Chapter 30
We need to talk about what happens when people almost die—and then come back to tell us about it.
For twenty-nine chapters, we have been building a case. We have walked through over seventy passages of Scripture. We have shown that the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, consistently teaches that human beings are composed of both a material body and an immaterial soul. We have demonstrated that Edward Fudge’s The Fire That Consumes, for all its brilliance on the question of final punishment, builds its anthropology on a physicalist foundation that cannot bear the weight of the biblical evidence. We have examined the philosophical arguments against physicalism and found them compelling. And in Chapter 29, we explored how the conscious intermediate state provides the theological space for a postmortem opportunity—God’s gracious offer of salvation to those who never heard the gospel in this life.
All of that was built on Scripture and philosophy. This chapter is different.
In this chapter, we turn to a body of evidence that comes not from ancient texts or logical arguments, but from the testimony of people who were clinically dead—whose hearts had stopped, whose brain activity had ceased or nearly ceased—and who returned to describe experiences they should not have been able to have. Experiences that, in many cases, included specific, verifiable details about events happening in other rooms, in other buildings, or even in other cities. Details they had no natural way of knowing.
These are called near-death experiences, or NDEs. And a specific subset of them—the ones that include objectively verifiable information—are called veridical NDEs.1
I want to be careful here. Very careful. NDEs are not Scripture. They are not the foundation of our argument for substance dualism. The foundation was laid in Chapters 5 through 18, where we walked through what God’s Word actually says about the body and the soul. If every NDE report in the world were proven fraudulent tomorrow, the biblical case for substance dualism would stand untouched. The exegetical evidence does not depend on medical data.
But here is the thing: the evidence from veridical NDEs is not fraudulent. It is extensive, carefully documented, peer-reviewed, and growing. And it points in exactly the direction that substance dualism predicts—toward the conclusion that consciousness can exist apart from normal brain function. This is precisely what the physicalist says is impossible.2
So we are treating NDEs as corroborating evidence. Secondary support. A confirmation from the empirical world of what Scripture has already taught us. Think of it this way: if the Bible says that the soul can exist apart from the body, and then we discover hundreds of well-documented cases in which people appear to have experienced conscious awareness while their bodies were clinically dead, that convergence matters. It does not prove the Bible is true—we believe that on other grounds. But it shows that what the Bible teaches about human nature lines up with the best available evidence from the world God made.
Now, how does this relate to Edward Fudge and the physicalist framework we have been engaging throughout this book?
Fudge himself does not address NDEs in The Fire That Consumes. That is understandable. His book was focused on the question of final punishment, not on the philosophy of mind or the evidence for an afterlife. But the physicalist anthropology that runs through his work—the view that human beings are entirely physical, that nephesh simply means “living creature” rather than “immaterial soul,” that there is no separable conscious self that survives bodily death—has direct implications for how we evaluate NDE evidence.3
If Fudge’s physicalism is correct, then NDEs cannot be what they appear to be. If human beings are entirely physical, then consciousness is a product of the brain. Period. When the brain shuts down, consciousness ends. There is no “self” left to observe anything. Every NDE report must therefore be explained away as a hallucination, a brain artifact, an oxygen-deprivation event, or a confabulation after the fact. The physicalist has no other option.4
The broader Christian physicalist community has generally taken one of two approaches to NDEs. Some, like Nancey Murphy and Joel Green, have largely ignored the NDE literature, treating it as irrelevant to the theological question of human nature.5 Others have acknowledged the reports but insisted that neuroscience will eventually provide a fully physical explanation for all NDE phenomena. The assumption is always the same: consciousness cannot exist apart from the brain. Whatever people think they experienced during cardiac arrest, it must have a physical explanation—because there is no immaterial soul to do the experiencing.6
This is the position we are going to examine. And I believe it is a position that crumbles under the weight of the veridical evidence.
But before we look at why the physicalist position fails, let me say one more thing about the broader context. The debate over NDEs is not just an academic exercise. It touches on some of the deepest questions human beings can ask. What happens when we die? Is there something more to us than flesh and blood? Is the consciousness that gives rise to our loves, our prayers, our worship—is that consciousness nothing more than a product of electrochemical signals in the brain? Or is it something the brain mediates but does not produce? Something that can exist, by God’s power, even when the brain has stopped?
These are not idle questions. They are questions that every pastor, every chaplain, every grieving family member, and every thinking Christian needs to wrestle with. And the NDE evidence has a contribution to make—not as a replacement for Scripture, but as a confirmation from God’s world of what Scripture teaches about God’s creatures.
Before we look at the positive case for NDEs as corroborating evidence for substance dualism, we need to understand why the standard physicalist explanations fail. Because the physicalist does not simply say, “We don’t know what NDEs are.” The physicalist says, “We know exactly what they are—brain events. Nothing more.” And that claim has serious problems.
The most fundamental challenge for the physicalist is what we might call the timing problem. Many of the most compelling NDE reports occur during cardiac arrest—a period when the heart has stopped pumping blood to the brain. Within ten to twenty seconds of cardiac arrest, the brain’s electrical activity ceases. The electroencephalogram (EEG) goes flat. The brainstem reflexes disappear. By every clinical measure, the brain is not functioning.7
And yet people report vivid, structured, coherent experiences during precisely this window. Not vague sensations or dream fragments—detailed, sequential experiences that often include accurate perceptions of events happening around their bodies or in distant locations. Cardiologist Pim van Lommel, who conducted one of the largest prospective studies of NDEs in cardiac arrest patients, put the problem bluntly: the standard models of brain function simply cannot account for clear consciousness during a period when the brain is demonstrably not working.8
The physicalist has a few standard responses here. The most common is to suggest that NDEs happen not during the period of flat EEG but either just before cardiac arrest or just after resuscitation, when some residual brain activity might still be present. But this faces a major difficulty: many NDE reports include accurate descriptions of specific events—conversations, medical procedures, the arrival of particular individuals—that can be correlated with the time of cardiac arrest itself, not with the period before or after.9 The timing of the veridical perceptions matches the period when the brain was not functioning. That is precisely what makes them veridical—and precisely what the physicalist cannot explain.
If NDEs were merely hallucinations caused by oxygen deprivation or endorphin release, we would expect them to be random, disorganized, and highly variable—like the confused imagery produced by drugs or fever. But the research shows the opposite. NDEs are remarkably consistent in their core features: a sense of separation from the body, movement through a tunnel or dark space, encounter with a brilliant light, feelings of peace and love, meeting deceased relatives, and sometimes a life review.10
More importantly, the veridical elements—the specific, checkable facts that NDErs report—are not the sort of thing hallucinations produce. Hallucinations do not give you accurate information about what is happening in the next room. They do not tell you where a misplaced shoe is sitting on a hospital ledge outside a window you have never looked out of. They do not accurately report the serial number on a piece of medical equipment you have never seen.11
This is the specificity problem. Physicalist explanations can account for the experience of an NDE—the feelings of peace, the tunnel, the light. These features could, in theory, be generated by a dying brain. But they cannot account for the veridical component—the accurate information about the external world that the patient had no normal way of obtaining. And it is the veridical component that matters most for the body-soul question.
One of the more extraordinary findings in NDE research involves people who were born blind. Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper studied over thirty cases of NDEs and out-of-body experiences in the blind, including people who had been completely blind from birth. These individuals reported visual experiences during their NDEs—they described seeing their own bodies, the medical team, the operating room—and their descriptions were confirmed as accurate by independent witnesses.12
Think about that for a moment. A person who has never had a visual experience in their entire life—whose visual cortex has never processed a single image—suddenly “sees” during a period of cardiac arrest and accurately describes what they saw. How does the physicalist explain this? The standard model says that vision requires a functioning visual cortex processing input from functioning eyes. These patients had neither. And yet they saw. Accurately.
Ring and Cooper’s work has been debated, and not all of their cases are equally strong. But the phenomenon has been reported by multiple researchers, and the strongest cases resist any straightforward physical explanation.13
Finally, there is what I call the coherence problem. If NDEs were products of a dying brain, we would expect them to become less coherent as brain function declines. That is what happens with every other altered state of consciousness. As the brain deteriorates through stroke, dementia, anesthesia, or intoxication, mental experience becomes more confused, more fragmented, more disorganized. But NDEs show the opposite pattern. People report heightened clarity, enhanced cognitive function, and more vivid perception during the very period when their brains were most compromised.14
Bruce Greyson, one of the most respected NDE researchers in the world and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, has noted this paradox repeatedly: the NDErs in his studies consistently describe their experiences as “more real than real,” with a clarity and vividness that surpasses normal waking consciousness. This is the exact opposite of what we would expect if the experience were being generated by a brain that is shutting down.15
Now we come to the heart of this chapter. We have seen the weaknesses in the physicalist dismissal of NDEs. But the positive case is even more compelling. In this section, I want to walk you through the strongest evidence from veridical NDE research, introduce you to the major researchers and their findings, and show you why this evidence powerfully corroborates the substance dualist position we have been building throughout this book.
First, a definition. A near-death experience is any conscious experience reported by a person who was close to death or clinically dead and then revived. NDEs are remarkably common. Depending on the study, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of cardiac arrest survivors report some form of NDE.16
Most NDE reports include subjective elements—feelings of peace, encounters with light, meetings with deceased relatives—that are meaningful to the individual but difficult to verify independently. A veridical NDE is one that includes specific, objectively verifiable details about events in the physical world that the patient could not have perceived through normal sensory means. The patient was unconscious, their eyes were closed, they were often in a different room from the events they described—and yet their descriptions turned out to be accurate when checked against the testimony of other witnesses.17
Veridical NDEs are the gold standard of NDE research, because they move the discussion from subjective experience (which the physicalist can dismiss as hallucination) to objective evidence (which requires an explanation). If a patient accurately describes a conversation that happened in the hospital cafeteria while they were flatlined in the cardiac unit three floors away, “hallucination” is not a satisfying explanation. Something else is going on.
The study of NDEs is not fringe science. It has been conducted by credentialed physicians, psychiatrists, and researchers at major universities and medical centers around the world. Let me introduce you to the most important contributors.
Michael Sabom was a cardiologist at Emory University when he first encountered NDE reports from his cardiac arrest patients in the late 1970s. Skeptical at first, Sabom conducted a careful study comparing the descriptions given by NDE patients with the actual medical procedures that had been performed on them. He found that patients who reported out-of-body experiences during their cardiac arrests gave highly accurate descriptions of their resuscitations—descriptions that were significantly more accurate than those given by a control group of cardiac patients who were asked to guess what a typical resuscitation looks like. Sabom concluded that the NDE patients had somehow perceived their own resuscitations from a vantage point outside their bodies.18
One of Sabom’s most striking cases involved a patient who described specific, unusual details of his open-heart surgery that were later confirmed by the surgical team—details he could not have known, even if he had been fully conscious, because his eyes were taped shut and his body was draped during the entire procedure.19
Pim van Lommel is a Dutch cardiologist who conducted the largest prospective study of NDEs ever published. His study, published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet in 2001, followed 344 consecutive cardiac arrest survivors in ten Dutch hospitals over a period of several years. Sixty-two of them (18 percent) reported NDEs, and a number of those included veridical elements. Van Lommel’s study was groundbreaking because it was prospective—patients were interviewed immediately after resuscitation, before they had any opportunity to gather information about their own medical events through normal channels.20
Van Lommel’s most famous case involves a patient who arrived in the hospital comatose and in cardiac arrest. A nurse removed the patient’s dentures during resuscitation and placed them in a drawer of a crash cart. The patient was in a deep coma for over a week. When he finally regained consciousness, he immediately recognized the nurse and said, “You know where my dentures are”—then described the specific cart, the specific drawer, and the room where the resuscitation had taken place, even though he had been deeply unconscious the entire time. He described the event from a vantage point above his body, looking down at the medical team working on him.21
Sam Parnia is a critical care physician and researcher at NYU Langone Health who has spent over two decades studying consciousness during cardiac arrest. His AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study, launched in 2008 across fifteen hospitals in the United States, United Kingdom, and Austria, was designed to test veridical out-of-body perceptions using hidden visual targets placed on shelves near the ceiling of cardiac arrest bays—visible only from above. While the target-identification results were limited by the rarity of cardiac arrests occurring in rooms with targets, Parnia’s research documented numerous cases of verified perceptions during cardiac arrest, including one patient who gave a detailed, accurate account of his three-minute resuscitation.22
Parnia’s subsequent AWARE II study, whose results were published in 2023, expanded the investigation significantly. Using both EEG monitoring and audiovisual testing during CPR, the study found evidence of spikes in brain electrical activity—including gamma waves associated with higher mental function—in some patients up to an hour into CPR, well after the brain should have shut down. Even more remarkably, survivors reported lucid experiences including visual and auditory perceptions that were confirmed by medical staff. Parnia has been cautious in his conclusions but has stated openly that the data challenge the standard model in which consciousness is solely a product of brain activity.23
Bruce Greyson, a professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, has studied NDEs for over four decades and is widely considered the dean of academic NDE research. Greyson developed the Greyson NDE Scale, the standard tool used to measure and classify NDEs across studies.24 His research has catalogued hundreds of veridical NDE cases, and he has consistently argued that the evidence cannot be adequately explained by any known physical mechanism. In his 2021 book After, Greyson presented the cumulative case from his career of research and concluded that NDEs provide strong evidence that the mind is not reducible to the brain.25
Janice Miner Holden, a professor of counseling at the University of North Texas, conducted the most comprehensive review of veridical NDE perception ever published. Holden analyzed 107 cases of apparently nonphysical veridical perception during NDEs from the published literature. Of these, 92 percent were rated as completely accurate when checked against independent evidence. Only 8 percent contained any inaccuracy at all, and none were found to be completely wrong.26 Think about that: 92 percent completely accurate. If these experiences were hallucinations or confabulations, we would expect them to be accurate only by chance—which would predict a far lower rate. The accuracy rate Holden found is consistent with genuine perception, not with guesswork or imagination.
Jeffrey Long, a radiation oncologist, founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) and has collected over 5,000 NDE accounts from around the world. Long’s research has shown that NDEs are remarkably consistent across cultures, ages, and religious backgrounds—a finding that tells against the “cultural conditioning” objection and suggests that NDEs reflect a real phenomenon rather than a culturally constructed narrative.27
Gary Habermas, the distinguished evangelical philosopher and historian at Liberty University, has brought the NDE evidence into direct conversation with Christian theology and the case for substance dualism. Together with J. P. Moreland, Habermas has argued that veridical NDEs provide strong empirical corroboration for the dualist claim that the mind or soul can function independently of the brain. Habermas has catalogued hundreds of veridical NDE cases and has carefully evaluated the physicalist objections, finding them inadequate to explain the strongest evidence.28
Let me walk you through several of the most compelling veridical NDE cases, because the power of this evidence is best seen in the specific details.
The Case of Pam Reynolds. In 1991, a woman named Pam Reynolds underwent a radical surgical procedure called a hypothermic cardiac arrest (sometimes called “standstill” surgery) to remove a large aneurysm at the base of her brain. During the procedure, her body temperature was lowered to 60 degrees Fahrenheit, her heart was stopped, and all blood was drained from her brain. Her eyes were taped shut and small speakers were inserted into her ears, emitting clicking sounds to monitor brainstem function. By every clinical measure, her brain was completely nonfunctional during the critical phase of the surgery.29
And yet Pam Reynolds reported a vivid, detailed NDE. She described the specific surgical instrument used to open her skull—a pneumatic bone saw that she said looked like an electric toothbrush—and she accurately described its sound. She reported hearing a female voice say that her blood vessels were too small on one side. She described the specific way her head was shaved. All of these details were confirmed by the surgical team.30
The Reynolds case is particularly important because the conditions were so tightly controlled. She was not merely in cardiac arrest; her brain was deliberately drained of blood and monitored to confirm the absence of electrical activity. If any NDE case approaches laboratory conditions, this one does. And the veridical details she reported were confirmed by multiple medical professionals who were present during the surgery.
Michael Sabom, who investigated Reynolds’s case in detail, concluded that there was no naturalistic explanation that could account for her accurate perceptions during a period when her brain was demonstrably nonfunctional.31
The Case of Maria’s Shoe. This well-known case was reported by Kimberly Clark Sharp, a social worker at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. A patient named Maria, who was visiting Seattle and had no familiarity with the hospital, suffered a cardiac arrest. After she was revived, Maria told Clark Sharp that during her cardiac arrest she had found herself floating outside the hospital building. She described seeing a tennis shoe on a ledge outside a window on the third floor of the hospital—on the opposite side of the building from where she had been resuscitated. She described the shoe in detail: it was a man’s shoe, dark blue, with a worn spot on the little toe area and a shoelace tucked under the heel.32
Clark Sharp went to the third floor, looked out the window, and found the shoe—exactly as Maria had described it, including the specific details of the wear pattern and the tucked lace, which would not have been visible from the ground or from inside the window. The shoe could only have been seen in that level of detail from a vantage point outside the building, at the level of the ledge.
Skeptics have attempted to explain this case in various ways, but Clark Sharp’s firsthand account has been consistent over decades, and the level of specific detail Maria provided goes well beyond what guessing or prior knowledge could explain.33
The Dentures Case (van Lommel). I mentioned this case briefly above, but it deserves fuller treatment. The patient arrived at the hospital comatose, in cardiac arrest, and was resuscitated by the medical team. During the resuscitation, a nurse removed the patient’s dentures and placed them in a specific drawer of a crash cart—a routine action that the patient could not possibly have observed, since he was unconscious and his eyes were closed. The patient remained in a coma for more than a week. When he finally awoke, he recognized the nurse and told her precisely where his dentures were, describing the crash cart, the drawer, and the room layout. He reported having observed the entire resuscitation from a position above his body.34
What makes this case so powerful is the delay. The patient was in a coma for over a week. He had no opportunity to learn about the events of his resuscitation through normal channels. And yet his description was specific, accurate, and immediately confirmed by the nurse.
Cases of Shared Information. Perhaps the most striking category of veridical NDEs involves patients who, during their experience, encountered deceased persons whose deaths were unknown to the patient at the time. Cooper describes this type of case in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: a man who had a near-fatal heart attack reported meeting an acquaintance during his NDE—an acquaintance who had died twenty-four hours earlier, over two thousand miles away. The patient did not learn of this person’s death until two months later.35
This pattern—meeting deceased persons whose deaths are unknown to the NDEr—has been documented repeatedly in the literature. As Cooper carefully notes, the subjects in these cases do not report meeting living people as deceased. They consistently and accurately report meeting only those who have actually died. This pattern is too consistent to be explained by chance, and it resists any straightforward physical explanation.36
Here is where we need to connect the dots. What does all of this evidence mean for the body-soul question?
Substance dualism makes a clear prediction: if human beings have an immaterial soul that is the seat of consciousness, then it is possible—at least in principle—for consciousness to continue even when the brain ceases to function. The soul does not depend on the brain for its existence, even though under normal conditions the soul works through the brain. When the brain shuts down, the soul does not vanish. It continues to exist and, potentially, to perceive, to think, and to experience.37
That is exactly what veridical NDEs appear to show. Patients whose brains were not functioning—whose EEGs were flat, whose brainstem reflexes were absent—nonetheless reported vivid, coherent, accurate perceptions of events in the physical world. Their consciousness appears to have continued operating even though their brains had stopped.
Physicalism, by contrast, predicts that consciousness should cease when the brain ceases to function. No brain activity, no consciousness. That is the core commitment of every form of physicalism, whether it is the reductive materialism that says the mind simply is the brain, or the nonreductive physicalism of Nancey Murphy, which says that mental properties “emerge” from physical processes but remain entirely dependent on them. On any physicalist view, a flatlined brain should mean a flatlined mind.38
The veridical NDE evidence directly contradicts this prediction. And this is not a minor problem for physicalism. It is not a puzzle to be filed away until neuroscience catches up. It is a fundamental challenge to the core claim that consciousness is nothing more than a product of physical brain activity.
Rickabaugh and Moreland make this point powerfully in The Substance of Consciousness. They argue that whether or not NDEs are “real” is fundamentally a question of eyewitness evidence, not a question of physics or chemistry. The physicalist cannot rule out NDEs on the basis of a prior commitment to materialism. The evidence must be evaluated on its own terms. And when it is, it points strongly toward a dualist understanding of the mind.39
John Cooper, in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, takes a characteristically careful approach. He distinguishes between two types of NDE evidence: veridical perceptions of this-worldly events (like seeing one’s own resuscitation from above) and encounters with what appears to be a transcendent realm (meeting deceased loved ones, experiencing a brilliant light). Cooper argues that the first type provides stronger evidence for body-soul separation, because the veridical details can be independently checked. The second type is more difficult to verify, though the pattern of meeting only genuinely deceased persons whose deaths were unknown to the patient is a significant datum.40
Cooper is appropriately cautious: he concludes that veridical NDEs demonstrate that conscious perception can occur without the use of the normal sense organs, which certainly supports dualism even if it does not conclusively prove it.41 I appreciate Cooper’s restraint here. We are not claiming proof. We are claiming that the evidence fits the dualist model far better than the physicalist model—and that it corroborates what Scripture has already taught us.
One of the most remarkable things about the NDE evidence is how closely it parallels the biblical pattern of soul-departure and return that we studied in earlier chapters.
In Chapter 6, we examined Genesis 35:18, where Rachel’s nephesh (soul) departed from her as she was dying. In 1 Kings 17:21–22, the child’s nephesh returned to his body when Elijah prayed. In Chapter 12, we saw the same pattern in the New Testament: Jesus “yielded up His spirit” (Matthew 27:50), Stephen said “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59), and when Jairus’s daughter was raised, “her spirit returned, and she arose immediately” (Luke 8:55).42
The consistent biblical pattern is clear: death involves the departure of the soul or spirit from the body. Resurrection or resuscitation involves its return. The person is not the body alone; the person is the union of body and soul, and at death they come apart.
This is precisely what NDE patients describe. They experience themselves leaving their bodies, observing events from an external vantage point, and then returning to their bodies when they are resuscitated. The parallel is not exact in every detail—NDEs are temporary events, not permanent deaths—but the basic structure is the same: consciousness separates from the body, exists independently for a period, and then returns.
I am not saying that NDEs are the same thing as the biblical accounts. I am saying that the pattern is strikingly similar, and that the similarity is exactly what we would expect if the Bible’s dualist anthropology is true. If Scripture is right that the soul can exist apart from the body, then we should not be surprised to find empirical evidence of exactly that phenomenon.
The NDE evidence also bears directly on one of the central themes of this book: the conscious intermediate state. In Chapter 13, we examined the biblical case for the belief that between death and the final resurrection, persons exist consciously. Paul longed “to depart and be with Christ, which is far better” (Philippians 1:23). He told the Corinthians that to be “absent from the body” is to be “present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). The author of Hebrews speaks of “the spirits of just men made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23). In Revelation, John sees “the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God” crying out from under the altar—conscious, aware, and communicating (Revelation 6:9–11).62
The physicalist has always had trouble with these texts. If there is no immaterial soul, then there is nothing to be conscious between death and resurrection. The person ceases to exist and must be re-created at the resurrection. That is why Fudge’s framework, as we showed in earlier chapters, has no coherent account of the intermediate state. On a physicalist reading, the dead are not “with Christ” in any experiential sense. They are simply gone.
Now consider the NDE evidence in light of this debate. What NDEs appear to show is precisely what the intermediate state passages teach: that a person can exist consciously, with full cognitive and perceptual capacities, even when their body is not functioning. The NDE patients were not dead in the final, irreversible sense—they were resuscitated. But they were clinically dead by every medical standard available at the time of their experience. And during that period of clinical death, they were conscious. They could perceive, think, remember, and later report what they had experienced.63
This is what substance dualism predicts for the intermediate state. If the soul is a real, immaterial entity that can exist apart from the body, then consciousness after bodily death is not only possible but expected. The NDE evidence provides a kind of empirical window into the first moments of what the Bible describes as the soul’s continued existence after death. It is a brief glimpse—a few minutes rather than the ages between death and resurrection—but the principle is the same. The person does not cease to exist when the body stops working. Something continues. Something that is aware, alert, and capable of perceiving the world.
Cooper makes a similar point in his discussion of NDEs. He observes that the phenomenon of veridical perception during clinical death cannot be explained by the normal mind-brain relationship, even under the most generous assumptions about residual brain activity. The simplest explanation—the one that fits both the biblical data and the medical evidence—is that the person who perceives during an NDE is the same immaterial self that Scripture says survives death and enters the intermediate state.64
For those of us who hold to the conscious intermediate state on biblical grounds, the NDE evidence is not just interesting. It is deeply encouraging. It tells us that the world we encounter through medical science is consistent with the world described in Scripture. The souls of the departed are not unconscious. They are not extinct. They are alive, aware, and—as Paul promised—with the Lord.
There is one more feature of NDEs that deserves our attention before we move on, and it is one that physicalist explanations have never adequately addressed: the profound and lasting transformation that NDE survivors often undergo.
Greyson and other researchers have documented that people who have NDEs frequently undergo dramatic changes in their values, priorities, and behavior. They become less materialistic, more compassionate, more spiritually oriented, and less fearful of death. They report a stronger sense of purpose and a deeper capacity for love. These changes are not temporary; follow-up studies show that they persist for decades after the original experience.65
Why does this matter for the body-soul question? Because hallucinations and oxygen-deprivation events do not typically produce lasting positive personality transformation. People who experience drug-induced hallucinations or hypoxic episodes do not come out of them with permanently altered life priorities and deepened spiritual sensitivity. The transformative power of NDEs suggests that something qualitatively different from a brain malfunction is occurring—something more consistent with a genuine encounter that leaves a lasting mark on the person who underwent it.66
Van Lommel was particularly struck by this finding. In his prospective study, he followed NDE survivors for years after their cardiac arrests and found that the personality changes were stable and consistent. He argued that the transformative effects of NDEs point toward the conclusion that these experiences involve contact with a dimension of reality that is not accessible through normal brain function—a conclusion fully consistent with the dualist claim that the soul has access to a realm of experience beyond the physical.67
I want to be measured here. I am not arguing that NDE transformations prove the existence of heaven or validate every theological claim that NDErs make about what they experienced. I am arguing that the pattern of lasting transformation is one more feature of NDEs that fits the dualist model better than the physicalist model. If NDEs are mere brain artifacts, the lasting change makes no sense. If they are genuine experiences of the soul perceiving beyond the body, the transformation is exactly what we would expect.
One important finding from the NDE literature deserves special attention. Jeffrey Long’s cross-cultural research has shown that the core features of NDEs are remarkably consistent across cultures, religious backgrounds, and worldviews. People in India, West Africa, East Asia, and South America report the same basic structure: separation from the body, movement toward light, encounters with deceased persons, feelings of peace and love, and a sense of returning to the body.43
This matters for two reasons. First, it tells against the objection that NDEs are merely cultural constructions—stories people tell because they have heard about NDEs and expect to have one. If that were the case, we would expect NDEs to vary wildly across cultures, reflecting local beliefs and expectations. They do not. The core experience is remarkably stable.
Second, the cross-cultural consistency of NDEs is consistent with the Christian teaching that all human beings—regardless of culture or religion—are made in the image of God and possess an immaterial soul. If the soul is a universal feature of human nature, as the Bible teaches, then we would expect the experience of soul-departure during clinical death to be a universal phenomenon. And that is exactly what we find.44
A further line of evidence that strengthens the case comes from NDEs reported by very young children. Pediatric NDE researchers have documented cases in which children as young as two or three years old reported NDEs with the same core features as adult NDEs—including veridical perceptions of events they could not have observed through normal means. These children were too young to have been exposed to cultural narratives about NDEs, too young to have formed expectations about what a near-death experience “should” look like, and yet their reports matched the adult pattern.45
Pediatric NDEs are particularly difficult for the cultural conditioning objection to handle. You cannot attribute a three-year-old’s NDE to years of hearing stories about tunnels and bright lights. And the veridical elements in pediatric cases—accurate descriptions of medical procedures, of people present during resuscitation, of events in other rooms—are just as striking as those in adult cases.46
Let me step back and take in the big picture. What we have is not a single anomalous case or a fringe study. We have:
Multiple independent research programs conducted by credentialed physicians, psychiatrists, and scientists at major universities and hospitals. Prospective studies (van Lommel, Parnia) that collected data in real time rather than relying on retrospective reports. Hundreds of documented veridical cases with accuracy rates above 90 percent (Holden). Cross-cultural consistency that rules out cultural conditioning as the primary explanation (Long). Cases involving blind patients who accurately described visual details (Ring and Cooper). Pediatric cases involving children too young to have cultural expectations. And a growing body of peer-reviewed publications in mainstream medical journals.47
No single case proves substance dualism. But the cumulative weight of the evidence is substantial. And it points consistently in one direction: consciousness can exist and function apart from normal brain activity. That is exactly what substance dualism predicts. It is exactly what physicalism says is impossible.
Any honest treatment of this topic must engage the strongest counter-objections. Physicalists have raised several, and they deserve careful answers.
A physicalist might respond by saying that even during cardiac arrest, some residual brain activity may continue at levels too low to be detected by standard EEG monitoring. Perhaps NDEs are generated by this undetectable brain activity rather than by a soul functioning independently of the brain.
This objection has some surface plausibility, but it faces several serious difficulties. First, standard EEG is capable of detecting very low levels of cortical activity, and in many NDE cases the EEG was demonstrably flat during the period of the reported experience. In the Pam Reynolds case, brain activity was deliberately eliminated and confirmed absent through continuous monitoring. Second, even if some residual electrical activity existed at a level below EEG detection, it would need to be sufficient to generate not merely vague sensations but highly specific, accurate, veridical perceptions of events in external locations—perceptions that outperform normal waking observation in clarity and detail. That is an enormous claim, and there is no known mechanism by which fragmentary, undetectable brain activity could produce such results.48
Third, the “residual brain activity” objection is unfalsifiable in a problematic way. No matter how thoroughly brain activity is monitored and confirmed absent, the physicalist can always postulate that there must have been some activity at some level that we could not detect. At that point, the objection becomes an article of faith rather than a scientific hypothesis. It is a commitment to physicalism that refuses to be dislodged by any evidence—and that is not good science.49
Someone might object that the subjective features of NDEs—the tunnel, the light, the feelings of peace—are well-explained by known physiological mechanisms. Oxygen deprivation (hypoxia) can cause tunnel vision and visual disturbances. The brain releases endorphins under extreme stress, which can produce feelings of euphoria. Temporal lobe stimulation can produce out-of-body sensations and mystical feelings.50
I am happy to grant that these mechanisms may account for some features of some NDE reports. The tunnel sensation, the feelings of peace, the sense of floating—these could plausibly be brain-generated phenomena, and I do not need to deny that for my argument to work.
But here is the critical point: none of these mechanisms can explain the veridical element. Oxygen deprivation does not give you accurate information about events in another room. Endorphins do not tell you where the nurse put your dentures. Temporal lobe stimulation does not enable you to describe the specific surgical instrument being used on your skull while your brain is drained of blood. The physicalist explanations account for the phenomenology of NDEs but not for their veridicality—and the veridicality is precisely the feature that matters for the body-soul question.51
Moreover, van Lommel has noted an important asymmetry: if NDEs were caused by oxygen deprivation, then all cardiac arrest patients should have them, since all of them experience the same physiological crisis. But only 10–20 percent of cardiac arrest survivors report NDEs. The physiological conditions are the same; the experience is not. Something other than physiology must account for why some patients have NDEs and others do not.52
A physicalist might argue that NDE reports are shaped by cultural and religious expectations. People who grow up hearing about heaven and angels are primed to interpret ambiguous experiences through that lens. NDEs are not genuine perceptions but culturally conditioned narratives imposed on otherwise random brain events.
This objection has been substantially weakened by the cross-cultural research I described above. The core features of NDEs are consistent across cultures that have radically different beliefs about death and the afterlife. Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, Christians, and people from indigenous cultures all report the same basic structure. Children too young to have absorbed cultural narratives report the same features. And the veridical elements—which are the evidential heart of the NDE case—are not the sort of thing cultural conditioning produces. You cannot culturally condition someone into accurately describing the serial number on a piece of medical equipment they have never seen.53
Cultural conditioning may influence the interpretation people give to their NDEs. A Christian may interpret the being of light as Jesus; a Hindu may interpret it as Yama. But the underlying experience—the separation from the body, the light, the sense of peace, and especially the veridical perceptions—transcends cultural boundaries.54
A more sophisticated physicalist might concede that NDEs are interesting neurological phenomena but argue that they tell us only about the brain’s remarkable capacity to generate vivid experiences under extreme conditions. NDEs show how adaptable the brain is, not that there is a soul.
This objection misses the point of the veridical evidence. Nobody disputes that the brain can generate vivid hallucinations under extreme conditions. The question is whether the brain can generate accurate perceptions of events in remote locations while it is not functioning. That is a very different claim, and it is the claim that the veridical evidence supports.
If an NDE patient sees their resuscitation from above and accurately describes every detail, the physicalist must either explain how a nonfunctioning brain produced accurate real-time perception of external events, or acknowledge that something other than the brain was doing the perceiving. The first option has no known mechanism. The second is substance dualism.55
This is the objection I take most seriously, because it comes from my own side. Some evangelicals are deeply skeptical of NDEs, not because of the scientific evidence but because they worry about building theology on human experience rather than on Scripture. I share that concern. Wholeheartedly.
That is precisely why I structured this book the way I did. We spent twenty-five chapters building the case for substance dualism from Scripture and philosophy before we ever mentioned NDEs. The foundation of our argument is the Word of God, not the testimonies of cardiac arrest survivors. NDEs are secondary confirmation. They are not the argument; they are evidence that the argument is right.
The relationship between Scripture and NDE evidence is like the relationship between biblical prophecy and archaeological evidence. When archaeologists discover artifacts that confirm biblical accounts, that does not mean our faith rests on archaeology. It means that the world God made is consistent with the world God described. The evidence confirms what we already believed on the authority of Scripture. That is exactly how I am treating NDEs here.56
Cooper strikes the right balance in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. He approaches the NDE evidence cautiously and critically, acknowledging both its potential value and its limitations. He notes that veridical perception without the use of the sense organs certainly seems to support dualism, even if it does not constitute absolute proof. He insists that the issue must be approached with both religious and intellectual integrity.57 I think that is exactly right. We do not need NDEs to believe in the soul. But we should not ignore evidence from God’s world that confirms what God’s Word teaches.
Rickabaugh and Moreland make a complementary point in The Substance of Consciousness. They note that many reported NDEs include accounts of the person experiencing themselves as a completely disembodied self—an “I” with spatial location and a point of view, but without a physical body. This phenomenology, they observe, is precisely what substance dualism would predict: the self is a simple, spiritual substance that can exist without the body. The NDE testimony thus provides what they call “eyewitness evidence” for the metaphysical possibility of disembodied existence.58
I want to address one more concern that some readers may have. Some NDE reports include elements that seem theologically problematic from an orthodox Christian perspective. Some NDErs report a universally welcoming afterlife with no hint of judgment. Some describe encounters with religious figures from non-Christian traditions. Some return with theological convictions that are at odds with biblical Christianity.
This is worth acknowledging honestly. But it does not undermine the evidential value of veridical NDEs for the body-soul question. Here is why: the question we are asking is not “Are NDE interpretations theologically reliable?” The question is “Can consciousness function apart from the brain?” Those are two completely different questions.
A patient who accurately describes their own resuscitation from a vantage point above their body provides evidence for consciousness existing apart from the brain, regardless of what theological conclusions they draw from the experience. The veridical perceptions are objective, verifiable data. The theological interpretations are subjective and shaped by the individual’s prior beliefs, cultural context, and spiritual condition. We can accept the evidential force of the veridical data without endorsing every theological claim made by every NDEr.59
We would not dismiss the archaeological evidence for a biblical city just because the archaeologist who found it held heterodox theological views. In the same way, we should not dismiss the veridical NDE evidence just because some NDErs draw theological conclusions we disagree with. The data are the data. And the data point toward substance dualism.
Let me bring this chapter home.
We did not need NDEs to know that human beings have immaterial souls. The Bible told us that in Genesis 2:7, when God breathed into the dust and created something more than dust. The Old Testament showed us that the nephesh departs at death and can return to the body. The New Testament showed us Jesus yielding up His spirit, Stephen committing his spirit to Christ, and Paul longing to depart and be with the Lord. The philosophical arguments against physicalism—the modal argument, the argument from consciousness, the argument from personal identity—further established that the mind cannot be reduced to the brain. We covered all of that before we ever opened a single NDE study.
But the NDE evidence matters. It matters because it provides empirical corroboration, from the world God made, for what the Word of God teaches. It matters because it shows that the substance dualist prediction—that consciousness can exist apart from brain function—is confirmed by the best available evidence from medical science. And it matters because the physicalist prediction—that consciousness ends when the brain stops—is directly challenged by that same evidence.
Consider the full weight of what we have surveyed in this chapter. We have multiple independent research programs, spanning decades and continents, all converging on the same conclusion. Sabom’s cardiological studies at Emory. Van Lommel’s prospective research across ten Dutch hospitals. Parnia’s controlled AWARE studies in the United States and Europe. Greyson’s four decades of psychiatric investigation at the University of Virginia. Holden’s comprehensive review of over a hundred veridical cases with a 92 percent accuracy rate. Long’s cross-cultural database of more than five thousand accounts. Ring and Cooper’s studies of NDEs in the blind. And Habermas’s integration of the evidence into the broader case for substance dualism. These are not fringe researchers publishing in obscure journals. They are credentialed scientists publishing in The Lancet, Resuscitation, the Journal of Near-Death Studies, and other peer-reviewed outlets.
The convergence of this evidence from so many independent sources is itself significant. In any other field of inquiry, when multiple independent lines of evidence all point in the same direction, we take that as strong confirmation. When archaeological evidence, literary evidence, and inscriptional evidence all converge on the same historical conclusion, historians treat that convergence as powerful. The same principle applies here. The NDE evidence converges with the biblical evidence and the philosophical evidence to form a cumulative case that is far stronger than any single line of evidence would be on its own.
Fudge did not address NDEs, and the broader CI physicalist community has largely ignored them. I understand why. The NDE evidence is inconvenient for the physicalist. If consciousness can exist apart from the brain, then the central claim of physicalism is false. And if physicalism is false, then the entire framework Fudge built his anthropology on—the framework that reduces nephesh to “whole person,” that denies the conscious intermediate state, that treats the soul as nothing more than “life-force”—that framework has a problem. A big one.60
But I want to close by saying something important to my friends in the CI movement. None of this means that conditional immortality is wrong. CI stands on its own exegetical merits, as we argued way back in Chapter 2. The wicked will be destroyed—body and soul, as Jesus said in Matthew 10:28. That truth does not change depending on whether you are a physicalist or a dualist. What changes is the framework within which you hold that truth. And the framework matters. It matters for what you believe about the intermediate state. It matters for what you believe about personal identity at the resurrection. It matters for what you tell a grieving widow about where her husband is right now. And it matters for how you handle evidence—both biblical evidence and empirical evidence—about the nature of the human person.
Veridical NDEs do not prove substance dualism. I have said that several times, and I mean it. But they corroborate it. Powerfully. They show that what Scripture teaches and what philosophy argues is consistent with what medical science observes at the boundary between life and death. The soul is real. Consciousness is not reducible to the brain. And when the body dies, something continues. Something that can see, and hear, and know, and experience.
We are more than dust. The NDEs confirm it. The Bible declared it. And in the next chapter, we will bring together the cumulative case—biblical, philosophical, and empirical—to show why substance dualism does not threaten conditional immortality but strengthens it. The evidence from every direction points the same way: we are body and soul, created in God’s image, destined for resurrection, and sustained by His power every moment in between.61
↑ 1. The term “veridical” comes from the Latin veridicus, meaning “truth-telling.” In NDE research, it refers to cases where the patient reports specific, objectively verifiable details about events in the physical world during a period when they were clinically dead or unconscious. See Janice Miner Holden, “Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences,” in The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation, ed. Janice Miner Holden, Bruce Greyson, and Debbie James (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009), 185–211.
↑ 2. Gary R. Habermas and J. P. Moreland, Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998), chaps. 7–9. Habermas and Moreland provide the most thorough evangelical treatment of NDE evidence in relation to the case for substance dualism.
↑ 3. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 25–30. Fudge’s treatment of nephesh and ruach consistently reduces these terms to “whole person” or “life-force” rather than allowing the possibility that they refer to an immaterial soul. See our detailed discussion in Chapter 4.
↑ 4. This is a point made forcefully by Rickabaugh and Moreland: on physicalism, the question of whether NDEs are real becomes a question of physics and chemistry rather than a question of evidence. Rickabaugh and Moreland, The Substance of Consciousness, chap. 5, “Eighteen Distinct Dualist Seemings,” point (xviii).
↑ 5. Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), does not engage the NDE literature. Joel Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), similarly avoids substantive engagement with NDE research.
↑ 6. For a representative physicalist treatment, see Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 401–405. Dennett dismisses NDE reports as artifacts of brain function without engaging the veridical evidence.
↑ 7. Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 107–115. Van Lommel provides a detailed medical description of what happens to the brain during cardiac arrest.
↑ 8. Pim van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands,” The Lancet 358, no. 9298 (December 15, 2001): 2039–2045.
↑ 9. Michael B. Sabom, Light and Death: One Doctor’s Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 37–52. Sabom carefully correlates the timing of veridical perceptions with medical records to show that the experiences occurred during the period of cardiac arrest.
↑ 10. Bruce Greyson, “The Near-Death Experience Scale: Construction, Reliability, and Validity,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 171, no. 6 (1983): 369–375. Greyson’s standardized scale identifies the core features that recur across NDE reports.
↑ 11. Holden, “Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences,” in The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, 185–211.
↑ 12. 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).
↑ 13. See also Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, “Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind: A Study of Apparent Eyeless Vision,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 16, no. 2 (1997): 101–147.
↑ 14. Bruce Greyson, “Implications of Near-Death Experiences for a Postmaterialist Psychology,” Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 2, no. 1 (2010): 37–45.
↑ 15. Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2021), chaps. 4–5.
↑ 16. Van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest,” The Lancet 358 (2001): 2039–2045. Van Lommel found that 18% of cardiac arrest survivors in his study reported NDEs. Parnia’s AWARE study found a similar range.
↑ 17. Holden, “Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences,” 185–186. Holden defines veridical NDE perception as the reporting of specific, verifiable details about events that the patient had no normal sensory access to.
↑ 18. Michael B. Sabom, Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). This was the first rigorous medical study of NDEs by a practicing cardiologist.
↑ 19. Sabom, Recollections of Death, 81–115. See also Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 10, “The Psychology of Near-Death Experiences,” where Cooper references Sabom’s work as significant evidence.
↑ 20. Van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest,” The Lancet 358 (2001): 2039–2045. The prospective design was critical because it eliminated the possibility that patients had gathered information about their resuscitations through normal channels before being interviewed.
↑ 21. Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, 171–173. This case has become one of the most widely cited in the NDE literature because of the extended time between the event and the patient’s recovery.
↑ 22. Sam Parnia et al., “AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A Prospective Study,” Resuscitation 85, no. 12 (2014): 1799–1805.
↑ 23. Sam Parnia et al., “AWAreness during REsuscitation—II: A Multi-Center Study of Consciousness and Awareness in Cardiac Arrest,” Resuscitation 191 (2023): 109903. The study documented biomarkers of lucidity up to an hour into CPR.
↑ 24. Greyson, “The Near-Death Experience Scale,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 171 (1983): 369–375.
↑ 25. Greyson, After, chaps. 10–12. Greyson concludes his career-spanning review by arguing that NDEs provide strong evidence that consciousness is not produced by the brain.
↑ 26. Holden, “Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences,” 196–200. The 92% complete accuracy rate across 107 cases is one of the most striking statistics in the entire NDE literature.
↑ 27. Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperOne, 2010). Long’s database at NDERF (nderf.org) contains over 5,000 accounts from around the world.
↑ 28. Habermas and Moreland, Beyond Death, chaps. 7–9. See also Gary R. Habermas, “Evidential Near-Death Experiences,” in The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism, ed. Jonathan J. Loose, Angus J. L. Menuge, and J. P. Moreland (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), 227–246.
↑ 29. Sabom, Light and Death, 37–52. Sabom provides a detailed medical description of the standstill procedure, including the monitoring of Reynolds’s brain function throughout.
↑ 30. Sabom, Light and Death, 38–47. Reynolds’s description of the bone saw was particularly striking: she described its appearance and sound before her surgeon, Dr. Robert Spetzler, had even used it on her.
↑ 31. Sabom, Light and Death, 183–195. Sabom systematically considers and rejects physicalist explanations for Reynolds’s veridical perceptions.
↑ 32. Kimberly Clark Sharp, After the Light: What I Discovered on the Other Side of Life That Can Change Your World (New York: William Morrow, 1995), 9–16.
↑ 33. For a skeptical evaluation, see Hayden Ebbern, Sean Mulligan, and Barry Beyerstein, “Maria’s Near-Death Experience: Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop,” Skeptical Inquirer 20, no. 4 (1996): 27–33. For a response defending the case, see Sharp, After the Light, and Holden, “Veridical Perception,” 192.
↑ 34. Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, 171–173.
↑ 35. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 10, “The Psychology of Near-Death Experiences.”
↑ 36. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 10. Cooper notes that while this phenomenon cannot easily be verified (since one cannot confirm whether the deceased person was “really” met), the consistent pattern of meeting only those who have actually died—and sometimes those whose deaths were unknown—is too regular to be mere chance.
↑ 37. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 10. See also Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters (Chicago: Moody, 2014), chap. 7.
↑ 38. Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?, 56–72. Murphy acknowledges that mental properties are entirely dependent on physical processes, which entails that the cessation of brain function should entail the cessation of conscious experience.
↑ 39. Rickabaugh and Moreland, The Substance of Consciousness, chap. 5, point (xviii): “(a) Near-death cases are (metaphysically) possible and (b) whether or not they are real is a function of the eyewitness (and related) evidence and not a function of the laws of physics/chemistry or the survival of my brain and body.”
↑ 40. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 10, “The Psychology of Near-Death Experiences.” Cooper carefully distinguishes these two categories of NDE evidence.
↑ 41. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 10: “While this sort of out-of-the-body phenomenon demonstrates that there can be veridical sense experience without the use of the sense organs, it does not prove that the soul can completely separate from the body. It does not prove the truth of dualism, although it certainly seems to support it.”
↑ 42. See Chapters 6 and 12 for the full exegesis of these passages. The pattern of soul-departure at death and return at resuscitation is one of the most consistent themes in biblical anthropology.
↑ 43. Long, Evidence of the Afterlife, chaps. 9–10. See also Allan Kellehear, “Census of Non-Western Near-Death Experiences to 2005: Observations and Critical Reflections,” in The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, ed. Holden, Greyson, and James, 135–158.
↑ 44. This does not mean that NDEs provide a complete or theologically reliable picture of the afterlife. The cross-cultural consistency concerns the structure of the experience (separation, light, peace, return), not its theological content or interpretation.
↑ 45. Melvin Morse with Paul Perry, Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children (New York: Villard Books, 1990). Morse’s research with children was groundbreaking because it provided a natural control for cultural conditioning.
↑ 46. See also Cherie Sutherland, Children of the Light: The Near-Death Experiences of Children (New York: Bantam, 1995).
↑ 47. For a comprehensive bibliography of peer-reviewed NDE research, see the reference sections in Holden, Greyson, and James, eds., The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009).
↑ 48. Sabom, Light and Death, 183–195. See also van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, 133–145, where van Lommel argues that the residual brain activity hypothesis cannot account for the specific features of NDEs during flat-EEG periods.
↑ 49. Habermas and Moreland, Beyond Death, 195–198. They note that if the physicalist’s objection can never be falsified in principle, it has ceased to be a scientific hypothesis and become a metaphysical commitment.
↑ 50. For a representative account of these proposed mechanisms, see Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993). Blackmore argues that all NDE features can be explained by known neurophysiological mechanisms.
↑ 51. Habermas, “Evidential Near-Death Experiences,” in The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism, 235–238. Habermas makes the crucial distinction between explaining the phenomenology of NDEs and explaining their veridicality.
↑ 52. Van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest,” The Lancet 358 (2001): 2044. Van Lommel notes that the physiological factors were the same for patients who had NDEs and those who did not, suggesting that physiological factors alone do not determine whether an NDE occurs.
↑ 53. Long, Evidence of the Afterlife, chap. 10. Long’s cross-cultural data from NDERF provides the strongest evidence against the cultural conditioning hypothesis.
↑ 54. Mark Fox, Religion, Spirituality and the Near-Death Experience (London: Routledge, 2003), provides a nuanced discussion of how cultural and religious frameworks influence the interpretation of NDEs while the core experience remains consistent.
↑ 55. Habermas and Moreland, Beyond Death, 185–200. See also Greyson, After, chap. 11, where Greyson argues that no known brain mechanism can account for veridical perception during cardiac arrest.
↑ 56. The analogy with archaeology is not original to me. Habermas and Moreland use a similar reasoning structure in Beyond Death, chap. 7, where they argue that NDE evidence should be treated the same way we treat any other category of empirical evidence that bears on theological questions.
↑ 57. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 10: “A great deal has been collected and written on this topic, some of it by Christians and responsible investigators… but a lot of it by uncritical prophets of the occult, Eastern religion, and the New Age movement. The whole issue must be approached cautiously and critically for the sake of both religious and intellectual integrity.”
↑ 58. Rickabaugh and Moreland, The Substance of Consciousness, chap. 11, “Accounting for Empirical Research on NDEs.” They note that NDE subjects experience themselves as completely disembodied selves with spatial location and a point of view, which is consistent with substance dualism’s claim that the self is a simple, spiritual substance.
↑ 59. This distinction between the evidential value of veridical NDE data and the theological reliability of NDE interpretations is crucial. For a careful evangelical treatment of this issue, see Habermas and Moreland, Beyond Death, 200–210.
↑ 60. This does not mean that Fudge’s case for conditional immortality is wrong. CI stands on its own exegetical merits regardless of anthropological commitments, as we argued in Chapter 2. But the physicalist foundations of Fudge’s case are undermined by the NDE evidence, just as they were undermined by the biblical and philosophical evidence in earlier chapters.
↑ 61. In Chapter 31, we will bring together the cumulative case from the entire book—biblical, philosophical, and empirical—to show that substance dualism, far from threatening conditional immortality, actually makes it stronger, more coherent, and more biblically faithful.
↑ 62. See Chapter 13, “Absent from the Body, Present with the Lord,” and Chapter 14, “The Souls of the Departed,” for the full exegesis of these intermediate state passages.
↑ 63. Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, 159–170. Van Lommel provides detailed discussion of the clinical parameters of death during cardiac arrest and the implications of conscious experience during this period.
↑ 64. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 10, “The Psychology of Near-Death Experiences.” Cooper concludes that veridical NDEs demonstrate that perception can occur without the sense organs, which “certainly seems to support” dualism.
↑ 65. Greyson, After, chaps. 6–8. Greyson documents the lasting changes in values, attitudes, and behavior that NDE survivors typically exhibit. See also Pim van Lommel, “About the Continuity of Our Consciousness,” Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology 550 (2004): 115–132.
↑ 66. Habermas and Moreland, Beyond Death, 178–182. They argue that the lasting transformative effects of NDEs are a significant datum that physicalist explanations (oxygen deprivation, endorphins, temporal lobe stimulation) have not been able to account for.
↑ 67. Van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest,” The Lancet 358 (2001): 2044–2045. The longitudinal follow-up component of van Lommel’s study is often overlooked, but it provides some of the strongest evidence for the lasting impact of NDEs.