NDEs are problematic for both Christians and materialists. They're a problem for some Christians because although they point to the existence of the self after physical death - a state of affairs that reinforces a belief Christians also hold - many of the details of what persons who've experienced these episodes relate do not conform to traditional Christian beliefs about that existence.
They're problematic for materialists because materialists believe that all we are is our physical, material selves and when we die our self is extinguished. If it is the case that our existence continues after the death of the body it would be a fact completely incompatible with materialism.
Thus, if these are genuine after death phenomena some Christians may have to adjust their thinking on the afterlife, but materialists would have to give up their belief in materialism altogether.
A recent article at Mind Matters discusses an article on NDEs which appeared in a recent issue of Scientific American. The author, a neuroscientist named Christof Koch, acknowledges that people who report these experiences are reporting something genuine. They're not fabricating the accounts, but Koch, being a materialist seeks a materialistic explanation for them.
The author of the Mind Matters article is Michael Egnor, also a neurosurgeon. Egnor writes that,
Koch points out that NDEs share common characteristics across individuals, cultures, and historical eras—freedom from pain, traveling down a tunnel to a light, an intense sense of peace, seeing loved ones, experiencing a life review, and having an unusual sense of time and space. These experiences are also remembered with unusual intensity. To the person who experiences them, they seem “realer than real”—and they often fundamentally change the person’s outlook on life.
It is when Koch addresses some of the neuroscience attempts to explain NDEs that his discussion goes off the rails. The number and variety of the materialist theories he describes counts against their veracity—it conveys more of a sense of groping for any plausible materialist explanation than of sober scientific investigation.
For example, he points out that NDEs are no more likely to occur in people with religious beliefs and beliefs in the afterlife than in people who lack those beliefs. But, far from undermining the significance of NDEs, that finding supports the view that they are not mere confirmation bias toward existing beliefs during a traumatic experience.
Egnor is right about this. If NDEs were, in fact, a real post-death experience of an afterlife we would expect that one's religious beliefs would have nothing to do with whether one experienced it or not.
Egnor then challenges Koch's explanation of what causes the NDE in the dying or dead person:
Egnor then challenges Koch's explanation of what causes the NDE in the dying or dead person:
In an attempt to account for NDEs in a fully materialist way, Koch ascribes many of them to “power outages” in the cerebral cortex during the dying process.This is an implausible account for two reasons. First, a sizeable portion (around 20% in many studies) of NDEs are correlated with perceptions and knowledge that could not have been obtained via conventional means. A famous example in the neurosurgical community is that of Pamela Reynolds, who had an out-of-body NDE during cardiac arrest associated with aneurysm surgery.Afterwards, she remembered watching her own operation while her heart was stopped and she could recount precise details of events during her surgery that she could not possibly have known unless she had actually seen them.
Hers is not the only example of an out-of-body experience that is inexplicable in materialist terms. One of my colleagues encountered a young child who had complex skull surgery who described his own operation in meticulous visual detail, despite being under general anesthesia and having his eyes and face covered during the procedure.
The technical details of the surgical procedure were idiosyncratic to that neurosurgeon; information was not publicly available and was not described to the family or the child in the kind of detail that the child reported seeing. The family was so shocked by their child’s awareness of the details that they asked why my colleague hadn’t used anesthesia for the surgery!There are many such examples of NDEs where details of accounts could be correlated, which of course cannot be explained by the “power outage” theory.
One of the most remarkable accounts I ever came across was of a Seattle woman named Vicki Noratuk who was totally blind from birth. Noratuk was "killed" in an automobile accident and yet was able to accurately report what happened to her in the hospital and even to describe seeing color which she had never seen in her life. She was resuscitated but never regained her sight. She tells her story in this video.
Egnor continues his critique of Koch's explanation for NDEs:
The second reason that Koch’s “power outage” theory fails is more mundane. The usual consequences of brain hypoxia and hypoperfusion are very well understood and they invariably entail confusion, diminished sensations, loss of memory, etc..
All of these experiences are antithetical to NDEs, which are characterized by stunning clarity, inexplicable knowledge, and lifelong memory of the events. NDEs improve awareness and understanding, which is utterly unlike brain hypoxia and brain damage.
Other materialist explanations for NDEs fail in much the same way. While drug intoxication, seizures, uncontrolled release of neurotransmitters, and the like may have some superficial resemblances to NDEs, all of them utterly fail to capture the whole phenomenon. NDEs are radically different from any mental experience caused by brain impairment.
There's more in the Mind Matters article that anyone interested in NDEs should read. It's a fascinating subject.