhaps these are not really visual experiences. Perhaps the blind person is interpreting non-visual sensory information in visual terms after the fact.” But Ring and Cooper anticipated this objection. The blind experiencers in their study distinguished their NDE visual experiences from their normal non-visual ways of perceiving the world. They insisted that this was genuinely seeing—not hearing, not touching, not imagining, but seeing. And the specific visual details they reported were confirmed by sighted witnesses.62
Melvin Morse’s pioneering research on pediatric NDEs showed that very young children—some as young as three or four years old—report NDE elements that are structurally identical to those reported by adults.24 These children had not read Raymond Moody. They had not watched documentaries about near-death experiences. They had no framework for understanding what was happening to them. And yet they described tunnels, lights, deceased relatives, and feelings of profound love and peace.
Even more striking, some of these children reported meeting deceased relatives they did not know had died. As we discussed in Chapter 7, this is a powerful evidential point. If NDEs are produced by the brain drawing on stored expectations and cultural conditioning, children should either have no NDEs at all (because they lack the cultural framework) or they should have NDEs that reflect childish expectations (meeting Santa Claus, seeing cartoon characters). Instead, they report the same core elements as adults. Jeffrey Long’s NDERF database confirms this pattern across hundreds of cases.25
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin discuss children’s NDEs in chapter 7 of their book, focusing on the Colton Burpo case from Heaven Is for Real, and they raise concerns about suggestibility and parental influence.26 These concerns are legitimate for cases where the child’s account was shaped over time through repeated questioning by parents. But they do not apply to cases where children spontaneously reported their experiences immediately after regaining consciousness, before any adult could have influenced their account. Morse’s cases fall into this category.
There is another dimension to the children’s NDE evidence that the skeptics rarely address. If NDEs are the product of cultural conditioning—of expectations about death formed by religious teaching, media exposure, and social environment—we would expect children’s NDEs to differ significantly from adult NDEs. Very young children have minimal cultural conditioning about death. A three-year-old has not developed a concept of the afterlife. A four-year-old has not read religious texts or watched television specials about near-death experiences. If cultural conditioning drives the content of NDEs, then children, who lack that conditioning, should have radically different experiences. They do not. The fact that a toddler and a sixty-year-old surgeon report the same structural features—the same out-of-body experience, the same sense of peace, the same encounter with a being of light, the same feeling of being told to return—is deeply significant. It suggests that the experience is not constructed from cultural raw materials but is, instead, a genuine encounter with something real.
Rivas, Dirven, and Smit make a related point. They observe that for very young children, retrocognition or precognition (alternative parapsychological explanations for veridical NDE content) is unlikely, because toddlers and infants do not even have a clear understanding of what it means to die.63 They cannot be unconsciously reassuring themselves that they were mentally present during a cardiac arrest, because they do not grasp the concept. The simplest explanation is the straightforward one: they were actually perceiving what they reported.
NDEs are not a Western phenomenon. They are not a Christian phenomenon. They appear across every culture, every religion, and every historical period for which we have records. As we saw in Chapter 8, the core features—the out-of-body experience, the tunnel or passage, the light, the encounter with deceased relatives, the life review, the border or boundary, the feeling of peace—appear consistently across cultures, even in cultures with no exposure to Western NDE literature.27
The cultural details vary, and this is exactly what we would expect if the experiences are genuine encounters mediated through individual cognitive and cultural frameworks. A Hindu may encounter Yamaraj. A Christian may encounter Jesus. A secular Westerner may encounter a “being of light.” But the structure of the experience remains remarkably stable. Allan Kellehear’s cross-cultural work confirms this pattern.28
Marsh argues for cultural relativity (pp. 33–43), pointing to variations in historical and cross-cultural NDE accounts as evidence that the experiences are shaped by cultural expectations.29 He is partly right. Cultural context does influence how people interpret their experiences. But cultural context does not explain the core structural features that persist across all cultures. It does not explain why a small child in rural India and a cardiac surgeon in New York report the same basic experience. And it does not explain the veridical elements, which have nothing to do with cultural expectations.
Here is the key distinction the skeptics miss. The cultural variation actually strengthens the case for the reality of NDEs, rather than weakening it. If NDEs were simply brain-produced hallucinations, we would expect them to be either random (since hallucinations are typically idiosyncratic and unpredictable) or entirely culture-specific (since the brain would draw on cultural expectations to construct the experience). Instead, we find something far more interesting: a stable structural core wrapped in variable cultural packaging. The tunnel is universal; the specific landscape at the end of the tunnel varies. The encounter with deceased loved ones is universal; which specific relatives appear varies. The being of light is universal; whether that being is identified as Jesus, Krishna, or an unnamed presence varies. This pattern—structural consistency with cultural variation in detail—is exactly what we would expect if NDEs are genuine encounters with a reality that is experienced and interpreted through individual cultural and cognitive frameworks. It is not what we would expect from random brain malfunction.
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin mention an interesting case from Japan, where some NDE experiencers report seeing themselves in a rock garden rather than in a tunnel—reflecting a Japanese cultural metaphor for death.64 They treat this as evidence for the cultural construction of NDEs. But notice what they are actually documenting: the setting varies (tunnel vs. rock garden), but the structure of the experience (leaving the body, encountering a peaceful realm, meeting deceased loved ones, feeling a sense of boundary) remains the same. The cultural construction argument explains the packaging. It does not explain the content.
The NDE evidence does not stand alone. It is corroborated by three related phenomena that pose their own independent challenges to physicalism.
Deathbed visions (DBVs) involve dying patients who, in the hours or days before death, report seeing deceased relatives who seem to come to welcome them. As we explored in Chapter 9, the most evidentially powerful DBV cases are the “Peak in Darien” cases—instances where the dying person sees a deceased relative they did not know had died.30 The odds of hallucinating a recently deceased person whose death you were unaware of—out of all the people you have ever known—are vanishingly small. Studies at hospices have found that over 80 percent of patients report these kinds of realistic visions of deceased loved ones.31
Shared death experiences (SDEs) are even more difficult for the physicalist to explain. In an SDE, a healthy person who is present at the moment of someone’s death reports experiencing NDE-like phenomena—unusual light, feeling drawn out of their body, sometimes witnessing the dying person’s life review.32 The healthy person’s brain is not dying. The healthy person is not experiencing hypoxia, endorphin release, temporal lobe seizures, or any of the other neurological mechanisms invoked by the piecemeal strategy. Marsh does not address SDEs at all. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin do not address them either. The piecemeal strategy simply has no explanation for this phenomenon.
Terminal lucidity is perhaps the most philosophically devastating of the three. In terminal lucidity, patients with severe brain damage—advanced Alzheimer’s, massive tumors, extensive neurological deterioration—suddenly become lucid shortly before death. They recognize loved ones they have not recognized in years. They carry on coherent conversations. They say their goodbyes. And then they die.33 If consciousness is entirely produced by the brain, terminal lucidity should not happen. A brain that has been devastated by Alzheimer’s cannot suddenly produce lucid consciousness any more than a shattered engine can suddenly run smoothly. The fact that it does happen suggests that the brain is not the producer of consciousness but perhaps the receiver—and when the receiver is about to be discarded, the signal, briefly, comes through clearly.
Marsh does not discuss terminal lucidity in his book. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin do not discuss it either. This is a significant omission. Terminal lucidity is not a fringe phenomenon. It has been documented in medical literature going back centuries, and recent research by Michael Nahm and colleagues has brought it to the attention of the neuroscience community.68 The phenomenon directly challenges the foundational premise of the physicalist account of consciousness—the premise that the quality of conscious experience is determined by the state of the brain. In terminal lucidity, a severely degraded brain produces clear, lucid consciousness. On physicalist assumptions, this should be impossible. Yet it happens. And neither Marsh nor Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin have an answer for it.
When you combine deathbed visions, shared death experiences, and terminal lucidity with the core NDE evidence, you have four independent phenomena—occurring under four different sets of conditions, in four different types of people, at four different stages of the dying process—all pointing in the same direction: consciousness is not reducible to brain function. The piecemeal strategy, which was designed to handle NDEs alone, has no resources for handling these corroborating phenomena. Its silence on these topics is deafening.
Over the course of Chapters 10 through 17, we examined every major neurological explanation for NDEs. We looked at the dying brain hypothesis (Chapter 10), hypoxia and CO2 (Chapter 11), temporal lobe seizures (Chapter 12), the temporo-parietal junction (Chapter 13), the phantom limb analogy (Chapter 14), dreaming and hallucinations (Chapter 15), ketamine and drugs (Chapter 16), and the timing problem (Chapter 17). Each one of these explanations captures something. Hypoxia can produce tunnel-like visual effects. Temporal lobe activity can produce feelings of presence. Endorphins can produce feelings of peace. But none of them, individually or in combination, can explain the full NDE.
Van Lommel’s cardiac arrest studies make this devastatingly clear. All cardiac arrest patients experience the same physiological crisis: the same hypoxia, the same CO2 buildup, the same shutdown of brain function. But only 12 to 18 percent of them report NDEs.34 If NDEs were caused by the dying brain, we would expect all dying brains to produce them. They do not. Chemistry cannot explain the selectivity.
Marsh’s neurophysiological toolkit is impressive. He draws on a wide range of brain mechanisms across eight chapters of his book. But as we showed in detail in each of those responding chapters, every mechanism he proposes suffers from the same two problems. First, the experiences produced by these mechanisms are nothing like NDEs. Hypoxia produces confusion and delirium, not lucid hyper-real experiences.35 Temporal lobe stimulation produces fragmentary, disjointed experiences that patients immediately recognize as artificial.36 Ketamine experiences are chaotic and disturbing, not peaceful and coherent.37 Second, none of these mechanisms can explain veridical perception. A malfunctioning brain can produce strange experiences. But a malfunctioning brain cannot give a patient accurate information about events they had no physical way of perceiving.
Let me put this more concretely. Imagine a patient named John who goes into cardiac arrest in the emergency room. His heart stops. His EEG flatlines. The medical team begins resuscitation. During this time, John’s wife, who has just arrived at the hospital, is in the waiting room on the second floor, having a conversation with a chaplain. She mentions that she is worried about their dog, Buster, who was hit by a car last week and has a broken front left leg. When John is revived, before anyone has visited him, before anyone has told him his wife is in the building, he tells the nurse: “My wife is upstairs talking to a minister about our dog Buster. He broke his front left leg.”
Now, the piecemeal strategy must explain this. Which piece explains it? Hypoxia? Hypoxia does not give you information about conversations in other rooms. Temporal lobe activity? Temporal lobe seizures do not give you accurate details about your wife’s location. REM intrusion? Dreams do not convey real-time information. Confabulation? A confabulated memory would not produce accurate details that are later verified. None of the pieces fit. The strategy collapses not because its individual explanations are wrong about what brain mechanisms can do in general, but because it has nothing to say about the specific cases that matter most.
I have deliberately created a hypothetical example here, but it is modeled directly on the types of cases documented in The Self Does Not Die and in the broader NDE literature. Real cases involve precisely this kind of verified, accurate reporting of events the patient had no normal way of knowing about. The skeptic can dismiss any individual case by proposing a creative alternative explanation. But when you have 128 cases, the strategy of dismissing each one individually becomes a form of systematic evasion rather than genuine explanation.
As we argued in Chapters 22 through 25, physicalism is not a neutral scientific conclusion. It is a philosophical commitment—and one that carries enormous unresolved problems.
The hard problem of consciousness, identified by philosopher David Chalmers, remains completely unsolved: why and how does physical processing in the brain give rise to subjective experience?38 Why does it feel like something to see red, to taste chocolate, to hear a symphony? No amount of neuroscience has even begun to bridge this gap. Thomas Nagel, hardly a religious thinker, has argued that the materialist conception of nature is “almost certainly false” because it cannot account for consciousness.39
The problem of qualia (the qualitative character of subjective experience), the problem of mental causation (how do thoughts cause physical actions?), and the unity of consciousness (how do billions of separate neurons produce a single, unified experiential field?) all remain open and deeply puzzling on a physicalist framework.40 Marsh assumes throughout his book that consciousness is brain-generated, but this assumption is precisely what the NDE evidence challenges. If the assumption is wrong, the entire skeptical edifice crumbles.
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin argue that dualism faces its own interaction problem: if the mind is nonphysical, how does it interact with the physical body?41 This is a genuine puzzle, and I do not dismiss it. But as we discussed in Chapter 24, the interaction problem is not an argument against the existence of mind-body interaction—it is an acknowledgment that we do not yet fully understand the mechanism. And the NDE evidence strongly suggests that such interaction does, in fact, occur. We may not fully understand how gravity works at the quantum level, either, but nobody denies that gravity exists. The evidence for mind-body interaction—including veridical NDEs—is far stronger than the philosophical objections against it.
For those who are also interested in the theological dimension of this question—and Marsh himself raised the theological argument, so we must respond—the biblical evidence for substance dualism is strong. As we showed in Chapters 26 through 28, the Old Testament portrays the soul (nephesh) departing the body at death (Gen. 35:18; 1 Kings 17:21–22) and the spirit (ruach) returning to God (Eccl. 12:7).42 Jesus explicitly distinguished the body from the soul as entities with different fates: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul” (Matt. 10:28).43 Paul expected to be “away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8).44 The souls of the martyrs in Revelation 6:9–11 are conscious, speaking, and waiting—before the resurrection has occurred.
Marsh argued that biblical anthropology is holistic and does not support a separable soul, relying heavily on N. T. Wright’s more physicalist reading of the New Testament.45 But as John Cooper showed in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, the claim that “Hebrew thought is holistic” is an oversimplification that has been thoroughly critiqued by Old Testament scholars.46 The Bible teaches that body and soul belong together—the resurrection is essential, not optional—but it also teaches that the soul can exist apart from the body in the intermediate state. This is precisely what NDE evidence corroborates.
Van Lommel’s longitudinal study found that cardiac arrest survivors who had NDEs showed significantly greater transformation—increased belief in an afterlife, decreased fear of death, greater empathy, and increased spirituality—than survivors who did not have NDEs, even eight years later.47 Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin acknowledge the reality of this transformation but argue that transformation does not prove the experience was real.48 Fair point. Transformation alone is not proof. But the depth, duration, and consistency of NDE transformation far exceeds what hallucinations, drugs, or dreams produce. It adds yet another strand to the cumulative case.
Consider this comparison. Psychedelic drugs can produce experiences that feel profound and even transformative. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin discuss this parallel in their chapter on transformation.65 But there is a critical difference. Drug-induced experiences do not produce the same degree or permanence of transformation that NDEs produce. Hallucinations, even vivid ones, do not typically lead to decades-long changes in personality, values, and worldview. NDEs do. The transformation produced by an NDE is more like the transformation produced by a genuinely life-changing event—falling in love, surviving a war, having a child—than it is like the effects of a drug trip or a vivid dream. This is consistent with the hypothesis that NDEs are real experiences of something genuinely encountered, not fabrications of a malfunctioning brain.
Laurin Bellg, an ICU physician who spent years caring for patients near death, documented this in Near Death in the ICU. The patients she observed who had NDEs were not confused or disoriented afterward. They were transformed. Their values shifted. Their priorities changed. Their fear of death evaporated. And these changes persisted—not for weeks or months, but for the rest of their lives.66 That is not what hallucinations do.
Now, here is the question that Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Marsh, and every other NDE skeptic must answer:
What is more likely? That nine independent lines of evidence—veridical perception during clinical death, NDEs in the blind, children’s NDEs, cross-cultural consistency, deathbed visions, shared death experiences, terminal lucidity, the failure of every neurological explanation, the philosophical problems with physicalism, and the biblical evidence for the soul—all have separate, independent, unrelated explanations that just happen to converge on a false conclusion? Or that the simplest, most straightforward reading of the evidence is correct: that consciousness can and does function apart from the body?
I think the answer is obvious. But let me explain why by using an analogy that might help make the point concrete.
Imagine you come home one day and find that your front door is open. You might think: the wind blew it open. That is a reasonable explanation. But then you notice that your television is missing. Now you need a second explanation. And your jewelry box is empty. And muddy footprints lead from the front door to the bedroom and back. And your neighbor tells you she saw a stranger leaving your house carrying a large bag.
At what point do you stop searching for separate, unrelated explanations for each observation and conclude: someone broke into my house? The individual observations might, in theory, have independent explanations. The wind really could have blown the door open. The television really could be at the repair shop. The muddy footprints really could be from your child. But when all of these observations converge on a single, coherent explanation, the reasonable conclusion is to accept it. The “burglary hypothesis” is not just the simplest explanation. It is the one that accounts for all the evidence at once, without requiring a separate ad hoc story for each observation.
The NDE evidence works the same way. Each strand, taken individually, might conceivably have a physicalist explanation—if you are willing to be creative enough. But when all nine strands point in the same direction, the reasonable conclusion is to follow where they lead. Consciousness can function apart from the body. The soul is real. And the skeptics, for all their intelligence and effort, have not shown otherwise.
Occam’s Razor, properly applied, actually favors the dualist hypothesis. The “simple” explanation is the one that accounts for all the evidence with the fewest ad hoc assumptions. The physicalist piecemeal strategy requires a different ad hoc assumption for every strand of evidence. The dualist hypothesis requires one: that consciousness can function apart from the body. One assumption versus nine. If simplicity is the criterion, dualism wins.
William James made this point over a century ago: the most that neuroscience can establish is a correlation between brain states and mental states, and correlation is not causation.49 The data of neuroscience are neutral between the hypothesis that the brain produces consciousness and the hypothesis that the brain transmits or filters consciousness that exists independently. But the NDE evidence is not neutral. The NDE evidence strongly favors the transmission hypothesis, because it shows consciousness functioning precisely when the transmitter has shut down.
Neal Grossman put it well: the materialist position requires that we explain away or negate the evidence presented in books like The Self Does Not Die, and this is precisely what materialists attempt to do.50 But the evidence keeps coming. Over 128 verified cases and counting. And no amount of philosophical hand-waving about the interaction problem can make that evidence disappear.
A skeptic might respond: “Physicalism is the default assumption of science. You cannot just overturn it with anecdotes.”
Two things need to be said here. First, verified, corroborated accounts documented in peer-reviewed research are not “anecdotes.” They are evidence. The Self Does Not Die documents 128 cases confirmed by doctors, nurses, family members, or medical records.51 Van Lommel’s study was published in The Lancet, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world.52 Parnia’s AWARE studies are ongoing at major research hospitals.53 Dismissing this body of evidence as “anecdotes” is not scientific rigor. It is intellectual evasion.
Second, physicalism is not the “scientific default” in the way the skeptic implies. Physicalism is a metaphysical commitment—a philosophical position about the nature of reality. Science studies the physical world. It does not follow that the physical world is all there is. That is a philosophical claim that goes beyond what science, by its own methods, can establish. When the evidence from within science points toward something beyond the physical, the proper scientific response is to follow the evidence, not to dismiss it because it challenges a philosophical assumption.
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin press this objection hard. How does the nonphysical mind interact with the physical brain? If we cannot explain the mechanism, they argue, we should not posit the existence of nonphysical consciousness.54
But this argument proves too much. By the same logic, we should deny the existence of gravity before Newton provided a mechanism, or deny quantum entanglement because we do not fully understand how particles influence each other across vast distances. The fact that we do not understand the mechanism of mind-body interaction does not mean we should deny the evidence for it. And the NDE evidence constitutes strong empirical evidence that mind-body interaction does occur.
Furthermore, the interaction problem is not unique to dualism. Physicalism has its own version: how do objective, third-person brain processes give rise to subjective, first-person conscious experience? This is the hard problem, and it is every bit as daunting as the interaction problem. Neither side has a complete mechanistic account. But only one side has 128 verified cases of consciousness apparently functioning apart from the body. That matters.
This is the argument of last resort, and it is the one Marsh implicitly falls back on throughout his book. His position can be summarized as: even if we cannot currently explain NDEs in purely physical terms, future neuroscience probably will.
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin make a similar move. They argue that the prospects of physical science are good and that we should be patient: better to work within the physicalist framework than to “open up a new can of worms.”55
But this is not an argument. It is a promissory note. And promissory notes are not evidence. We cannot dismiss 128 verified cases today because of hypothetical scientific discoveries that might come tomorrow. The evidence exists now. It demands an explanation now. And the best explanation now is that consciousness can function apart from the body.
Chris Carter made a devastating observation in Science and the Near-Death Experience: the skeptics have been promising a complete neurological explanation for NDEs since the 1970s. After five decades of trying, they have not produced one.56 At some point, the failure to find a physical explanation stops being evidence of the problem’s difficulty and starts being evidence that the answer lies elsewhere.
Moreover, the appeal to future science cuts both ways. If we are allowed to invoke hypothetical future discoveries, the dualist can do the same: future science might discover the mechanism by which the nonphysical mind interacts with the physical brain, thereby resolving the interaction problem that Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin press so hard. If the skeptic can say “future science will explain NDEs physically,” the dualist can say “future science will explain mind-body interaction.” Neither prediction constitutes evidence. But only one side has 128 verified cases in its favor right now.
There is also something philosophically troubling about the appeal to future science. It treats physicalism not as a hypothesis that can be tested and potentially falsified but as an unfalsifiable commitment that is assumed to be true regardless of what the evidence shows. If veridical NDEs do not count as evidence against physicalism because a future physical explanation might come along, what would count? At what point would the physicalist be willing to say, “The evidence has defeated my position”? If the answer is “never,” then physicalism is not functioning as a scientific hypothesis. It is functioning as a dogma.
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin devote their final chapter (chapter 12) to the argument that NDE researchers, like everyone, are subject to confirmation bias—the tendency to favor evidence that supports what we already believe.57 This is a fair concern, and it applies to all researchers in every field. I do not deny it.
But the confirmation bias argument cuts both ways. Physicalist researchers are just as subject to confirmation bias as anyone else. A neurologist who is committed to the assumption that consciousness is brain-generated may be just as likely to dismiss inconvenient evidence as an NDE researcher is to overvalue it. As Rivas, Dirven, and Smit point out, some materialists reject the NDE evidence with arguments that are themselves unreasonable—such as the claim that it cannot be true because materialism was established long ago, or that all NDE investigators are either cheaters or incompetent.58
The antidote to confirmation bias is not to dismiss evidence but to verify it. And the veridical NDE cases have been verified. Repeatedly. By multiple independent witnesses. In peer-reviewed studies. At major research institutions. Confirmation bias cannot explain away verified facts.
I want to return to where we started. The skeptics—Marsh, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Blackmore, and others—have done us a service. They have forced us to think carefully. They have pushed us to examine our evidence with rigor. They have identified real weaknesses in some popular NDE accounts (and we acknowledged those weaknesses in Chapter 30). A serious engagement with skepticism makes for a stronger case, and I am grateful for the challenge.
But when you step back and look at the full picture—not just one NDE case, not just one neurological explanation, not just one philosophical objection—when you look at the entire landscape of evidence that this book has surveyed, the conclusion is clear. The piecemeal strategy fails because it cannot explain the combination of features in a single NDE. Occam’s Razor actually favors the dualist hypothesis because it requires fewer ad hoc assumptions per case. The cumulative evidence—veridical cases, blind NDEs, children’s NDEs, cross-cultural consistency, deathbed visions, shared death experiences, terminal lucidity, the failure of every neurological explanation, the philosophical bankruptcy of strict physicalism, and the testimony of Scripture—forms a multi-stranded rope that no skeptical scissors can cut.
I want to speak directly to the skeptical reader for a moment. If you have read this far, I respect you. I respect your willingness to engage the evidence. I am not asking you to abandon your critical thinking. I am asking you to apply it consistently. Apply the same skepticism to the physicalist assumptions that you apply to the NDE evidence. Ask yourself: has any skeptical explanation actually accounted for the strongest veridical cases? Has any neurological mechanism explained how a clinically dead patient accurately reports events they could not have perceived? Has the piecemeal strategy shown, even in one single case, how five or six different physical mechanisms combined to produce a unified, coherent, veridical experience in a brain with no measurable activity?
If the honest answer to these questions is “no”—and I believe it is—then it is time to consider the possibility that the evidence is pointing somewhere the skeptics have not been willing to go. Consciousness can function apart from the body. The self does not die when the brain shuts down. The evidence is strong. Stronger than the critics want you to believe.
Consciousness, the evidence powerfully suggests, can function apart from the body. The self does not die. And the implications of that conclusion—for how we think about death, about the soul, about the hope that the grave is not the end—are the subject of our final chapter.
↑ 1. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences: Brain-State Phenomena or Glimpses of Immortality? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Marsh holds a medical degree and a D.Phil. from Oxford.
↑ 2. The “Immortality Project” was a 3-year, $5 million research initiative led by John Martin Fischer at the University of California, Riverside, beginning in 2012. See Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences (Durham, NC: IANDS Publications, 2016), chap. 10.
↑ 3. Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993).
↑ 4. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences: Understanding Visions of the Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), chap. 11.
↑ 5. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 11.
↑ 6. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 11. They suggest that Pam Reynolds’s auditory sensations may have been unconsciously registered during surgery and then assembled into a conscious experience during recovery.
↑ 7. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 9. They argue that any supernatural explanation must explain how the nonphysical mind interacts with the physical body, and that this interaction problem makes dualism more complex than it appears.
↑ 8. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 9. They write that multi-factor physical explanations “have the virtue of cohering with a vast body of scientific knowledge” and that “it is easier to fit them into our broad, common-sense understanding of the way the world works.”
↑ 9. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 11. They state that their strategy “does not rule out supernaturalist explanations of near-death experiences.”
↑ 10. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, p. xvi.
↑ 11. Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin and John Martin Fischer, “The Near-Death Experience Argument Against Physicalism: A Critique,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 21, nos. 7–8 (2014). Cited in Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die, chap. 10.
↑ 12. Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die, chap. 10.
↑ 13. Bas van Fraassen, The Scientific Image (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). Quoted in Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 9.
↑ 14. Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die, chap. 10. They report 128 cases of NDEs with paranormal aspects confirmed by independent sources.
↑ 15. Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die, chap. 10.
↑ 16. Janice Miner Holden, “Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences,” in Janice Miner Holden, Bruce Greyson, and Debbie James, eds., The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009).
↑ 17. Pim van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands,” The Lancet 358 (2001): 2039–2045. The “dentures man” case is discussed in detail in Chapter 4.
↑ 18. Kimberly Clark Sharp, “Clinical Interventions with Near-Death Experiencers,” in Bruce Greyson and Charles P. Flynn, eds., The Near-Death Experience: Problems, Prospects, Perspectives (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1984). Discussed in Chapter 4.
↑ 19. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, pp. 18–19, 26–27.
↑ 20. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 2.
↑ 21. Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind (Palo Alto, CA: William James Center for Consciousness Studies, 1999). Discussed in detail in Chapter 6.
↑ 22. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 6. They draw on Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations (New York: Knopf, 2012), to argue that blind people can have visual hallucinations. But Sacks’s cases do not involve veridical perception of real events.
↑ 23. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, chap. 6.
↑ 24. Melvin Morse, Paul Castillo, David Venecia, Jerrold Milstein, and Donald Tyler, “Childhood Near-Death Experiences,” American Journal of Diseases of Children 140 (1986): 1110–1114. See also Melvin Morse and Paul Perry, Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children (New York: Villard, 1990).
↑ 25. Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperOne, 2010). Discussed in Chapter 7.
↑ 26. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 7.
↑ 27. Jeffrey Long, Evidence of the Afterlife; Chris Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2010), chap. 9. Discussed in Chapter 8.
↑ 28. Allan Kellehear, Experiences Near Death: Beyond Medicine and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
↑ 29. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, pp. 33–43.
↑ 30. The term “Peak in Darien” cases comes from F. W. H. Myers’s metaphor. See J. Steve Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, vol. 1 (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2020), for a thorough treatment. Discussed in Chapter 9.
↑ 31. Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, vol. 1. Miller cites ongoing hospice research showing that over 80 percent of patients report realistic visions of deceased relatives.
↑ 32. Raymond Moody, Glimpses of Eternity: Sharing a Loved One’s Passage from This Life to the Next (New York: Guideposts, 2010). See also Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die, Case 3.32, in which John Price observed his wife Jan’s form leave her body during a cardiac arrest.
↑ 33. Michael Nahm et al., “Terminal Lucidity: A Review and a Case Collection,” Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics 55, no. 1 (2012): 138–142. Discussed in Chapter 9.
↑ 34. Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2010). In his Lancet study, 18% of resuscitated cardiac arrest patients reported NDEs. Other studies have found rates of 12–18%. Discussed in Chapter 10.
↑ 35. See the discussion of James Whinnery’s G-LOC (gravity-induced loss of consciousness) research in Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 11. Discussed in Chapter 11.
↑ 36. Wilder Penfield’s electrical stimulation studies produced fragmentary experiences that patients distinguished from real perception. See Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 11. Discussed in Chapter 12.
↑ 37. Karl Jansen later acknowledged that ketamine experiences differ fundamentally from NDEs. See Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 12. Discussed in Chapter 16.
↑ 38. David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Discussed in Chapter 23.
↑ 39. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Discussed in Chapter 23.
↑ 40. See J. P. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters (Chicago: Moody, 2014); Richard Swinburne, Are We Bodies or Souls? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Discussed in Chapters 22–25.
↑ 41. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 9. They argue that the interaction problem is “a notoriously daunting problem” and that “it is not only unclear that supernaturalism provides simpler explanations, but it is more generally unclear whether it presents a satisfactory explanatory framework at all.”
↑ 42. Gen. 35:18 (“as her soul was departing”); 1 Kings 17:21–22 (Elijah praying for the child’s soul to return); Eccl. 12:7 (“the spirit returns to God who gave it”). Discussed in Chapter 26.
↑ 43. Matt. 10:28 (ESV). Discussed in Chapter 26.
↑ 44. 2 Cor. 5:8 (ESV). See also Phil. 1:23; Luke 23:43; Rev. 6:9–11. Discussed in Chapters 26–28.
↑ 45. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, chap. 10. Marsh argues that the person is a “psychophysical whole” (p. 190) and that Paul’s anthropology is “Hebraic rather than Hellenistic” (p. 192).
↑ 46. John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989; rev. ed., 2000). Discussed in Chapter 26.
↑ 47. Van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest,” The Lancet 358 (2001): 2039–2045. The longitudinal follow-up at 2 and 8 years is discussed in Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 10, and in van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life. Discussed in Chapter 29.
↑ 48. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 10. They argue that the transformative power of NDEs does not establish their accuracy or supernatural origin.
↑ 49. William James, Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898). Cited in Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die, chap. 10, and in Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience.
↑ 50. Neal Grossman, letter to the editor, Journal of Near-Death Studies 26 (2008). Cited in Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die, chap. 10.
↑ 51. Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die, chap. 10.
↑ 52. Van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest,” The Lancet 358 (2001): 2039–2045.
↑ 53. Sam Parnia et al., “AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A Prospective Study,” Resuscitation 85, no. 12 (2014): 1799–1805. See also Parnia’s subsequent AWARE II research.
↑ 54. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 9.
↑ 55. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 9.
↑ 56. Chris Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2010). Carter surveys the entire history of skeptical explanations from the 1970s onward and demonstrates that none have succeeded.
↑ 57. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 12.
↑ 58. Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die, chap. 10. They list several unreasonable arguments used by materialist critics to dismiss NDE evidence.
↑ 59. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, pp. xvi–xvii. Marsh quotes Ring’s challenge that any neurological explanation must be capable of showing how “the entire complex of phenomena associated with the core experience” would be expected to occur as a consequence of specific neural events.
↑ 60. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 11. They describe their goal as providing “a preliminary blueprint or strategy for generating candidate explanations for empirical scrutiny,” not a complete explanation of any given NDE.
↑ 61. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, chap. 13 (Overview and Recapitulation).
↑ 62. Ring and Cooper, Mindsight. The blind experiencers in Ring and Cooper’s study consistently distinguished their NDE visual experiences from their normal non-visual ways of perceiving the world, and the specific details they reported were confirmed by sighted individuals present.
↑ 63. Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die, chap. 10. They note that toddlers and infants who experience NDEs during cardiac arrest cannot be motivated by an unconscious desire to confirm their mental presence during clinical death, since they lack the cognitive framework to understand what clinical death means.
↑ 64. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 7. They cite a case from Japan in which NDE experiencers reported seeing themselves in a rock garden, reflecting a Japanese cultural metaphor for the end of life.
↑ 65. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 10. They discuss the parallel between NDE transformation and transformation produced by psychedelic drugs, drawing on Michael Pollan’s work.
↑ 66. Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them (Sloan Press, 2016). Discussed in Chapter 29.
↑ 67. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 8. They argue that the fact that a single factor cannot explain a phenomenon in isolation does not mean that factor cannot contribute as part of a multi-factor explanation, using the analogy of a gas burner and a house fire.
↑ 68. Michael Nahm et al., “Terminal Lucidity: A Review and a Case Collection,” Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics 55, no. 1 (2012): 138–142. See also Michael Nahm, “Terminal Lucidity in People with Mental Illness and Other Mental Disability: An Overview and Implications for Possible Explanatory Models,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 28, no. 2 (2009): 87–106.