Last week, The Immortal Mind co-author Denyse O’Leary did a segment of Jacob Vazquez’s Truthful Hope podcast. The talk turned to the change in the way near-death experiences are being treated these days:
The Evolution of Near-Death Experiences
Denyse O’Leary: [25:44] The reason they came to get so much attention today was actually modern medical practice. Near-death experiences were quite commonly reported throughout human history. The problem was, how do you know that the person was dead?
The modern intensive care unit will give you feedback from a body, including flat brain waves. When the brain waves are flat, basically nothing is happening in the brain. If the person comes back and says, I had a near-death experience. I was floating. I noticed that the nurse left my dentures in a drawer, but I don’t seem to have them. Can you go and find them? And sure enough, they’re in the drawer.
For all I know, a similar story could have been told in the Middle Ages, but what they didn’t have was the flat brain waves. So what’s really interesting to me is doctors studying near-death experiences, medical papers being published on them. So that is, in a sense, a blow to a materialist approach. The materialist can’t just say, “Oh, that’s hogwash! …
Have you ever heard of a guy named Michael Shermer?
Jacob Vazquez: 27:52 Yeah. Skeptic magazine, I think he runs. Yes. A well-known skeptic and debunker.
O’Leary: [27:58] Well, he had Michael Egnor on his show, along with a prominent neuroscientist named Christof Koch. But it was a very respectful discussion.
Nobody tried to make fun of Mike [Egnor] because they knew perfectly well that there has to be some accounting for this sort of thing that goes beyond “That’s just hogwash!” Now, I can’t prove that they will or won’t come up with a plausible materialist explanation. I don’t see how, but then I don’t claim to see everything either. All I’m going to say is, it’s not like it used to be, where people could just say, “Oh, that’s nonsense.” Because there are too many things that they then have to account for …
At one time, near-death experiences were the sort of thing like seances and mediums, right? And you could just say, “Oh, that’s nonsense.” But the veridical near-death experiences and also the tendency of such experiences to cause people to make significant changes in their lives — again, change isn’t easy. Everyone knows that if it’s happening, there should be some explanation for it that goes beyond “Well, it just so happened that way” or something like that.
I think that’s the problem that the one-dimensional skeptic is encountering. I mean, I try to be skeptic, too, but I try not to be a one-dimensional skeptic!
Skeptics and Near-Death Experiences
More:
Vazquez: Yeah, that’s a great way to put it. And that’s a great segue to my next question. Given your journalistic background … how are the [30:15] skeptics responding to such an argument? Are they just trying to, you know, put it under the rug or are they actually giving an account for what this is all about?
O’Leary: Well, one approach has been to point out that death occurs in stages. This, of course, is true. So what they’re trying to say is that the near-death experience is simply the body’s reaction to impending death. I don’t think that works with veridical near-death experiences [where the experiencer reports things that can later be verified while clearly unable to do so by any natural means]. I think they’re going to have to eventually come to terms with the fact that the human mind can survive separated from the body, which no materialist will like. But it’s not theology.
Next: Reconciling near-death experiences with theology.
Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.