Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven: A Brief Introduction in Plain Language (2 page)

Introduction
The Search for Shangri-La

Imagine
that you’ve heard tales of an extraordinary lost civilization somewhere in the
mountains of Tibet called Shangri-La. Your curiosity gets the best of you and
you’re itching to find out if it’s real. But how could you gather evidence
without launching your own costly expedition?

Your
best bet would be to talk to scads of people who claim to have independently
visited Shangri-La and compare their stories, while evaluating their
intelligence, honesty, and sanity. And it wouldn’t hurt if they produced
corroborating evidence, like a souvenir that could have come only from
Shangri-La. 

Essentially,
this is what many people claim about the afterlife. Since we’re told that the
most popular way to meet God face-to-face is to die, it’s simply not practical
to schedule a trip over Spring break. That leaves us with the option of
interviewing levelheaded people who claim to have visited the other side.

But
how could they ever prove that their experiences were more than vivid dreams?
And what could they possibly bring back as corroborating evidence?  Those
questions kept me from taking near-death experiences seriously.  

Until
recently.

Chapter
1
A Four Year Old’s Near-Death Experience

A
relative read the popular book
Heaven is for Real
and wanted my opinion.
(1)
I wasn’t interested, but read it as a favor. In the book, a father tells
about his four year old child, Colton, who described his visit to heaven during
a medical crisis. 

Several
things about the story intrigued me. First, the father was a respected, highly
visible member of a rural community (a pastor, wrestling coach, and volunteer
fireman who operates a garage door company). If he were making things up,
people in the community would likely start poking around and asking questions.
Eventually, his reputation would be ruined and neighbors would likely report
the farce to the press and complain on reviews, 

“The father’s weird; his wife’s prone to
hysteria, and Colton’s delusional. My son goes to school with Colton. Last week
the kid swore to his teacher that he owned a pet unicorn.”

Had
the family been low-profile residents of a large city like Los Angeles, it
would be easier to fabricate a story, sell it as real, and get away with it. 

Second,
there was corroborating evidence. Colton shared insider knowledge that he
probably couldn’t have known from earthly sources. He claimed to meet his
miscarried sister, whom he’d never been told about. He told details of a great-grandfather
that he supposedly couldn’t have known. He saw his father praying in a separate
hospital room, which he claimed to have viewed from outside his body.    

It
was an interesting book, but to me wasn’t very helpful as evidence for the
afterlife. I needed more. To satisfy my skeptical mind, I needed:

·
        
Reports
from the doctors and nurses.  

·
        
Reports
from people in the community about the family’s integrity.  

·
        
Evidence
that Colton couldn’t have overheard talk about the supposed “corroborating
evidence” at a time when family members didn’t realize he was listening.

·
        
Evidence
that his experience wasn’t an elaborate dream, the details of which were
supplied by his religious upbringing. 

Also,
I thought it rather weird that Colton said nothing about the experience when he
first woke up. After all, don’t young kids typically report spectacular
neighborhood events when they first burst in the front door?

The
story seemed evidentially weak, but intriguing nevertheless. In the blurbs
section, an author who studied near-death experiences commented that Colton’s
experience jived with the many NDEs he’d studied. If others were reporting
similar experiences with better corroborating evidence, this line of inquiry
just might provide evidence for the afterlife.

Chapter
2
Studies on Near-Death Experiences

So I
looked for serious books on the subject – books by objective authors (not
pastors or new age gurus who might be out to evangelize) who had the academic
credentials to do solid research on multiple cases. I began by reading Dr.
Raymond Moody’s seminal 1975 study,
Life After Life
.
(1)
Moody
studied medicine (Psychiatry), enabling him to evaluate scientific evidence for
possible medical explanations of the phenomenon. Additionally, he held a Ph.D.
in philosophy, which often helps researchers to more accurately evaluate hypotheses
and to be more precise with their conclusions.

I
started with Moody because he was one of the earliest researchers to seriously
study and popularize NDEs. Thus, it was highly unlikely that his subjects had read
about NDEs or seen them discussed on TV. This could likely rule out the
psychological explanation that people have these experiences because they’ve
heard about them and thus expect to have them.

Moody
came from a nonreligious home, where his father, a surgeon, scoffed at religion
as “institutionalized superstition.” It’s no wonder that Moody grew up thinking
that death was the end of life.
(2)
But while studying philosophy at the
University of Virginia, one of his professors mentioned Dr. George Ritchie, a
respected psychiatrist in their medical school who had been declared dead and
later regained consciousness, reporting a fantastic experience on the other
side. Fascinated, Moody went to hear him speak to a group of students.

Dr.
Ritchie reported dying of double pneumonia. (He passed around a copy of his
death certificate for the students to examine.) While he was clinically dead,
he left his body, making observations that he would later confirm by visiting
the location.
(3)
He could walk through people and doors. The laws of
space and time didn’t seem to apply – he could think of a place and be there
immediately.

He returned
to the hospital room to find his body and a voice said “Stand up! You are in
the presence of the Son of God!” A magnificent being appeared and showed him every
detail of his life, from his birth to when he was pronounced dead, all within
what seemed like a brief period of seconds.

The
being asked, “What have you done with your life?” He replied, “Well, I’m an
Eagle Scout.” The being responded, “Yes, that only glorified you.”

Then
the being sat next to him, allowing him a glimpse of the heavenly realm.
Finally, Dr. Ritchie returned to his body.
(4)  

Moody
became friends with Dr. Ritchie, eventually dedicating
Life After Life
to him and catching his passion for Psychiatry. Ritchie said that when he spoke
of his experience, people would often come up afterward and report similar
experiences. Moody became fascinated. Could it be that this experience was
fairly common, but people were reluctant to report it out of fear that people
would think they were crazy?
(5)  

When
Moody began teaching philosophy at East Carolina University, a frustrated
student approached him, suggesting that they should focus on important stuff,
like life after death. The student described being in a car accident, where the
doctors had pronounced him dead. Before he was resuscitated, he found himself
fully conscious, outside his body. He travelled through a tunnel and met a
person who let him see his entire life. It changed his life. To the student, that
sounded more interesting and relevant than most philosophy.

So Moody
began asking his students if they had experienced anything like this. Some
would share their stories. When he entered medical school, he continued
interviewing doctors, professors, and others who reported such experiences,
recording them on a cassette player. These shared experiences, numbering about
150, became the substance of his book.
(6)
In it, Moody wrote snippets of
his interviews, organizing them under 15 common characteristics, such as
leaving the body, hanging out with deceased relatives, passing through a
tunnel, meeting a being of light, and reviewing their lives.

The
accounts were astoundingly similar, yet personalized and detailed, often
containing corroborating evidence. Finally, he evaluated and ruled out possible
naturalistic explanations, such as oxygen deprivation, psychological
explanations, or drugs administered during medical crises.
(7) 

Life
After Life
was enlightening, but left me wanting more. Decades had
passed since Moody’s study and I wanted someone to pull together the subsequent
research. Also, Moody’s subjects lived in America. Although his subjects
claimed to have diverse beliefs, could the pervasive Christian worldview at
least partially explain the similar experiences? Had further research of more
culturally diverse subjects confirmed or refined or overturned Moody’s
conclusions?

Enter
Dr. Pim van Lommel, a world-renowned Dutch cardiologist, who wrote
Consciousness
Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience
. Working in a
hospital cardiac wing where clinically dead patients were often resuscitated,
he began to rethink his naturalistic assumptions. According to van Lommel,

“I grew up in an academic environment
where I was taught that there is a reductionist and materialist explanation for
everything. And up until that point, I had always accepted this as indisputably
true.”
(8)

What
changed his mind?

Many
of his resuscitated patients reported trips to the other side, in vivid detail,
that occurred when they were clinically dead. While their lifeless bodies lay
on hospital beds, with their hearts flat lined and their brains should have
been incapable of producing consciousness, they reported experiencing something
that was vivid, astounding and life changing. After resuscitation they spoke of
being very much alive somewhere else. As one patient said, “Dead turned out to
be not dead.”
(9)
Corroborating evidence (things his patients saw and
learned while clinically dead) indicated that the experiences were real.

Van
Lommel’s scientific inquisitiveness lit a fire under him and he embarked on a
20-year study of near-death experiences. He interviewed patients soon after
their experiences and re-interviewed them years later to see if their memories and
life changes remained true to their original reports. His research was so well
done that it was published in the prestigious medical journal,
The Lancet
.
(10)

One
reason van Lommel’s research intrigued me was his location. He interviewed
patients in Holland, where most people don’t believe in life after death.
(11)
If people who didn’t believe in heaven had vivid heavenly experiences, you
could hardly attribute the experience to their rather boring expectations of
after death nothingness. But remarkably, the experiences reported in Holland
paralleled Moody’s findings in America.

Van
Lommel went beyond his own research and Moody’s to compare many independent
studies on NDEs after Moody. Finally, for those who can’t get enough of a good
thing, he took several chapters to theorize about the mind/brain phenomenon and
possible explanations based upon quantum physics. It’s well documented and
shows a thorough command of the relevant literature.   

Van
Lommel’s conclusion?

Near-death
experiences don’t fit into a naturalistic worldview. There
is
life after
death. His patients experienced, not vivid dreams, but very real journeys to
the other side, the most significant part of which was an encounter with a
personal being of light.
(12)

After
reading van Lommel, I slowly worked my way through the other primary
researchers in the field. Each study left me with additional questions that
were typically addressed in other studies. (If you’re interested in going
deeper, see Appendix #9 – Guide to Further Research. With hundreds of NDE books
available, you’ll likely want to concentrate on serious studies of multiple
cases.)  

Beyond
books, NDEs are no stranger to scholarly, peer-reviewed literature. Over 900
articles on NDEs were published in scholarly literature prior to 2005, gracing
the pages of such varied journals as
Psychiatry
,
The Lancet
,
Critical
Care Quarterly
,
The Journal for Near-Death Studies
,
American
Journal of Psychiatry
,
British Journal of Psychology
,
Resuscitation
and
Neurology.
(13)
In the 30 year period after Moody published
Life
after Life
, 55 researchers or teams published at least 65 studies of over
3500 NDEs.
(14)
  

It’s
important to note that most of these researchers don’t come across as heralding
their pet theological or philosophical positions. Most that I read began their
research doubting that NDEs involved anything spiritual but became convinced by
the weight of the evidence. They write like objective, scientifically-minded
people who became fascinated with a perplexing phenomenon that had the
potential to teach us not only about the afterlife, but the very purpose of our
existence. 

I
also conducted my own informal interviews with friends, relatives, and those
they trust. Even after reading scads of scholarly studies, the skeptic in me
kept saying, “If these experiences are as prevalent as they say, why haven’t I
heard of even one NDE within my own trusted circles?” So I began to ask friends
and relatives and was astounded to hear people I had every reason to trust,
with no apparent ulterior motives, telling me about their experiences on the
other side. In Appendix #3, I suggest how anyone can study NDEs by interviewing
their circles of trust.