Late last month, Biola professor Sean McDowell interviewed Liberty University’s Gary Habermas at his YouTube channel. Habermas, a scholar of near-death experiences, spoke about some of the recent accounts:
From the introduction at YouTube:
Gary Habermas was one of the first Christian scholars to study near-death experiences in the early 1970s. Thus, he has been studying them over 5 decades! How has the evidence changed? According to Dr. Habermas, we have hundreds of NEW documented, evidential cases just in the past few years. In this episode, I talk with Dr. Habermas about the cases he has collected and analyzed. Some involve accurate details observed miles away from the patient’s body, blind individuals seeing for the first time and verifiable medical data that naturalistic explanations simply cannot explain.
In Three Parts
Habermas also wrote a chapter of Minding the Brain (Discovery Institute Press, 2023) on near-death experiences which you can read online in three parts:
One: There’s a growing number of verified near-death experiences. Gary Habermas notes more than 110 NDEs where experiencers’ detailed reports of what they saw when they were flatlined have been corroborated later. It’s exceedingly unlikely, Professor Habermas argues, that all these cases result from misperception, deception, coincidences, or mistakes.
Two: What people learn when they are (briefly) dead. In this excerpt, Gary Habermas reports that sometimes the returned experiencer says that someone else has died — but the official news only comes later. For reasons that are not yet clear, blind people can see during a near-death experience and details have been confirmed. Habermas relates some cases.
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Three: Why corroborated NDEs can’t just be explained away. In some cases, Gary Habermas recounts, patients who had NDEs while in a state of clinical death report dates and numbers that are later found to be accurate, Materialist explanations for near-death experiences are much less satisfactory than simply accepting that the mind can act independently of the brain.
Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.