Maybe the Best Empirical Evidence for Life After Death (Pt.II)

Yesterday's VP post discussed a few examples of what are called evidential NDEs, Near Death Experiences for which there is independent corroboration. The post was based on excerpts from Gary Habermas's chapter on NDEs in the book Minding the Brain.

Today's post summarizes a second excerpt from that chapter. The entire excerpt can be found here, and in it Habermas discusses cases where the NDEr is the only person who knows that someone else has died. Habermas notes that,

Another body of evidence comes from cases where particular persons, often friends or loved ones but sometimes others, had died recently, but the death was unknown to the NDEr until the deceased persons appeared in the NDE or deathbed vision.

[There are] three distinct species of these experiences: (1) where the death of the deceased individual occurred well before the NDE, but the death was not known by the NDEr before the occurrence of the NDE; (2) where the deceased person had died at the same time as the NDE experience, or “immediately beforehand,” thus precluding previous knowledge of the death on the part of the NDEr (or others in the room); (3) where the deceased was a person whom the NDEr did not even know.

In all three species of these NDEs (especially the last), information was purportedly imparted from the previously deceased individuals to the person who had the near-death experience, with subsequent confirmation of the reports. Over two dozen such examples were collected by Greyson, and other researchers have also presented similar accounts.

These examples are both tragic and fascinating. Here's one:

A young nine-year-old boy named Eddie was seriously ill in a hospital. Recovering from a thirty-six-hour fever, Eddie immediately told those in the hospital room that he had been to heaven, recounting seeing his grandfather, an aunt, and an uncle there.

But then his startled and agitated father heard Eddie report that his nineteen-year-old sister Tammy, away at college, was in heaven too, and she told Eddie that he had to return. But the father had just spoken to Tammy two days prior.

Checking with the college, the father found out that his daughter had been killed in a car accident the previous day, but that the college could not reach the family at their home, presumably because of Eddie’s hospital stay!

Another example of this type are simultaneous or shared near-death experiences reported by at least two different people and supported by accounts from physicians, nurses, or others. In most such cases, a healthy person shares part or all of the NDE experience of the ill person.

In one case, a seventeen-year-old boy named Shane died in a traffic accident. His fifteen-year-old deaf sister Cheryl “observed” the entire accident process, though she was a distance away at home when the event occurred. She observed Shane “flying through the air” and knew that he was dead.

Cheryl sensed that her brother was contacting her without words, relating that he wanted to show her “something really cool.” She then reported that the two of them “rose in the air, high above the scene of the accident.” She accompanied her deceased brother to heaven, where they met previously dead relatives.

Her brother did not return, since he was deceased. But during the process, her parents could hear her talking to her brother while the other three family members were all at home, where Cheryl was present and conscious.

Upon her “return,” she brought back information that no one else knew, but which was verified subsequently. Shane had said to Cheryl repeatedly, “I know something that you don’t know.” Then he told his sister that their aunt was pregnant with a boy, though no one in the family knew that at the time.

Cheryl reported observing the event while her two parents witnessed her side of the conversation.

Another type of empirically verifiable NDEs is found in cases of people blind since birth reporting having seen things during their NDE. These cases are significant, as it would be difficult for many of the specific items to have been known previously by the patients, through any of their physical senses.

One episode concerned a woman named Vicki who had been blind from birth. During her NDE, Vicki reported color images, including a rendezvous with two close friends from her youth. Both of them had also been blind, and both had died previously. She reported that two other deceased friends and a deceased relative were also present. She provided accurate physical descriptions of each one, even though she had never seen any of them before. She also provided details, such as a glimpse of the roof of the hospital and a description of some jewelry.

Another NDE case involved a woman named Nancy, who became blind during an operation and remained completely blind afterwards.

She had an Ambu bag placed over her nose and mouth to make her breathe. In her NDE she reported watching the process away from her body. Afterwards, she properly described the identities of two men standing down the hallway away from her, and gave the correct number of staff people around her. Her medical records, plus a testimony from one of the men, were “in substantial agreement” with Nancy’s comments and agreed “in virtually every significant respect.”

Brad had been blind since birth. He had stopped breathing for a few minutes and then noticed himself looking down on his body in the bed. He described details of another person in the room with him who went to get help, then experienced himself going up through the ceiling and out of the building, where he observed the rooftop.

He related that he could see clearly and described the scene outside of his home by providing many details, including very specific information regarding the snow on the ground and how it had been plowed into heaps. A streetcar also drove by.

In another case, Frank was a blind man who described the pattern of colors and designs on a necktie that he had received. Some of these details were confirmed in additional interviews.

[Researchers] Ring and Cooper conducted extensive discussions with these blind individuals, and attempted to confirm their stories with others who were present. They concluded that “the blind persons in our study saw what they certainly could not possibly have seen physically. Our findings in this section only establish a putative case that these visions were factually accurate, and not just some kind of fabrication, reconstruction, lucky guess, or fantasy.”

It's possible, of course, that some of these accounts have a materialist or naturalist explanation, but there are so many of them that one has to be impressed by the sheer number, variety, and in many cases, the quality of medical documentation.

Moreover, if only a single one of the thousands of cases in the literature is veridical, then materialism must be false, since materialism insists that human beings are solely material and that everything about us is reducible to atoms and chemistry. If a single example of an NDE is actually what it purports to be, however, then there must be something about us - a consciousness, a soul - that's immaterial and which persists beyond the physical death of the body.

I'll post the third and final part of this series tomorrow.