Appendix I
The Philosophy of Psychological Time and the Extended Moment
How the Soul's Own Time Differs from the Clock's
Full-Length Edition
Parent chapter: Chapter 14 (The Subjective and the Objective: How Long Is a Moment?). Chapter 14 introduces the difference between psychological time and clock time. This appendix gives the philosophical and cognitive-scientific case in full.
The Question Augustine Could Not Answer
You have felt it. A car drifts into your lane, and the next three seconds feel like a full minute. You watch a child take her first steps, and a ten-second wobble seems to last forever. You wait in a dentist's chair, and thirty minutes feel like a day. Time stretches. Time compresses. And none of these changes show up on any clock.
These are not illusions. They are clues. They tell us that the time we live in is not the same as the time our clocks measure. And if that gap between inner time and clock time is real in ordinary life, what happens to it at the moment of death?
That question is the heart of this appendix. But the question is not new. The best minds in the history of philosophy have wrestled with it for sixteen centuries. The trail begins with Augustine.
In Book XI of his Confessions, Augustine of Hippo asked one of the most famous questions in all of philosophy. He put it simply: What is time? His answer was equally honest. If no one asks him, he knows. If he tries to explain it, he does not.1 That confession of puzzlement, written around AD 397, launched the Western tradition of thinking carefully about how the mind experiences time.
Augustine worked through the puzzle step by step. The past, he said, no longer exists. The future does not yet exist. The present is a knife-edge instant with no duration at all. So if past and future are gone and the present has no width, how can we measure time? How can we experience it?2
His solution was striking. Time, Augustine argued, is in the soul. The soul holds the past through memoria (memory). It holds the present through attentio (attention). It holds the future through expectatio (expectation). These three acts of the mind stretch out what would otherwise be a knife-edge instant into a felt duration. Augustine called this stretching distentio animi, a distension or extension of the mind.3
Primary Source — Augustine on Time in the Soul. In Confessions XI.28, Augustine wrote that the mind performs three functions: expectation, attention, and memory. The future passes through the present into the past. What is measured when we measure time is not something outside the soul but an extension of the mind itself. As DeWeese summarizes: for Augustine, "temporal intervals exist only in the mind," and "the mind has the power, as it were, to extend itself into the future by expectation, and into the past, by memory."4
Why does this matter for the moment of death? Because if time is partly constituted by the soul's own activity, then the soul's time does not have to match the body's clock. A dying soul whose brain is shutting down may lose its link to the body's timekeeper. But it does not lose its memory, its attention, or its expectation. Those three functions can keep running in a mode that no longer depends on the body's rhythm.
Augustine never applied his insight to dying. But the application is natural. If time lives in the soul, then a soul stepping free of the body's constraints may experience time very differently from anything the bedside clock records.
Bergson's Two Kinds of Time
Nearly fifteen centuries after Augustine, the French philosopher Henri Bergson drew an even sharper line between inner time and clock time. In his 1889 work Time and Free Will, Bergson introduced a distinction that would shape all later work on this subject. He called the soul's lived experience of time durée (duration). He called the measurable, countable time of science temps (clock-time).5
Primary Source — Bergson on Durée. For Bergson, durée is the qualitative flow of experience. Its moments are not beads on a string but colors blending into one another. Each moment carries the flavor of the ones before it and leans into the ones to come. Duration is intensive, heterogeneous, irreversible, and irreducibly subjective. Clock-time, by contrast, is what we get when we project this inner flow onto a spatial line and chop it into equal segments. The two are not the same dimension.6
Think of it this way. A clock divides an hour into sixty equal minutes. But your experience of that hour is nothing like sixty equal slices. The first twenty minutes of a boring meeting drag. The last ten, once the conversation gets interesting, fly past. The clock does not care. The clock ticks evenly. But you do not live evenly.
Bergson pressed the point further in Matter and Memory (1896). The body, he argued, anchors the soul to a specific slice of duration. The brain acts as a kind of filter. It narrows the soul's awareness down to what is useful for action in the present moment. Remove the body's filter, and the soul's awareness widens.7
The application to dying is hard to miss. If the brain is a filter that constrains the soul's temporal experience, then a dying brain is a loosening filter. As it fails, the soul's durée slips free of the body's temps. What Bergson described in theory is exactly what near-death experiencers report in practice.
James, Husserl, and the Width of the Present
Around the same time Bergson was writing in Paris, William James was developing a related idea in Cambridge. In his Principles of Psychology (1890), James coined the term "specious present." The present moment, he argued, is not a knife-edge. It has width. We experience a short span of time as a single "now."8
How wide is this span? It varies. A bored listener at a lecture has a very narrow present. An absorbed musician playing a complex passage has a wider one. James drew the lesson plainly: subjective duration depends on attention, interest, emotion, and bodily state. The same clock-interval can feel long or short depending on what the mind is doing.9
The German philosopher Edmund Husserl took the analysis deeper. In his Lectures on the Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (delivered 1905, published 1928), Husserl argued that every moment of awareness has three layers. There is the "primal impression" of the now. There is "retention," the just-past that still clings to the present. And there is "protention," the leaning forward into the immediate future.10 These three layers create a flowing thickness in every moment. Time does not arrive in disconnected points. It arrives in waves.
Notice the echo of Augustine. Husserl's primal impression is Augustine's attentio. Retention is memoria. Protention is expectatio. The vocabulary has changed. The insight has not. From the fourth century to the twentieth, the major philosophers of time agree: the soul's experience of time is not a simple readout from a clock. It is an active construction of consciousness.11
Martin Heidegger, Husserl's most famous student, carried the point into his own work. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger argued that human existence is fundamentally temporal. We do not just happen to be in time. We are time, in the sense that our being is stretched out between past and future.12 For Heidegger, to be a person is to live toward a future. And the most decisive future each of us faces is death. Death, for Heidegger, is the horizon that shapes all of our time.
I mention Heidegger briefly because his point sharpens the book's question. If human existence is constituted by our orientation toward death, then the moment of death itself is the moment when our temporal existence reaches its peak. The dying person is not running out of time. The dying person is entering the most concentrated form of time there is.
The Psychological Evidence
The philosophical tradition from Augustine to Husserl built the case from reflection and argument. But modern psychology has built the same case from data. Study after study confirms that subjective time and clock time come apart under a wide range of conditions.13
Start with extreme stress. Accident survivors often report that the moments before impact unfolded in slow motion. A car spinning on ice. A fall from a ladder. A shooting. In each case, the clock said seconds. The survivor said it felt like minutes. The slow-motion effect is so common that researchers have given it a name: tachypsychia.14
Consider flow states. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi documented a condition he called "flow," in which a person is so deeply absorbed in a task that hours seem to pass in minutes. Athletes, musicians, surgeons, and rock climbers all report the same thing. Once you are fully engaged, the clock disappears.15
Consider meditation. Long-term practitioners of focused meditation report dramatic shifts in time perception. Experienced meditators sometimes describe a single sitting as feeling like hours or as feeling like seconds. The direction of the distortion depends on the type of practice and the depth of concentration.16
Consider psychedelic states. Under substances like psilocybin, subjects routinely report time slowing, stopping, or losing all meaning. Some describe experiencing "eternity in an instant." The subjective distortion is not subtle. It is massive.17
Consider fever, intense pain, and extreme joy. Each shifts time perception. A night of severe pain drags endlessly. A reunion with a loved one after long absence seems to end before it starts. These are universal human experiences, not exotic edge cases.18
The researcher Marc Wittmann has surveyed this literature in his book Felt Time. He concludes that subjective time is shaped by emotional arousal, by bodily states, and by the level of attention the mind brings to the moment. The clock keeps ticking evenly. The mind does not.19
Key Argument — The Continuum from Ordinary to Extreme. Stress slows time by a factor of two or three. Flow compresses it by a similar factor. Meditation and psychedelics can distort it by an order of magnitude. Each of these is documented in ordinary, healthy people under non-fatal conditions. Near-death experiences represent the most extreme condition of all: total physiological crisis, often including cardiac arrest and flat-line brain activity. If ordinary crises produce moderate time-dilation, the dying crisis is the natural place to expect radical time-dilation. The NDE data (see Appendix J) confirm this expectation.
The Brain as Timekeeper
Why does the mind's time come apart from the clock's? Neuroscience offers a partial answer. The brain is deeply involved in creating our sense of time. Several brain regions contribute, including the basal ganglia, the cerebellum, and the prefrontal cortex. Together they form something like an internal clock, though the process is far more complex than any single mechanism.20
The neuroscientist David Eagleman has studied how the brain processes time under extreme conditions. His research shows that the brain's time-perception system can be disrupted by adrenaline, by novel stimuli, and by altered states of consciousness. When the system is disrupted, subjective time shifts.21
Note — Eagleman's "Retrospective Reconstruction" Hypothesis. Eagleman has proposed that at least some time-dilation in emergencies may be a trick of memory rather than a real slowing of experience. The brain lays down richer memories during a crisis. When we recall the event, the extra detail makes it feel as though it lasted longer. This is the "retrospective reconstruction" model.22 The model may explain some cases. But it struggles with two features of NDE reports. First, NDErs typically describe the time-extension as something they experienced during the event, not just in memory afterward. Second, veridical NDEs include accurately observed details from the operating room or the scene, anchored in a sequence the experiencer was living through in real time (see Appendix J). Retrospective reconstruction cannot easily account for accurate real-time perception during a period of no measurable brain activity.
The deeper point is this. If the brain is the mechanism that keeps our inner time synchronized with clock time, then damage to the brain should loosen that synchronization. And it does. Lesions in the basal ganglia produce dramatic shifts in time perception. Drugs that affect dopamine levels speed time up or slow it down. Anesthesia collapses time altogether.23
Now think about what dying does to the brain. During cardiac arrest, the brain loses its blood supply within seconds. Its electrical activity drops toward zero. This is the most radical disruption of the brain's time-keeping system that a human being can undergo. If smaller disruptions produce moderate time-distortion, this disruption should produce massive distortion. And that is exactly what NDErs report.24
The Brain-as-Constraint Model
The data from neuroscience point toward a model that fits naturally with the substance dualism this book affirms (see Chapter 8). On the dualist account, the soul is a conscious entity distinct from the body. During embodied life, the soul's experience is channeled through the brain. The brain does not produce consciousness. It constrains it.25
Insight — The Brain as Filter, Not Generator. If the brain generates consciousness, then a dying brain should produce less consciousness: dimmer, simpler, fading to black. But NDE reports describe more consciousness: vivid, hyper-real, richer than ordinary waking life. The generation model predicts a candle guttering. The data show a searchlight. This is exactly what the constraint model predicts. As the brain's filter loosens, the soul's native capacities emerge more fully. Among those capacities is a temporal mode not limited to the body's clock.26
The constraint model has deep roots. Bergson himself proposed it in Matter and Memory. The brain, he argued, is a tool for narrowing the soul's attention to what is useful for bodily action. Aldous Huxley adopted a similar view, calling the brain a "reducing valve."27 The cardiologist Pim van Lommel, drawing on decades of NDE research, has argued for the same idea. Consciousness, he writes, is not produced by the brain but is received and filtered by it.28
On this model, the dying soul's time-dilation makes perfect sense. As the brain fails, the temporal constraint it imposed begins to lift. The soul experiences time in a mode closer to its own nature. Its durée slips free of the body's temps. And in that freed duration, there is room for an encounter far richer than anything the bedside clock could accommodate.
Is the Extended Time Real or Illusory?
This is the question that matters most. A skeptic might grant that the dying person seems to experience extended time. But is that extended time real? Or is it just a dying brain's last hallucination?
Three lines of argument support the book's position that the extended time is real.
The first is phenomenological. NDErs do not report compressed memories. They report lived experience. Howard Storm describes hours of conversation with beings of light. George Ritchie describes what felt like a tour of the afterlife lasting days. These are not flashbacks. They have the structure of events unfolding in sequence, one after another, in real time.29
The second is the veridical anchor. Some NDEs include details the experiencer could not have known by normal means. Pam Reynolds described the bone saw used during her surgery. She was right. If the conscious experience during the NDE is real enough to perceive the physical environment accurately, then the temporal experience during the NDE is real too. You cannot have accurate perception without genuine consciousness. And you cannot have genuine consciousness without genuine duration.30
The third is epistemological. William Lane Craig argues in Time and Eternity that our experience of tense is a properly basic belief. A properly basic belief is one we are justified in holding at face value unless someone gives us a good reason to doubt it. Craig's point is that our belief in the reality of temporal passage is grounded in direct experience. It is innocent until proven guilty.31 The same epistemological principle applies to the NDEr's temporal experience. The person who says "I lived through hours of encounter" holds a belief grounded in direct experience. That belief is justified unless a defeater can be produced. The "dying brain illusion" hypothesis is a candidate defeater, but it faces the veridical problem. A hallucination that gets the bone saw right is a strange kind of hallucination.32
Common Objection — The Non-Reductive Physicalist Reply. A non-reductive physicalist (like Joel Green or Nancey Murphy) might object: "We don't need dualism to explain NDE time-dilation. A partially functioning brain in crisis might generate altered temporal experience without the soul being a separate substance." This reply has some force. A partially functioning brain might indeed produce altered experience. But the content of NDE temporal experience presses against a purely brain-based account. The experience is not chaotic or fragmented, as we would expect from a failing system. It is orderly, patterned, and often includes veridical perception. A collapsing computer does not compose symphonies. A collapsing brain would not be expected to produce the structured, content-rich, temporally extended experiences NDErs report. The dualist account, in which the brain constrains rather than generates consciousness, offers a better fit for the data (see Chapter 9 for the full argument).33
The Convergence
Step back and notice what has happened. Five independent lines of inquiry point to the same conclusion.
Augustine's memoria, attentio, and expectatio placed time in the soul. Bergson's durée separated lived time from measured time. James's specious present showed that the width of "now" varies with attention. Husserl's retention-protention structure confirmed that every moment of awareness has its own internal thickness. And the psychological and neuroscientific evidence documented that this thickness can stretch or compress by enormous factors under altered conditions.34
All five lines converge on one claim: subjective time is not the same as clock time. Under altered conditions, the gap widens. Under the most extreme conditions, the gap can be radical.
The moment of death is the most extreme condition a human being faces. The expected result is the most radical gap between inner time and clock time that a human being can experience. The NDE data bear this out (Appendix J). The life review, in which a person's entire history is replayed in vivid detail during a few clinical seconds, is the cleanest single example (Appendix K).35
And if the A-theory of time is true, as Appendix H argues, then these subjective hours are not mere appearances layered onto a static block. They are real, lived, unfolding moments. The soul does not remember having had an encounter. The soul lives through the encounter, step by step, in its own genuine time.36
What This Means for the Encounter
The philosophical and scientific case developed in this appendix has a single practical point. If subjective time can extend dramatically beyond clock time, then the moment of death is not too brief for the encounter this book proposes.
The objection writes itself: "A few seconds of cardiac arrest cannot hold a full conversation with Christ, a life review, a free decision, and a response." On the clock, the objection is correct. A few seconds is a few seconds. But the clock is not the whole story. The philosophy of psychological time, confirmed by the cognitive-science data, tells us that the soul's experience during those few seconds may be vastly richer and longer than anything the clock records.37
Subjective extension gives the encounter room to breathe. Room for Christ to pursue. Room for the soul to see its life clearly. Room for a genuine decision. And room for grace to do its patient, careful work.
The working model of the encounter (Appendix O) draws on this philosophical foundation at every stage. Stage 1, the release from brain-time constraint, is Bergson's durée unhitching from temps. Stage 4, the life review, is the empirical peak of time-dilation. The entire architecture depends on the distinction this appendix has traced from Augustine to the neuroscience lab.38
The Foundation That Is Not New
I want to close by saying what this appendix has not done. It has not introduced a strange new theory. It has not asked the reader to accept an exotic metaphysics. It has traced a distinction that runs through the mainstream of Western philosophy for sixteen hundred years and that modern psychology confirms at every turn.
The soul's time is not the clock's time. Augustine knew it. Bergson named it. James measured it. Husserl mapped its structure. And every parent who has waited in a hospital room while their child was in surgery knows it in their bones. Five minutes on the clock. Five hours in the heart.
This book's contribution is not the distinction. The distinction is old and well established. This book's contribution is the application. The dying soul, freed from the body's clock, enters its own time. And in that time, there is room for everything grace needs to do.
Note — The Territory We Already Know. When the philosophy of mind says that the soul has its own time, it is saying what you already know. An hour of waiting can feel like a day. A week of vacation can feel like an afternoon. The dying soul is not entering a strange new world. It is entering the same territory we all live in, intensified. The only difference is the degree. And the degree, at the moment of death, may be beyond anything we have experienced in ordinary life. That is what the NDE data suggest. That is what the philosophy predicts. And that is what makes the encounter possible.39
Notes
↑ 1. Augustine, Confessions, XI.14. The Pine-Coffin translation renders the famous line: "What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled." For discussion, see Garrett J. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time (London: Routledge, 2004), ch. 5.
↑ 2. Augustine, Confessions, XI.15. DeWeese summarizes: "If we speak of a present interval of time, say, the present year, it is clear that some months are past, one is present, and the rest are future." The regress continues until the present shrinks to a durationless instant. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 5.
↑ 3. Augustine, Confessions, XI.26–28. DeWeese notes that the Latin distentio is better rendered "distension" than "extension," following John F. Callahan, Four Views of Time in Ancient Philosophy, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 177. See DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 5.
↑ 4. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 5. The quotation is DeWeese's summary of Augustine's argument in Confessions XI.28. See also Richard A. Holland Jr., God, Time, and the Incarnation (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), 42, who cites Confessions 11.14.17 as a key anchor for Augustine's treatment of time.
↑ 5. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1910; orig. pub. 1889). The durée/temps distinction runs through the entire work but is stated most clearly in ch. 2.
↑ 6. Bergson, Time and Free Will, ch. 2. The key claim is that duration is qualitative and heterogeneous, while spatialized time is quantitative and homogeneous. The two are different in kind, not just in degree.
↑ 7. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1911; orig. pub. 1896), chs. 1–2. Bergson's argument that the brain is a "center of action" rather than a generator of representations is the ancestor of the filter or constraint model discussed later in this appendix.
↑ 8. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), ch. 15 ("The Perception of Time"). James defines the specious present as the short span of time "of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible."
↑ 9. James, Principles of Psychology, ch. 15. James notes that emotional arousal, interest, and physical condition all affect the felt duration of a given interval.
↑ 10. Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), §§8–11. Husserl's three-fold structure of primal impression, retention, and protention is the foundation of twentieth-century phenomenological time-analysis.
↑ 11. The parallel between Augustine's triad (memoria, attentio, expectatio) and Husserl's triad (retention, primal impression, protention) is widely noted. Both analyze time-consciousness as an active synthesis performed by the mind, not a passive reception of external ticks.
↑ 12. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962; orig. pub. 1927), Division Two, especially §§61–65 on temporality and death.
↑ 13. For an accessible survey, see Marc Wittmann, Felt Time: The Science of How We Experience Time, trans. Erik Butler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). Wittmann reviews the evidence for time-distortion under stress, meditation, drugs, flow, and altered consciousness.
↑ 14. On tachypsychia (the slow-motion effect during emergencies), see David Eagleman, "Human Time Perception and Its Illusions," Current Opinion in Neurobiology 18, no. 2 (2008): 131–36. The effect is robust across many types of emergency.
↑ 15. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990). Csikszentmihalyi identifies time-distortion as one of the hallmarks of the flow state.
↑ 16. On meditation and time perception, see Wittmann, Felt Time, ch. 5. See also Marc Wittmann and Karin Meissner, eds., Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2024). Experienced meditators report both elongation and compression depending on the practice.
↑ 17. On psychedelics and time perception, see R. L. Carhart-Harris et al., "Neural Correlates of the Psychedelic State as Determined by fMRI Studies with Psilocybin," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 6 (2012): 2138–43. Participants commonly report time slowing, stopping, or losing meaning entirely.
↑ 18. Wittmann, Felt Time, chs. 2–3. Pain lengthens perceived time; positive emotion compresses it. Both effects are well documented in experimental settings.
↑ 19. Wittmann, Felt Time, ch. 6. Wittmann's summary: felt time is a product of arousal, attention, and bodily self-awareness, not a passive readout from a single internal clock.
↑ 20. For a technical review of the brain regions involved in time perception, see Warren H. Meck, ed., Functional and Neural Mechanisms of Interval Timing (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2003). The basal ganglia and prefrontal cortex are the most-studied substrates, but the cerebellum, insula, and supplementary motor area also contribute.
↑ 21. Eagleman, "Human Time Perception and Its Illusions," 131–36. See also David Eagleman and Alexander O. Holcombe, "Causality and the Perception of Time," Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6, no. 8 (2002): 323–25.
↑ 22. Chess Stetson, Matthew P. Fiesta, and David M. Eagleman, "Does Time Really Slow Down during a Frightening Event?" PLoS ONE 2, no. 12 (2007): e1295. The study used a free-fall experiment and found no evidence of enhanced temporal resolution during the fall, suggesting that the slow-motion effect may be a retrospective memory effect rather than a real slowing of experience.
↑ 23. On dopaminergic modulation of time perception, see Meck, Functional and Neural Mechanisms of Interval Timing. Dopamine agonists speed up the internal clock; antagonists slow it down. Lesions to the basal ganglia produce dramatic temporal misperception.
↑ 24. See Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2010), ch. 2. Van Lommel notes that NDErs consistently report altered time perception, including the experience of extended duration during periods of no measurable brain activity.
↑ 25. For the philosophical case for substance dualism, see J. P. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It's Real and Why It Matters (Chicago: Moody, 2014); and John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000). The book's full case is in Chapter 8.
↑ 26. The "filter" or "constraint" model of the brain is developed in Bergson, Matter and Memory, chs. 1–2; Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (London: Chatto & Windus, 1954); and van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, chs. 10–11. Van Lommel cites the hyper-real quality of NDE consciousness as evidence against the generation model.
↑ 27. Huxley, The Doors of Perception. Huxley borrowed the "reducing valve" metaphor from C. D. Broad's The Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: Kegan Paul, 1925).
↑ 28. Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, chs. 10–11. Van Lommel proposes that the brain functions as an interface or transceiver for consciousness rather than as its producer.
↑ 29. See Howard Storm, My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life (New York: Doubleday, 2005); George G. Ritchie, Return from Tomorrow (Grand Rapids, MI: Chosen Books, 1978). For the general pattern of sequential, temporally extended NDE narratives, see Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin's, 2021), ch. 3.
↑ 30. Michael B. Sabom, Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), ch. 3 (the Pam Reynolds case). See Appendix J for the fuller case-by-case treatment.
↑ 31. William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), pp. 130–33. Craig's argument: belief in the objective reality of tense is properly basic. It is grounded in direct experience and is justified at face value unless a defeater can be produced.
↑ 32. Craig, Time and Eternity, pp. 132–33. Craig addresses the objection that a brain in a vat would have the same experiences and notes that this is no more a defeater of our temporal experience than the brain-in-a-vat scenario is a defeater of our perceptual beliefs about the external world.
↑ 33. Joel B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008); Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For the book's reply, see Chapter 9.
↑ 34. The convergence of Augustine, Bergson, James, Husserl, and the empirical literature is not accidental. Each approached the question from a different angle and reached the same result: subjective time is not reducible to clock time. See DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 2, for the broader metaphysical framework that underwrites this conclusion.
↑ 35. The life review's time-dilation is addressed in detail in Appendix K. For the NDE case data, see Appendix J.
↑ 36. For the metaphysical case that the A-theory of time underwrites the reality of the soul's lived experience, see Appendix H. On presentism, the dying soul's encounter is happening now, not merely located at a spacetime coordinate.
↑ 37. See Chapter 10 for the NDE time-dilation data introduced in the main text, and Chapter 14 for the book's central treatment of the subjective/objective time distinction.
↑ 38. See Appendix O for the full working model. The model's Stage 1 (release from brain-time constraint) depends directly on the philosophical and scientific case developed in this appendix.
↑ 39. The gap between this book's proposal and ordinary experience is a gap of degree, not of kind. Every reader already lives in a world where subjective time and clock time diverge. The moment of death widens that gap to its extreme. That is the philosophical claim. The NDE data (Appendix J) supply the empirical confirmation.