Near-death stories are filled with fascinating otherworldly details.
Should we believe all of them?
John said, “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 Jn. 4:1).
Our job is to test.
That means we shouldn’t immediately accept or reject everything we hear. We must do the hard work of thinking and considering.
Susan Blackmore
After having her own near-death experience in 1970, Dr. Susan Blackmore proceeded to search for an explanation. Disappointed with supernatural answers, she decided that natural explanations made the most sense. In 2000, she said,
It was just over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic out-of-body experience that convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena and launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end. Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena—only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a sceptic. (Wikipedia)
She went on to become a proponent of the dying brain hypothesis and one of the most outspoken critics of the afterlife hypothesis of NDEs. Blackmore’s theories are published in Dying to Live: Near Death Experiences (1993) and Seeing Myself: What Out-of-body Experiences Tell Us About Life, Death and the Mind (2017).
Evidential NDE Cases
In his 1996 article, professor Gary Habermas engages with Blackmore’s naturalistic explanations of NDEs. He focuses on evidential NDEs because Blackmore admits these could pose a direct challenge to her thesis. Evidential or veridical cases contain details that can be objectively corroborated.
For example, Kimberly Clark Sharp, a social worker in Seattle, reported that a heart attack victim in Seattle named Maria claimed to see a verifiable object while she was unconscious: a blue tennis shoe with a worn little toe and a lace under the heel on a ledge around the corner of the building from where she entered. Blackmore finds this case fascinating but unsubstantiated because she was “unable to get further information.”
Habermas looked into the case and gathered the following information:
- Sharp had interviewed Maria on the same day of the NDE.
- Prior to her hospitalization, Maria had never been in the area of the hospital.
- The shoe could not be seen from the ground.
- The hospital was not surrounded by buildings of sufficient height to give a view of the shoe.
- The worn toe and the position of the lace could not be seen from the window where Sharp found it.
- Maria had also identified it as big and it was large.
- When Clark brought it to Maria she held it behind her back while Maria described it one more time.
- The story was confirmed multiple times in later interviews.
So here are the facts: While Maria was unconscious she says left her body and floated outside the building where she saw a (1) large, (2) blue, (3) tennis shoe with a (4) worn little toe, with a (5) lace under the heel (6) resting on a high ledge that could not be seen from the ground, (7) outside a window where the lace and little toe could not be seen, (8) around the corner of the building from where she entered. And (9) Maria had never been to the area of this hospital. The shoe and the details of the shoe were corroborated. Habermas also mentions a similar case where a red shoe was retrieved from the roof of a hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. (You can listen to Kimberly Clark Sharp talk about this experience here.)
What about evidential NDEs in blind people? If a blind person accurately described a physical object or an event he or she saw during an NDE, doesn’t that show something beyond mere natural ability? In the three-year period since Blackmore’s book was published in 1993, Habermas says nineteen cases of this sort were discovered. He then proceeds to highlight the confirmed story of a congenitally blind woman who accurately reported items from her surroundings.
In the years since Habermas’s article was published, researchers have collected more verified cases. In The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences (2016) “over 100 reliable, often firsthand accounts of perceptions during NDEs that were later verified as accurate by independent sources.” Finding corroborating details is one way to test the veracity of an NDE and we now have plenty of cases to consider. Evidential NDE cases pose a special challenge to naturalistic explanations.
After graduating from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, I served as a high school Bible teacher in Asia. I enjoy traveling, writing, and playing the drums. For a deep dive into church history and the character of God, see my book Surprised by Hell.