Chapter 32

What NDEs Mean for Us — Life, Death, and Hope

We have come to the end of a long road together.

Thirty-one chapters back, I asked you to walk with me into one of the strangest and most contested questions a human being can ask: what happens when we die? Not as a matter of feeling. Not as a matter of mood. As a matter of evidence. I promised you that we would take the strongest skeptical arguments seriously, name them honestly, and then test them against the data. We have done that. And now I want to tell you what I think it all means.

This last chapter is different from the others. It is shorter on argument and longer on heart. The case has been made — the long stretch of close work is behind us. What is left is to ask, plainly, what the case means. For you. For me. For the people we love. For the next time we stand at a hospital bed and a body grows still under our hand.

Before I get to that, I want to say thank you.

Not just to you, the reader. To the critics.

An Honest Word About the Critics

Michael Marsh is a serious man.¹ He is a medical doctor. He earned a D.Phil. at Oxford. He spent years working through the neurological and theological literature on near-death experiences before he wrote his book. When he argues that what he calls "extra-corporeal experiences" are "brain-state phenomena" produced by "metabolically disturbed" brains,² he is not throwing rocks. He is offering a careful, scientifically-informed account of what he believes is going on. I disagree with him. You know that by now. But I am better for having read him. Many of the arguments in this book would not exist if Marsh had not pressed me to make them.

The same goes for John Martin Fischer and Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin.³ They are sharp philosophers. Their book is calm, careful, and unfailingly polite. They never reach for the easy dismissal. When they argue that NDEs do not, by themselves, force us to a supernatural conclusion, they are doing real philosophical work. I disagree with their conclusion. But the way they pressed the question made me sharpen mine.

And Raymond Lawrence. And the authors of Selling the Stairway to Heaven. And Susan Blackmore, Keith Augustine, Kevin Nelson, Jason Braithwaite, Gerald Woerlee. I have argued with all of them. Some of them, hard. But they are not enemies of truth. They are people who, like me, are trying to make sense of a strange and humbling set of reports. Iron sharpens iron, the proverb says.⁴ My iron is sharper because of theirs.

I want to be clear about why I have spent so much ink on these particular voices. It is not because they are loudest. It is because they are best. If the case for veridical NDEs cannot stand up to Marsh, it cannot stand up to anyone. If it cannot answer Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, the philosophical work has not been done. Throughout this book, I have tried to take the strongest version of the skeptical argument and test it. Not the cartoon version. Not the Twitter version. The real one. And in chapter after chapter, the strongest version did not survive contact with the strongest evidence.

If you have read this book and felt, at any point, that I was being unfair to a critic — tell me. The book is better when the critics get a fair hearing. They deserve one.

What the Evidence Actually Shows

Now, what have we learned?

Strip away the fine print. Forget the footnotes for a moment. Stand back and look at the whole picture.

We have learned that there are people — many people — who, while their hearts had stopped and their brains were not functioning the way brains need to function for ordinary perception, accurately reported things they could not have known by ordinary means. The man with the dentures saw a coronary care nurse from above and described, a week later, exactly where the nurse had stashed his teeth.⁵ Maria saw a tennis shoe on a third-floor window ledge she had never been near.⁶ Pam Reynolds, with her eyes taped shut and clicking transducers in her ears at 95 decibels, described surgical instruments she had never seen and a conversation about her veins she could not have heard.⁷ Vicki Umipeg, blind from birth, saw — saw — her own body during an out-of-body experience, with detail she had never had access to in waking life.⁸

These are not isolated tales. Janice Holden, working through every published veridical NDE she could find, calculated that 92 percent of the reportable details in such accounts were completely accurate.⁹ Six percent had small errors. Less than one percent were entirely wrong. Hallucinations don't behave that way. Dreams don't behave that way. The Self Does Not Die, the most careful collection we have, contains over a hundred verified cases.¹⁰

And we have learned something else. Every neurological explanation that has been offered for these experiences — hypoxia, hypercarbia, endorphins, ketamine, temporal-lobe seizures, the temporo-parietal junction, REM intrusion, dying-brain dysfunction — every one of them, when pressed against the actual evidence, fails.¹¹ Not all at once. One at a time. The hypoxia argument cannot account for clarity of thought. The TPJ argument cannot account for verified perception of distant events. The ketamine argument cannot account for cardiac-arrest patients who never received ketamine. The dying-brain argument cannot account for patients whose brains were not dying in any of the ways the theory requires.

I am not telling you NDEs prove the Christian faith. They don't. I am not telling you they answer every question about the afterlife. They don't. I am telling you something more modest and, I think, more interesting: the brain is not the whole story of the mind. Something about us — call it consciousness, call it the soul — can function when the body cannot. That is what the evidence, taken together, shows. And that single conclusion, if it is true, is enough to undo the central claim of physicalism.¹²

Now I Want to Talk to You

Up until now I have mostly been arguing. I want to stop arguing for a minute and just talk.

You picked up this book for a reason. Maybe you had an experience yourself, and a doctor or a friend or a pastor told you it was nothing — just chemicals, just a misfiring brain — and you have spent years wondering whether they were right. Maybe someone you love had an experience like that, and you are trying to figure out what to make of it. Maybe you sat at a hospital bedside and watched someone reach toward a corner of the ceiling and smile, and you cannot get the moment out of your head. Maybe you are simply afraid of dying, and you wanted to know if there was anything on the other side of that door. Or maybe you are a skeptic who picked this up to see if any of it would hold up.

Whoever you are, I want to say this plainly. You are more than a brain. You are not a wet computer running biological software, scheduled to be deleted when the hardware fails. You are a body, yes — God made bodies, and bodies matter — but you are also a soul. The two are knit together so tightly in this life that we usually cannot tell where one stops and the other starts. But they are not the same thing. The veridical evidence, the cases we have walked through together, the millions of lives quietly transformed by what they saw — all of it points the same way.

If you are an NDE experiencer who has been told, again and again, that what you saw was a hallucination — please hear me. The evidence does not support that dismissal. You are not crazy. You did not imagine it. The clinicians who waved you off were not standing on solid science. They were standing on a worldview that ruled out your experience before they ever heard it. That worldview has problems — problems this book has tried to lay out fairly. Take the experience seriously. Bring it to Scripture. Bring it to a thoughtful pastor. Do not let it become an idol — but do not let it be erased.

You are going to die. So am I.¹³ That is not the bad news. The bad news would be if dying were the end. The good news, on the evidence, is that it is not.

The Hope That Holds

If the evidence is correct — and I have argued, at length, that it is — then the picture Scripture has held out for two thousand years is not a fairy tale. It is something closer to a confirmed hypothesis.

Scripture teaches that human beings are body and soul.¹⁴ Not body alone. Not soul alone. Both. When Jesus warned His disciples not to fear those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul,¹⁵ He was not speaking poetically. He was saying something true about how we are made. When Paul wrote that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord,¹⁶ he was not using a metaphor. He was telling the Corinthian church what death is for the believer. When the dying thief was promised, "Today you will be with me in paradise,"¹⁷ the promise was kept. Today. Not after a long unconscious sleep. Today.

This is the conscious intermediate state — the historic Christian conviction that, between death and the final resurrection, the redeemed exist with Christ in joyful awareness.¹⁸ It is what John saw in Revelation, when the souls under the altar cried out to God.¹⁹ It is what Paul anticipated when he said that to die is gain.²⁰ It is what the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed and the whole sweep of Christian tradition have always confessed. NDEs do not prove this picture. But they fit it — better than any rival.²¹

And the intermediate state is not the destination. It is the waiting room. The destination is bodily resurrection — the day Christ returns and the dead are raised in glorified, imperishable bodies for life in a renewed creation.²² That is the Christian hope. It is bigger than going to heaven. It is heaven coming here. New heavens and new earth. Bodies and souls together, made new, made whole, made at home.

This is one place where Marsh and I are not as far apart as it might first appear. Marsh is right that the final Christian hope is resurrection, not soul-escape.²³ What he misses is that affirming a conscious intermediate state does not threaten the resurrection — it is, instead, what bridges the present body and the future one. The two are sequential, not rival. NDE experiencers do not, by and large, claim to see the resurrection state. They describe a temporary, transitional realm — a foretaste, not the final feast. Which is exactly what Scripture would lead us to expect.

And running through all of it — the evidence, the doctrine, the hope — is a love that pursues us even into our dying. Children describe it. Atheists describe it. Cardiac patients describe it. The unbearable, knowing, welcoming love that meets them at the threshold and tells them they are known.²⁴ J. Steve Miller, surveying thousands of accounts, observed that Jesus appears in NDEs far more often than skeptics admit, and that anti-Christian elements are far rarer than critics suggest.²⁵ Whether or not every NDE is correctly interpreted by every experiencer — and many are not — the central feature is hard to miss. The God who made us has not abandoned us at the door of the grave. He stands there. Waiting.

Think about what that means for a moment. Not for the famous cases. Not for the books on the bestseller list. For you. For the friend you have lost. For the parent who is fading. The doctrine has always taught it; the evidence now corroborates it. The body shuts down, and you are not annihilated. The brain stops, and your name is still spoken. The God who knew you in the womb does not lose you at the grave.

A Personal Note

Before I close, let me say two things that are mine and not the book's. The argument of this book stands without them.

I hold to conditional immortality. That is, I believe immortality is a gift God grants only in Christ, and that the finally unrepentant will not be tortured forever but will at last be destroyed.²⁶ Conditional immortality does not require physicalism — the older Christian conditionalists held it together with a robust belief in the soul, and so do I. I am also open to the possibility, suggested by passages like 1 Peter 3:18–20 and 4:6, that God's saving outreach may extend beyond the moment of death, and perhaps to the final judgment itself.²⁷ I find myself drawn at times to a conservative biblical universalism, though I have not landed there. I hold these convictions with humility. They are not the argument of this book; they are personal notes from the writer.

If you disagree with me on either of these, that is fine. The case for the soul, the case against physicalism, the case that NDEs are real and evidential — none of it depends on either of those convictions. The book stands without them. I have many dear brothers and sisters in Christ who hold the traditional view of eternal punishment, and I have many more who reject any postmortem opportunity. Those are real conversations. Worth having. They are simply not the conversations of this book.

And Finally

I started this book with a man who shouldn't have seen anything — whose heart had stopped, whose brain was failing, whose dentures were sliding into a hospital drawer — and who, a week later, looked up at the very nurse who had pulled his teeth and said, I know where they are.²⁸ I want to end there.

For decades, that story and a thousand like it have been waved away. Brain chemistry. Misfiring neurons. Tricks of memory. The dying brain's last theater. I have argued, in these pages, that none of those explanations actually fits the evidence. The man knew something he could not have known. So did Maria. So did Pam. So did Vicki. So did the children who came back and named relatives they had never met, who had died before they were born.²⁹ The simplest explanation — the one that does not require us to torture every detail to fit a theory — is that for a few moments, when the body went quiet, the person did not.

I want to say one more thing about that man with the dentures — the man we have circled back to. He did not write a book. He did not go on a speaking tour. He did not become a celebrity. He simply went home, and lived, and died, like the rest of us will. But for a moment, while the doctors worked over a body that was not breathing, something looked back at them from a corner of that emergency room and remembered. And a week later he handed that memory to a startled nurse, and the nurse never forgot. The case is small. It is also enormous. In the quiet of a single hospital corridor, a worldview gave way.

If you take only one thing from this book, take this. The skeptic's confidence that you are only a brain is not supported by the data. Something in you outlasts the body's failing. And that something is not yours to keep by your own willing — it is yours because the One who made you holds it, and you, and waits to receive what He made when at last you set the body down.³⁰

I cannot prove all of that with NDE evidence. I have not tried. But I can say that the empirical evidence we have walked through is consistent with what Scripture has been telling us all along: that we are dust, and we are breath; that we die, and yet we live; that the grave does not have the last word.

Christ does.

Thank you for reading. Go in peace.

Soli Deo gloria.