Chapter 25

The Physicalist Assumption Behind NDE Skepticism

Open Marsh’s Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences to page xvii. There, in plain words, sits the engine that drives the rest of the book: NDEs “are likely to be generated by metabolically disturbed brains.”¹

Read that sentence again. Notice the word generated. The brain produces the experience. The brain is the cause. The experience is the effect. The conclusion sounds modest — likely, he says — but the framing is total. Before any evidence has been weighed, the inquiry has already been pointed in one direction.

This is what philosophers call a prior commitment. Every researcher has them. The question is whether we name them honestly and let the evidence test them, or whether we hide them behind the language of “science” and pretend we are being neutral.

In this chapter I want to do something simple. I want to name the prior commitment most NDE skeptics share: physicalism. I want to show how it operates throughout their work. And I want to show why, once it is named, the whole skeptical case looks much less decisive than it first appeared.

Physicalism is the view that everything — including the mind — is made of physical stuff. No soul. No nonphysical consciousness. Just brains, neurons, chemistry, and whatever activity arises from them. On this view, when the brain stops, the mind stops. Period.²

You can hold this view. Many serious thinkers do. But it is not a finding of science. It is a philosophical claim about what kinds of things exist. And when a critic uses it as a starting point — without arguing for it — every piece of NDE evidence ends up filtered through it before the reader has a chance to see the evidence on its own terms.

The hard problem of consciousness gets its full treatment in Chapter 23. The positive case for substance dualism — the view that we are body and soul — belongs to Chapter 24. My job here is narrower: to expose the unstated assumption beneath the skeptical case and show how much of the argument depends on it.

A. The Critic’s Argument

Marsh tells us, on the first page of his preface, that his project is “neurophysiological.”³ He says he wants to rescue NDE research from the “metaphysical claims” of authors who think these experiences point to a soul or mind existing apart from the body.⁴ His tools are brain anatomy, brain chemistry, and brain pathology. His conclusion is that NDEs are produced by brains under stress — especially as those brains recover from a metabolic crisis.⁵

Notice how this works. Marsh does not argue for physicalism. He simply does science as if physicalism were true and then presents the results as if they had decided the question. He never pauses to ask: “What if consciousness is not made of brain stuff? What would my data look like then?” He proceeds as if that possibility were already off the table.

Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin go further. They make the physicalist commitment explicit. In their Chapter 8, they admit that “we may not, at present, be able to see our way to a physical explanation of near-death experiences” — and then argue that this is “no good reason for pronouncing dead the hope of explaining them in wholly physical terms.”⁶ They appeal to the youth of neuroscience, the steady progress of physical science, and the supposed difficulty of any non-physical alternative.⁷ Physicalism wins by inference to the future.

This move has a name. Robert and Suzanne Mays, writing in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, called it promissory physicalism: the position that we do not have the explanation now, but science will deliver one eventually, so trust us.⁸ It is a promise about a future we cannot yet see, used to settle a question we cannot yet answer.

Susan Blackmore takes a blunter line in Dying to Live. NDEs are dying-brain phenomena, full stop. Anyone who reads them otherwise has been seduced by wishful thinking. The book’s title gives away the framing: as the body dies, the brain produces a final lucid hallucination. Where is the argument that brains do produce consciousness in the first place? It is presupposed.⁹

Across the skeptical literature you will find the same pattern. The critic announces that he is doing science. He defines the territory in physical terms. He treats every NDE feature as a behavior of meat. Then, when veridical evidence shows up — perceptions during cardiac arrest that should not have been possible — the critic does not say, “perhaps the soul really did leave the body.” He says, “we must be missing some brain mechanism.” The conclusion is fixed; only the mechanism is up for grabs.

You can watch this happen in real time. Take any chapter of Marsh where he confronts a difficult case. The format is consistent: present the case, list possible neurophysiological explanations, then declare the case “explainable in principle” even when no single explanation actually fits. “In principle” is doing the heavy lifting. Translated, it means: the explanation has to be physical, so a physical one must be available somewhere, even if we cannot identify it yet. The conclusion is supported by the assumption, and the assumption is held in place by the conclusion. Neither is supported by the evidence under review.

That is what an unstated assumption looks like in practice. It is the silent referee deciding which evidence counts and which evidence has to be explained away.

B. Identifying Weaknesses

Two big problems sit on top of this approach.

First, physicalism is not a scientific result. It is a philosophical claim that science alone cannot establish. Neuroscience can map correlations between brain states and mental states. It cannot, by its own methods, decide whether mental states are brain states, or whether they are caused by brain states, or whether they are merely connected to brain states the way a radio signal is connected to a radio. Those are different metaphysical pictures. The data from a brain scanner does not tell you which one is true.

To see this, picture a scientist watching a violinist play. She can record every motion of the bow, every pressure on the strings, every wave of sound. From those measurements, can she tell whether the music is produced by the violin or transmitted through the violin? No. She can describe what the violin is doing. She cannot, from her measurements alone, decide whether the violin is the source of the music or its instrument. That choice depends on prior questions about what music is and where it comes from.

The same thing is true of brains and minds. Brain scans show us what brains do when minds work. They do not, by themselves, settle whether brains make minds or simply carry them.¹⁰

Second, promissory physicalism is faith dressed in a lab coat. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin admit that we cannot now see how the brain produces consciousness. They then say: don’t worry, future neuroscience will figure it out.¹¹ This is the philosophical equivalent of “the check is in the mail.” Trust us. We are working on it. Meanwhile, you must accept our conclusions as if the check had already cleared.

The central problem here is not new. It has been with us for at least four hundred years. Descartes saw it. William James saw it. Today’s leading philosophers of mind — David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, Galen Strawson, Philip Goff — see it.¹² The hard problem of consciousness has resisted every reductive attempt for decades. Saying “future science will solve it” amounts to saying “we do not have an answer, but we know our answer is right.” That is not an argument. It is a profession of faith — and one we should test, not assume.

A third weakness sits beneath both. The skeptical project is in danger of being self-undermining. If full-blown materialism is true, our beliefs are produced by physical processes shaped by survival pressures, not by truth. As Nagel and Alvin Plantinga have each argued, the materialist cannot easily account for the very rationality on which the materialist relies in order to argue.¹³ The NDE skeptic is sawing off the branch he sits on without seeming to notice.

I want to be careful here. None of this proves physicalism is false. The point is humbler: physicalism is a contested philosophical position, not the settled view of science. Anyone using it to evaluate NDE evidence ought to admit that, defend it, and let the reader decide. Marsh and most other critics do not.

One distinction makes the issue cleaner. Working scientists routinely operate under what philosophers call methodological naturalism — the practice of looking only for natural causes when doing experiments in a lab. That practice is reasonable and useful. It is how science gets done. But methodological naturalism is not the same as metaphysical naturalism — the much larger claim that nature is all there is. The first is a working rule. The second is a worldview.¹⁴ NDE skeptics regularly slide from one to the other without warning. They use the modesty of the working rule to smuggle in the much bigger claim, and then tell us the worldview is just “what science says.” It is not. It is what some scientists believe, sometimes for reasons that have nothing to do with their lab work.

C. The Pro-NDE Response

Once the assumption is named, the conversation changes. The veridical NDE evidence stops being a strange anomaly to be tamed by future neuroscience and starts being exactly what we would expect if consciousness can function apart from the body. Let me lay out the response in four steps.

1. Marsh has already given the game away.

In Chapter 5 of his own book, Marsh writes that “there is no explanation as to how, or why, consciousness should necessarily arise out of the rather more basic neural activities comprising brain metabolism.”¹⁵ Read that slowly. The leading skeptical text in the field admits, in print, that the central premise of physicalism — that brain activity gives rise to consciousness — has no explanation. None. We do not know how it would work. We do not know why it should work.

That is a stunning admission, and it points straight at the hard problem of consciousness, which Chapter 23 treats in detail. If physicalism cannot explain how an ordinary brain produces ordinary consciousness, why should we trust it to rule out unusual consciousness reports — like NDEs — on the grounds that the brain is not producing them in the usual way? You cannot pronounce on the failure of an unknown mechanism.

2. The qualia problem will not go away.

Qualia (pronounced KWAH-lee-uh) are the what-it-is-like features of experience — the redness of red, the taste of strawberry, the heaviness of grief. Thomas Nagel’s famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” pointed out that no description of bat brains, no matter how detailed, captures what it is like to be a bat using sonar to find its way at night.¹⁶ Frank Jackson made the same point with his “Mary’s Room” thought experiment: a scientist who knows every physical fact about color vision but has lived all her life in a black-and-white room will still learn something new the first time she sees a red rose.¹⁷ Physical descriptions leave something out — the experience itself.

NDE reports are full of qualia. Vivid color. Joy beyond words. The feeling of being deeply known and deeply loved. Whatever the dying brain is doing, it is also producing — or transmitting — experience. And experience is precisely what physicalist neuroscience has not been able to explain.

3. Many physicalist defenses have collapsed.

For half a century, philosophers have tried to reduce mind to brain in stronger and weaker ways. The identity theory — “thoughts just are brain states” — ran aground on the multiple-realizability problem (a thought, like “it is raining,” could in principle be carried by very different physical systems).¹⁸ Functionalism — “mental states are roles, not stuff” — has trouble with qualia.¹⁹ Eliminative materialism — “there are no mental states, only brain states” — is widely seen as self-refuting; the eliminativist still has to believe his theory.²⁰ What is left is mostly a hopeful “non-reductive physicalism,” which says minds depend on brains in some deep way without being reducible to them. Critics like J. P. Moreland have pointed out that this is barely more than a label.²¹

What is striking is that even non-religious philosophers are walking away. Thomas Nagel — an atheist — argued in Mind and Cosmos that the materialist neo-Darwinian picture of mind is “almost certainly false.”²² Galen Strawson, also no friend of theism, argues that consciousness is so resistant to the standard physicalist account that we may need to expand our concept of the physical to include it.²³ Philip Goff has moved toward panpsychism (the view that consciousness is a basic feature of reality) for the same reason.²⁴ The field is fracturing. The crisp confidence behind Marsh’s “metabolically disturbed brains” is, today, a minority view among philosophers of mind.

The same shift has happened among some of the most distinguished neuroscientists of the last century. Wilder Penfield, the Canadian neurosurgeon who literally mapped the human cortex by stimulating it during awake brain surgery, spent his career trying to show that the brain alone could account for the mind. At the end of his life he concluded the opposite. In The Mystery of the Mind, he wrote that after decades of evidence he found it “easier to rationalize man’s being on the basis of two elements than on the basis of one” — a brain and a mind, not a brain alone.²⁵ Sir John Eccles, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on synapses, came to a similar conclusion through different reasoning, arguing that the unified character of conscious experience could not be explained by the fragmented activity of brain regions and required a non-physical mind interacting with the brain.²⁶ These were not theologians or NDE researchers. They were leading scientists who followed the evidence where it led. The popular notion that “real” neuroscience pushes toward physicalism is, at best, half the story.

4. NDEs fit a non-physicalist picture without strain.

If consciousness is not reducible to brain activity, then the central question in NDE research becomes: what happens to consciousness when the brain shuts down? Several options open up. Maybe consciousness ends with the brain. Maybe it pauses and resumes. Maybe — as in the filter or transmission view associated with William James and Henri Bergson, recently developed by Bernardo Kastrup and the Esalen group of researchers — the brain narrows or focuses a wider consciousness, and as the brain fails the focus loosens.²⁷ On any non-physicalist option, NDE phenomena are no longer impossible. They are predicted.

The veridical cases, treated more fully in Chapters 4 through 9, look exactly like what we would expect if a non-physical aspect of the person continues to function while the brain is offline. The physicalist must explain those cases away. The dualist simply describes them.

One note for Christian readers. None of this argument requires Scripture. The case against an over-confident physicalism can be made on purely philosophical grounds, by atheists, agnostics, and theists alike. But once the case is made, the biblical picture of the human person — body and soul, integrated in this life and separable at death — comes into much sharper focus.²⁸ Chapter 26 takes up that biblical picture in full. For now, just notice this: the NDE evidence and the historic Christian view of human nature point in the same direction. The view they jointly oppose is physicalism.

D. Counter-Objections

Two replies a thoughtful skeptic might raise. Both are worth taking seriously.

Objection 1: “Physicalism is the scientific view. Dualism is a religious leftover.” This is not so much an argument as a sociological observation about Western academia. It tells us where physicalism is popular, not whether it is true. And in any case, the claim does not survive contact with the actual literature. Chalmers, Nagel, Strawson, Goff, John Searle, Frank Jackson at one point in his career — none of these are religious thinkers, and all reject reductive physicalism on philosophical grounds. The “science vs. religion” framing is itself a piece of metaphysical packaging.²⁹ Notice the sleight of hand: critics get to call their view “scientific,” then point at non-physicalists and call them “religious,” then act as if science has settled the question. It has not.

Objection 2: “Physical explanations have a long track record. Why bet against them now?” Because subjective experience is not a “physical case” in the same sense that lightning or fevers were. Lightning was always a physical event in search of a physical explanation. Whether consciousness is a physical event is the question at issue. You cannot decide a disputed question by counting victories in a different category. The track record only counts if you have already settled what kind of phenomenon NDE consciousness is. That is precisely what is in dispute.³⁰

So where does this leave us? The skeptical case against the veridical NDE evidence depends — silently, throughout — on a contested metaphysical view. Once we name that view, we can ask whether it has earned its keep. I have argued it has not. The hard problem remains unsolved (Chapter 23). The positive case for substance dualism is strong (Chapter 24). And the best NDE evidence (Chapters 4–9) fits a dualist picture far more naturally than it fits a physicalist one. The skeptics’ confidence rests on an assumption they have rarely defended — and one that, when examined, is harder to defend than they let on.

In the next chapter we turn to Scripture. Marsh has argued that the Bible itself rules out the separable soul. He is wrong about that, and the wrongness matters. To that argument we go now.