A genuine science-based debate about near-death experiences seems to be developing. It would make materialism much harder to just take for granted. Some people are not happy with that.
At Real Clear Science, Michael Zignarelli asks, “Has Science Dismissed Near-Death Experiences Too Quickly?” Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and I think so: we are currently writing a book on the science evidence for NDEs and the difference that it makes (Worthy 2027).
A Remarkable Aspect of NDEs
In his article, the Messiah University professor focuses on one aspect of the NDE that certainly requires explanation: the way people who are pulled back from the brink of death have often discovered during the experience things that they seemingly could not have known by other means.
A patient in cardiac arrest later described an ordinary act performed in the emergency room while he was, according to the nurse, “in a deep coma.” The claim carried weight for the same reason crime-scene details do: someone else could verify it. The NDE witness’s story checked out as true…
In another case from the Netherlands, a five-year-old emerged from coma speaking of meeting an older sister named Rietje, a sibling who had died and whose existence had never been revealed to the child.
Current approaches to NDEs, he points out, focus on explaining them away as the traumas of a dying brain. An explainaway is an explanation that explains something away. But the suggested explainaways hardly account for their clarity or their tendency to produce life-changing effects not seen following other traumas. “The evidence,” he says, “deserves more than a verdict without a trial.”
Possum Tales
But he discusses a recent research contretemps that suggests that explaining away is having a harder time than it used to. In 2025, Charlotte Martial and colleagues published a paper arguing that evolutionary psychology can account for all that. From an interview by Kristin French at Nautilus:
[Charlotte Martial:] We suggest that something called thanatosis, where animals pretend to be dead to protect against predators, may have been a kind of precursor in evolution. With the evolution of complex brains and language in humans, this stereotypical behavior evolved into the more complex and multi-dimensional experience that is the NDE. Basically, we suggest the NDE is a defense mechanism for coping with a life-threatening situation. It permits the person to disconnect from the environment, from the surroundings, to be absorbed into a more peaceful mental experience.
So the NDE can literally be explained away as a more complex version of the opossum’s metabolic collapse when it feels threatened (thanatosis). And that’s all we need to know?
Then an Interesting Thing Happened…
When a prominent NDE researcher, psychiatrist Bruce Greyson, and colleague Marieta Pehlivanova challenged that thesis in an open-access paper, they were not simply ignored.
At the Washington Post, for example, Mark Johnson did not treat the Martial team’s evo psych views as definitive. He quoted Greyson and Pehlivanova as if they were people who should be listened to rather than explained away:
While calling the model “an admirable strategy,” they wrote that aspects of such experiences cannot be explained solely by brain physiology, and they criticized the NEPTUNE authors for omitting evidence that did not support their ideas.
Although this debate is taking place in the rarefied atmosphere of scientific journals and conferences, it is almost certainly one that has crossed the minds of most people…
The two acknowledged that near-death experiences “are typically triggered by physiological events” but stressed that such events do not account fully for the experiences people have described. They faulted the NEPTUNE authors for dismissing evidence from patients’ near-death accounts and from hospital staff who have supported aspects of those accounts — for example, the number of people who were in the room during resuscitation.
Johnson may have sensed that possum tales are not going to be the whole story so he had to choose between the pop science explainaway and getting to the heart of the story. And he felt he could risk choosing the story…
Science Has Been Here Before
Zigarelli notes that Martial et al. dismiss non-materialist approaches to NDEs because “a fundamental tenet of neuroscience asserts that the human experience arises from the brain.” Let’s be clear what this means: the purpose of neuroscience is to assert material causes, whether they are good explanations or not. Hence, the popularity of the explainaway.
His response:
At this impasse, history becomes especially useful. Science has faced this temptation toward premature conclusion repeatedly. The classic example: When Galileo saw moons orbiting Jupiter and phases of Venus, it strained the old, geocentric cosmology. Leading scholars dismissed the findings as optical tricks, and church officials eventually sentenced him to house arrest. Now every schoolchild knows that planets orbit the Sun.
Explainaways, whether possum tales or optical illusions, exist to protect a system from unwanted evidence by ignoring or dismissing it. But as the weight of such evidence grows, they stop sounding so persuasive.
Cross-posted at Mind Matters.