Chapter 5
Imagine for a moment that you are lying on an operating table. Your heart has stopped. Your body has been cooled to sixty degrees. The blood has been drained from your head. The machines monitoring your brain show nothing—no electrical activity at all. By every clinical measure, you are dead. And yet, somehow, you are watching the surgeons work on your body. You hear what they say. You see the unusual surgical saw they are using. Later, when you wake up, you describe these things in detail—details you could not possibly have known by any normal physical means. This is not a scene from a novel. This actually happened to a woman named Pam Reynolds in 1991. And her case, along with hundreds like it, presents a serious problem for anyone who believes that the human mind is nothing more than the firing of brain cells.
In the previous chapter, I laid out the philosophical case for substance dualism: the view that human beings are composed of both a physical body and an immaterial soul. I argued from consciousness, qualia, intentionality, personal identity, and several other angles. Those arguments stand on their own. But there is another line of evidence that strengthens the case in a different way—not philosophical, but empirical. I am talking about the growing body of research on near-death experiences, or NDEs. In this chapter, I want to focus specifically on what researchers call veridical NDEs—cases in which the patient reports verifiable information they could not have obtained through normal sensory means. My argument is straightforward: if consciousness can function when the brain has shut down, then consciousness is not identical to brain activity. And if consciousness is not identical to brain activity, then physicalism is false.1
The modern study of near-death experiences began in 1975, when a young physician named Raymond Moody published a book called Life After Life. Moody had collected accounts from patients who had been resuscitated after clinical death, and he noticed striking similarities between their stories. Many described floating above their bodies, moving through a tunnel toward a bright light, encountering deceased loved ones, having a panoramic life review, and being told they had to return.2 Moody coined the term “near-death experience” and gave the field its name.
Since then, the research has grown enormously. Kenneth Ring, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, brought academic rigor to the study with Life at Death (1980) and Heading Toward Omega (1984). Cardiologist Michael Sabom published Recollections of Death (1982), the first systematic medical study comparing NDE accounts with what actually happened during the resuscitations. In 2001, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet published a landmark prospective study by Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel, who tracked 344 cardiac arrest survivors and found that 18 percent reported clear NDEs. Sam Parnia, an intensivist now at NYU Langone, has led the AWARE and AWARE II studies, which I will discuss below. Jeffrey Long, an oncologist, founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation and has assembled the largest publicly available database of NDE accounts. And Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, summarized half a century of his own research in his 2021 book After.3
NDEs occur across cultures, ages, religions, and medical conditions. They happen to lifelong atheists and devout believers, to children and to the elderly, to people who knew nothing about NDEs beforehand and to those who had read every book on the subject. The core features remain remarkably stable across all these populations. That cross-cultural consistency is itself an interesting datum—one that fits poorly with the idea that NDEs are simply a product of cultural expectation.
Here is the crucial point. Not every NDE is equally compelling as evidence against physicalism. Many NDE features—the tunnel, the light, the feelings of peace—could in principle be explained as products of a stressed and dying brain. The cases that really matter for our argument are the veridical ones: NDEs that include accurate information the patient could not possibly have obtained through ordinary perception. This is the category that rules out hallucination, since hallucinations do not, as a rule, deliver verifiable facts about the room next door.
The Veridicality Test. A near-death experience becomes evidence against physicalism when the patient reports specific, accurate information—about events, conversations, or surroundings—that they could not have obtained through their physical senses. Hallucinations do not predict the serial number on the surgical saw. A flatlined brain is not supposed to be perceiving anything at all.
The case I described in the opening paragraph is one of the most carefully documented in the NDE literature. In August 1991, Pam Reynolds underwent a procedure called hypothermic cardiac arrest, sometimes nicknamed “standstill,” to remove a giant aneurysm at the base of her brain. The surgical team, led by Dr. Robert Spetzler at the Barrow Neurological Institute, took her body temperature down to about 60°F (16°C), stopped her heart, and drained the blood from her brain. During the procedure, her EEG was flat. Her brainstem auditory evoked responses, monitored through small speakers in her ears, were silent. By every neurological measurement available, her brain was not functioning.4
And yet, when Reynolds woke up, she described the operation in detail. She described the unusual bone saw used to open her skull—a tool she had never seen and that did not look like an ordinary saw. She described the conversation between Dr. Spetzler and the cardiac surgeon about her femoral artery being too small. She described the music playing in the operating room. Independent verification confirmed that her descriptions matched what actually happened. The veridical details were observed during a window when her brain was demonstrably non-functional.5
I want to be careful here. NDE skeptics have raised reasonable questions about the timing—whether some of the perceptions could have occurred before or after the cooling phase. Those are fair questions, and the evidence is not as clean as we might wish. But the core problem for physicalism does not go away. Even if we grant the most skeptical reading, Reynolds reported verifiable details from a period when her brain function was severely impaired, her ears were sealed and emitting clicks, and her eyes were taped shut. On any honest accounting, this is not what physicalism predicts.
The second category of cases I find especially powerful comes from Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper’s research with blind NDE experiencers, published in the 1999 book Mindsight. Ring and Cooper interviewed 31 blind people who had reported NDEs or out-of-body experiences. About half of them had been blind from birth. And yet during their NDEs, many described visual scenes—sometimes accurately depicting their resuscitation, the people in the room, or the layout of the hospital.6
One particularly striking case is Vicki Umipeg, blind from birth due to optic nerve damage. During an NDE following a 1973 car accident, she described seeing her own body on the gurney, a wedding ring on her finger she did not know was distinctive, and the strangers attempting to revive her. Vicki had no concept of what visual experience was like in normal life. Her dreams were not visual. And yet she came back from her NDE describing what she had seen.7
Now, on physicalism, this should be impossible. A brain that has never received visual input cannot, in any obvious way, generate coherent visual experiences—much less veridically accurate ones. Visual cortex development depends on visual input during a critical period. If consciousness is just brain activity, then a blind person’s “visual” NDE is roughly as likely as a person born without ears suddenly being able to compose a symphony. The fact that these reports exist—and that some of them include accurate visual details—is exactly what we would expect if a soul, capable of perceiving in some non-bodily way, can briefly function apart from its usual sensory machinery.
The Pam Reynolds and Mindsight cases are striking, but skeptics rightly point out that they are anecdotal. What we really want is a prospective, controlled study. That is what Sam Parnia tried to provide with the AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) studies.8
The AWARE I study, published in 2014, tracked 2,060 cardiac arrest cases across 15 hospitals in the U.S., U.K., and Austria. Researchers placed hidden visual targets on shelves near the ceiling in resuscitation rooms—images that could only be seen from above. The hope was that some patients would report leaving their bodies and seeing the targets, providing rigorous, prospectively-tested evidence. Of 140 cardiac arrest survivors interviewed, 9 percent had experiences consistent with NDEs, and 2 percent had detailed out-of-body experiences. One man accurately described his three-minute resuscitation, including the actions of staff and the sounds of two automated alerts—during a period when his brain should have been incapable of forming memories. The hidden targets were not seen, but the room layouts in question turned out not to have such targets in place.9
The AWARE II results, presented in 2019 and published more fully later, confirmed and extended these findings. Cardiac arrest patients showed periods of measurable cognitive activity even with flat EEGs, and a subset reported detailed conscious experiences during resuscitation that were independently verified.10 The studies do not yet provide a clean “hidden target” confirmation, but they reinforce the basic finding that vivid, verifiable conscious experience occurs during clinical death.
What the data require us to explain. The challenge is not the unusual character of NDEs but the combination of three things at once: (1) coherent, structured conscious experience, (2) occurring during periods of severe brain compromise or measured flatline, (3) yielding information that can be checked against external reality. Any account of human nature that calls itself adequate must explain all three. Physicalism, I will argue, can explain none.
Physicalists have offered several alternative explanations for NDEs. Each captures something true about some NDE-like experiences, but none of them accounts for the veridical cases. Let me walk through the main proposals.
The first is the hallucination hypothesis: NDEs are simply hallucinations produced by a stressed or dying brain. This sounds plausible until we ask what hallucinations actually do. Hallucinations are subjective experiences with no necessary connection to external reality. A person hallucinating a pink elephant does not, by virtue of the hallucination, gain accurate information about the room next door. But that is exactly what veridical NDEs report. A blind woman does not hallucinate the wedding ring on her own finger. A flatlined patient does not hallucinate the specific words spoken in another part of the room. The hallucination hypothesis does not fit the evidence.11
The second is the oxygen deprivation hypothesis: NDEs are caused by cerebral anoxia. There is no doubt that anoxia produces unusual experiences. But the experiences anoxia produces—confusion, disorientation, fragmentary perception—look nothing like the coherent, structured, often crystalline NDE accounts. As van Lommel and others have pointed out, NDE survivors typically describe their experience as more vivid and lucid than ordinary waking life, not less. Anoxia is the wrong shape to explain that data.12
The third is the temporal lobe stimulation hypothesis associated with Michael Persinger and Olaf Blanke. Direct stimulation of certain brain regions can produce sensations that resemble out-of-body experiences. True enough. But the experiences produced this way are fragmentary, often distorted, and they do not yield veridical information. Stimulating someone’s temporal lobe does not allow them to read a sentence written in another room.13
The fourth is the endogenous DMT hypothesis: the brain releases the psychedelic compound DMT at death, and this produces NDEs. Setting aside that the evidence for DMT release at death is contested at best, the deeper problem is that DMT trips, while sometimes mystical, do not give the user accurate information about events outside the room. A psychedelic experience that produces verifiable observations is not a psychedelic experience as we understand them.14
The fifth is the residual brain activity hypothesis: maybe the brain is not truly dead during NDEs, and some low-level activity produces the experience. This response gestures at a real point—measuring brain activity is hard, and EEGs may miss deeper structures. But it cannot rescue physicalism. In Pam Reynolds’ case, the blood was literally drained from her brain. There was nothing to fuel residual activity. And even granting some hypothetical residual function, the explanation has things backward: a severely compromised brain should produce less coherent experience, not more. Yet NDE survivors consistently describe their experiences as more vivid than waking life. Physicalism predicts gradual cognitive shutdown; the data show heightened, structured awareness.15
I want to be careful not to overstate the case. NDE evidence does not prove dualism the way a mathematical proof establishes a theorem. John Cooper, whose work on biblical anthropology I rely on heavily elsewhere, has approached NDE evidence cautiously. He notes that the data tend to support dualism and certainly do not contradict it, but he hesitates to say the evidence demonstrates the soul’s ability to function entirely apart from the body.16 Richard Swinburne has been even more skeptical about parapsychological evidence in general.17 I take their cautions seriously.
But the case has gotten stronger since Cooper wrote. Twenty-five years of additional prospective research, the AWARE studies, the documentation of cases like Pam Reynolds and the Mindsight blind subjects, and the failure of physicalist explanations have shifted the picture. J. P. Moreland, surveying the field, concludes that the reality of the soul fits well with what he calls the “massive and ever-growing evidence” from near-death experiences.18 I think Moreland has the better read on where the evidence now stands.
What veridical NDEs do show, I believe, is this: human consciousness can, under at least some conditions, function in ways that are not fully explainable by ongoing brain activity. That is a modest claim and a devastating one for physicalism. Combined with the philosophical arguments of Chapter 4 and the biblical evidence of Chapter 3, the empirical data tip the balance decisively toward substance dualism.
This book is not, finally, a book about NDEs. It is a book about the Incarnation, the human soul, and the failure of physicalist Christology. So I want to close this chapter by drawing the connection that motivates the entire project. If consciousness can function independently of the brain—if souls can be active when bodies are not—then we have empirical support for exactly the kind of human being orthodox Christology requires Christ to be.
The Christological Payoff. If a human soul can be conscious and active when the body has shut down, then the orthodox claim that Christ’s human soul was active during the triduum mortis—the time between His death on the cross and His resurrection—is not a strange piece of metaphysical speculation. It is exactly what we would expect of a real human being. Physicalism, by contrast, has no place to put Christ during those hours.
I will develop this argument in detail in Chapter 21 (Holy Saturday and the Triduum Mortis) and Chapter 22 (The Death of Christ and the Dissolution of the Hypostatic Union). For now, the point is simply this: the empirical evidence from NDEs converges with the biblical and philosophical case for the soul. If the soul of an ordinary cardiac arrest patient can perceive and remember when the brain is silent, we have no reason in principle to deny that the human soul of Jesus was conscious and active in the hours between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. On dualism, those hours have a coherent account. On physicalism, the Incarnation appears to dissolve at the cross and reconstitute on Easter morning—or some still more complicated story has to be told. NDE evidence does not solve every Christological puzzle. But it removes the temptation to think of disembodied human consciousness as a piece of theological wishful thinking. The lab data are pointing in the same direction Scripture and the creeds have always pointed.
Before I close, a caution. NDEs are not Scripture. The theological content of NDEs—the “being of light,” the universal welcome, the absence of anything resembling judgment in many accounts—cannot be treated as authoritative revelation. Some NDE reports likely involve genuine encounters with God or with deceased loved ones; others may involve nothing of the kind; and some, given biblical warnings about spiritual deception (2 Corinthians 11:14), may involve something worse. The Christian who reads NDE literature should bring biblical discernment to it.19
What we can take from the empirical research is the bare phenomenon: consciousness functioning when the brain is not. That is enough. The biblical and theological work of describing what consciousness after death is actually like, and what God will and will not do with it, has to be done from Scripture, not from anecdote.
I began this chapter with Pam Reynolds. Let me end where her case ends. She woke up, recovered, and lived another nineteen years. She told her story many times. She never claimed to have proven anything by it. She just told what happened. And what happened, on the most natural reading of the evidence, is that her conscious self continued to perceive and remember during a period when her brain could not have been the source of those perceptions or memories.
That fact, multiplied across hundreds of well-documented cases, presents physicalism with a problem it cannot solve from inside its own framework. Hallucinations don’t produce verifiable data. Anoxic brains don’t produce crystalline experiences. Blind people’s brains don’t generate accurate visual scenes. Something else is going on. The substance dualist has a name for that something else. We call it the soul.
I am not asking the reader to accept dualism on the strength of NDE evidence alone. The biblical case (Chapter 3) and the philosophical case (Chapter 4) carry most of the weight. What the empirical case adds is confirmation: it shows that the kind of human being Scripture and the creeds describe—a being whose conscious self is not exhausted by the activity of the brain—is exactly the kind of human being we have growing scientific evidence for. That convergence matters. And it sets up the argument I will be making for the rest of this book: that the Christ of Scripture, of the councils, and of the creeds was a real human being in this same sense—body and rational soul together—and that any anthropology which denies the soul makes an orthodox Christology impossible.20
Looking Ahead. The next chapter turns from human nature to Christ Himself. Before we can show that physicalism cannot account for the Incarnation, we need to establish what kind of being Christ is. Chapter 6 takes up the biblical witness to the full deity of Christ. Chapter 7 takes up the full humanity—body and soul—that the Son assumed.
1 For my philosophical case for substance dualism and against physicalism, see Chapter 4. For the biblical case, see Chapter 3. This chapter complements those arguments by adding empirical support from NDE research. ↩
2 Raymond A. Moody, Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon—Survival of Bodily Death (Atlanta: Mockingbird Books, 1975). Moody’s methodology was qualitative and his sample was self-selected, but the patterns he identified have been replicated in much more rigorous studies since. ↩
3 Kenneth Ring, Life at Death: A Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death Experience (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980); Kenneth Ring, Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience (New York: William Morrow, 1984); Michael B. Sabom, Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); 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): 2039–45; Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperOne, 2010); Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2021). For a brief but careful theological treatment of this body of literature from a dualist perspective, see also John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 212–15. ↩
4 Sabom himself documented the Reynolds case extensively in Michael Sabom, Light and Death: One Doctor’s Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), 37–51. Sabom interviewed Reynolds, the surgeons, and reviewed the medical records. ↩
5 Sabom, Light and Death, 37–51. For careful philosophical engagement with the Reynolds case and similar cases as evidence for substance dualism, see J. P. Moreland, “Substance Dualism and the Diachronic/Synchronic Unity of Consciousness,” in Christian Physicalism? Philosophical Theological Criticisms, ed. R. Keith Loftin and Joshua R. Farris (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), chap. 3, “Final Plea to Christian Physicalists.” ↩
6 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). ↩
7 Ring and Cooper, Mindsight, chap. 1. The Vicki Umipeg case is also discussed in Greyson, After, chap. 6. ↩
8 Sam Parnia et al., “AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A Prospective Study,” Resuscitation 85, no. 12 (December 2014): 1799–1805. ↩
9 Parnia et al., “AWARE,” 1799–1805. The single verified out-of-body case Parnia reports—a patient who accurately described his own resuscitation including the timing of equipment beeps—occurred in a hospital that had not been equipped with the hidden visual targets, which is a frustrating limitation of the study but does not nullify the verifiable observation. ↩
10 Sam Parnia et al., “AWAreness during REsuscitation—II: A Multi-Center Study of Consciousness and Awareness in Cardiac Arrest,” Resuscitation 191 (October 2023): 109903. ↩
11 Cooper makes this point cogently in his discussion of the literature: ordinary hallucinations cannot account for veridical perception of events physically removed from the patient’s sense organs. See Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 213. ↩
12 Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2010), chaps. 6–7. ↩
13 Olaf Blanke et al., “Stimulating Illusory Own-Body Perceptions,” Nature 419, no. 6904 (September 19, 2002): 269–70. The induced experiences Blanke reports involve a sense of dislocation but no veridical observation. ↩
14 For critical discussion, see Greyson, After, chap. 8. ↩
15 See van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest,” 2039–45, on the lucidity problem for any reductive account. ↩
16 Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 215. Cooper’s caution is appropriate but, as I argue above, the evidence has continued to accumulate since the writing of his important volume. ↩
17 Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 305, cited in Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 215. ↩
18 Moreland, “Substance Dualism and the Diachronic/Synchronic Unity of Consciousness,” in Loftin and Farris, Christian Physicalism?, chap. 3, “Final Plea to Christian Physicalists.” Joshua Farris similarly notes that the broader empirical and philosophical case against physicalism has only strengthened in recent decades; see Joshua R. Farris, An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2020), 122–23. ↩
19 For thoughtful treatment of the theological evaluation of NDE content from an evangelical perspective, see Gary R. Habermas and J. P. Moreland, Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998). ↩
20 The argument that an anthropology denying the soul makes orthodox Christology impossible is developed throughout Parts IV and V of this volume. The central anti-Apollinarian principle—that what is not assumed is not healed—is treated in Chapter 12. The triduum mortis problem for physicalism is treated in Chapters 21 and 22. The Chalcedonian-anthropological argument that human nature must be understood in light of Christ’s human nature, including a rational soul, is developed in Chapter 7 and engaged throughout. See Michael A. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor: A Chalcedonian Anthropology, Studies in Historical and Systematic Theology (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2024), 30–33. ↩
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