Near-Death Experiences: Do They Prove Anything?

Richard Neuhaus, who recently died,  reports a near-death experience in his essay Born Toward Dying:

It was a couple of days after leaving intensive care, and it was night. I could hear patients in adjoining rooms moaning and mumbling and occasionally calling out; the surrounding medical machines were pumping and sucking and bleeping as usual. Then, all of a sudden, I was jerked into an utterly lucid state of awareness. I was sitting up in the bed staring intently into the darkness, although in fact I knew my body was lying flat. What I was staring at was a color like blue and purple, and vaguely in the form of hanging drapery. By the drapery were two “presences.” I saw them and yet did not see them, and I cannot explain that. But they were there, and I knew that I was not tied to the bed. I was able and prepared to get up and go somewhere. And then the presences—one or both of them, I do not know—spoke. This I heard clearly. Not in an ordinary way, for I cannot remember anything about the voice. But the message was beyond mistaking: “Everything is ready now.”

That was it. They waited for a while, maybe for a minute. Whether they were waiting for a response or just waiting to see whether I had received the message, I don’t know. “Everything is ready now.” It was not in the form of a command, nor was it an invitation to do anything. They were just letting me know. Then they were gone, and I was again flat on my back with my mind racing wildly. I had an iron resolve to determine right then and there what had happened. Had I been dreaming? In no way. I was then and was now as lucid and wide awake as I had ever been in my life.

Tell me that I was dreaming and you might as well tell me that I was dreaming that I wrote the sentence before this one. Testing my awareness, I pinched myself hard, and ran through the multiplication tables, and recalled the birth dates of my seven brothers and sisters, and my wits were vibrantly about me. The whole thing had lasted three or four minutes, maybe less. I resolved at that moment that I would never, never let anything dissuade me from the reality of what had happened. Knowing myself, I expected I would later be inclined to doubt it. It was an experience as real, as powerfully confirmed by the senses, as anything I have ever known. That was some seven years ago. Since then I have not had a moment in which I was seriously tempted to think it did not happen. It happened—as surely, as simply, as undeniably as it happened that I tied my shoelaces this morning. I could as well deny the one as deny the other, and were I to deny either I would surely be mad.

“Everything is ready now.” I would be thinking about that incessantly during the months of convalescence. My theological mind would immediately go to work on it. They were angels, of course. Angelos simply means “messenger.” There were no white robes or wings or anything of that sort. As I said, I did not see them in any ordinary sense. But there was a message; therefore there were messengers. Clearly, the message was that I could go somewhere with them. Not that I must go or should go, but simply that they were ready if I was. Go where? To God, or so it seemed. I understood that they were ready to get me ready to see God. It was obvious enough to me that I was not prepared, in my present physical and spiritual condition, for the beatific vision, for seeing God face to face. They were ready to get me ready. This comports with the doctrine of purgatory, that there is a process of purging and preparation to get us ready to meet God. I should say that their presence was entirely friendly. There was nothing sweet or cloying, and there was no urgency about it. It was as though they just wanted to let me know. The decision was mine as to when or whether I would take them up on the offer.

A skeptical response:  Near-death experiences prove nothing for two reasons.  First, no experience of any sort can prove its own veridicality.  Put otherwise, no experience can guarantee the reality of its intentional object.  Add to this the fact that the unusualness and rarity of near-death experiences entail their non-coherence and non-integration with the massive interconnected evidences of ordinary experience, and you have a powerful reason for dismissing such experiences as transient mental aberrations caused by a body and brain in extremis.  Setting aside this general consideration, there is a specific reason why near-death experiences prove nothing: the subject, though near death, is not dead!  One who 'returns from the dead' has nothing veridical to report about the 'far side' for the simple reason that he was not dead.  He did not make it to the 'far side' if there is one.  The truly dead do not return, and those who do return were not truly dead.  So near-death experiences give their subjects no good reason to believe in an afterlife.

Skepticism about the skeptical response:  A consistent skepticism calls into question everything including the power of reason that the skeptic himself must employ.  If he trusts his power to doubt as a power revelatory of something true (e.g. that near-death experiences are justifiably dismissable as transient mental aberrations), then he is not being consistently and radically skeptical.  He is stuck with a dogmatic posit, namely, the conviction that his reason is utterly trustworthy.

Doubts about the 'far side' are not to be trusted since skeptics are too much alive, too much in the grip of the ego-illusion, too much in the grip of the conviction that this world of ordinary experience is all there is and can be.  So if those who are near death are in no position to know what it is like to be dead -- if there is something it is like to be dead -- for the reason that they are not dead, then those who are full of the pride of life are equally in no position to know what it is like to be dead precisely because they are alive.

It cuts both ways.  If the skeptic says that Neuhaus was not dead when he had his strange experience, then it ought to be pointed out to the skeptic that he is too much alive and enamored of this world to be a trustworthy source of information about the 'far side' if there is one.  If not being dead disqualifies, then so does being alive.  If the weakened state of Neuhaus' body and brain casts doubt on the veridicality of his near-death experience, then the excess of animal spirits of the materialist worldling casts doubt on his opinions on spiritual matters.  His being sunk in his body and enslaved to its lusts blinds his spiritual eyes.  If the skeptic calls the believer credulous, the believer can call the skeptic spiritually blind.  Even if the skeptic is not enslaved to his bodily lusts, he is almost sure to be arrogantly proud of his intellect as almost all intellectuals are.  But the spiritual blindness deriving from pride is even worse than that deriving from lust.

The truth may be that the ego-weakening and loss of control that the approach of death brings about first makes possible certain glimpses of reality that cannot be had by those whose egos are in the full bloom of their worldly vitality.  So, yes, those near death are not yet dead, but they are perhaps in a better epistemic position than those who are fully alive.  It is an ancient thought, common to many traditions, that mortification (literally: deadening) aids spiritual perception.  Those full alive to the world and fully claimed by their robust bodies cannot but take the sense world as the ne plus ultra of reality.

But on a topic like this nothing can be proven one way or another.  It is reasonable to be a materialist scoffer, but also reasonable to be a spiritualist believer.  Neuhaus was reasonable to take his near-death experience as confirming something like what he believed all along.  Since nothing can be proven on this topic one way or another, and the opposing positions are both reasonable, one must in the end decide what one will believe and how one will live.  Contrary to what some people maintain, a limited doxastic voluntarism is true: belief on a topic like this one is within the control of the will.  Those who have near-death and other mystical/religious experiences are free to form or not form beliefs in accordance with them.  And those who do not have such experiences are free to form or not form debunking beliefs.

 

 

 

Comments

[Ilíon]

"Contrary to what some people maintain, a limited doxastic voluntarism is true: belief on a topic like this one is within the control of the will."

It seems to me that ultimately all belief is within the control of the will: we are not (and cannot be) *forced* to believe anything, rather that we choose all our beliefs.

[Ilíon]

Knowing when someone is really dead can be a tricky question: Woman Wakes Up After Family Says Goodbye, Tubes Pulled

[I've seen no reports that this woman has any rememberances of her near-(or post-)death experience.]

[Bill Vallicella]

Suppose in good conditions of ordinary lighting, etc. you see a vicious dog running towards you. You form the perceptual belief that an animal is approaching you. It seems obvious to me that a belief like this is not under the control of the will.

Knowing when someone is dead is indeed a "tricky question." It depends on at least two things. First a definition of 'dead.' Second, the application of the criteria embodied in the definition.

[Vlastimil Vohánka]

The only serious philosophers I know about who take dear-death experiences seriously are:

Gary Habermas, garyhabermas.com

and

Titus Rivas, www.geocities.com/titusrivas

Bill,

You say: "... nothing can be proven on this topic one way or another ..."

Have you studied the best argument in detail? I haven't.

[n--blog]

Stephen E. Braude is another serious philosopher who takes near-death experiences seriously.

[Mike]

Near-death experiences prove nothing for two reasons. First, no experience of any sort can prove its own veridicality. Put otherwise, no experience can guarantee the reality of its intentional object

I take it that this is the skeptic speaking, and it needn't represent your own views. There are interesting principles to the contrary. Swinburne and Huemer defend a principle of credulity about perception that says (simplifying) that if it seems to you that P, then, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, you have reason to believe P. These sorts of principles require that the skeptic not merely conjure up a skeptical hypothesis h that is possible, but that he actually give us some reason to believe h is true. I confess to being unpersuaded by Swinburne and Huemer. On the other hand, I'm not persuaded that we should assume the opposing principle either, that if it seems to you that P, then in the absence of evidence that P is veridical, you have no reason to believe P. It's hard to know the right place to start epistemology, being credulous or being suspicious.

[Victor Reppert]

This is a rather detailed Internet Infidels response to NDEs.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/HNDEs.html