Chapter 6
When the dying see what they should not be able to see
Pam Reynolds was a thirty-five-year-old singer-songwriter from Atlanta. In 1991 she was diagnosed with a giant aneurysm deep in her brain. The only option was a radical surgery called hypothermic cardiac arrest, sometimes known as "standstill." Doctors would cool her body to 60 degrees Fahrenheit. They would drain the blood from her head. Her heart would be stopped. Her brain waves would flatline. For all measurable purposes, she would be dead.1
And that is when Pam Reynolds began to see.
She later reported floating above the operating table and watching the surgeon open her skull with a small, unusual bone saw. She described its shape, the case it came in, and the sound it made. She reported hearing a female voice say that her blood vessels were too small on one side. She described the conversation between the surgical team members. After the surgery, her surgeons confirmed these details. The bone saw looked exactly as she described. The comment about her vessels had been made while she was under deep anesthesia, her eyes taped shut, her ears blocked with molded speakers clicking at 100 decibels.2
How do you explain that?
That question sits at the heart of this chapter. Because if a person can see and hear and know things while their brain shows no activity, then something about who we are is not the brain. And if that something exists apart from the brain, it can exist when the body dies. The whole argument of this book depends on that possibility.
The question is simple. Are you your brain, or are you more than your brain?
Physicalism says the mind is what the brain does. Thoughts, feelings, and the sense of being "you" are all produced by neurons firing. When the brain stops, the mind stops. There is no you left to encounter anyone.3
Substance dualism says something different. You are a union of two things: a physical body and an immaterial soul. Your soul thinks, perceives, and chooses. The brain is the instrument the soul uses during this life, the way a musician uses a piano. Damage the piano and the music suffers. But the musician is not the piano.4
I want to be clear about what I'm claiming. I am not saying the brain doesn't matter. I am saying the brain is not the whole story. And the strongest evidence for that claim comes from people who reported accurate perceptions while their brains were not working.
Not all near-death experiences carry the same evidential weight. Many are deeply meaningful to the person who had them. But meaning, on its own, is hard to test. The experiences I want to focus on are a specific kind: veridical cases. The word comes from the Latin veridicus, meaning "truth-telling."5
A veridical NDE is one in which the person reports real-world details that turn out to be accurate. They had no ordinary way of knowing those details. Their eyes were taped shut, or their ears were blocked, or their heart had stopped. Yet they came back and described what was happening around them. And the description checked out.
I already told Pam Reynolds's story. Let me walk through several more.
In 1977, a migrant worker named Maria suffered cardiac arrest at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. After she was revived, she told her social worker, Kimberly Clark Sharp, that she had floated out of her body and risen above the hospital. She described seeing a dark blue tennis shoe on a ledge outside a third-floor window. She gave specific details: it was worn on the left side, and its lace was tucked under the heel.6
Sharp went to look. On the ledge of a third-floor window she found a dark blue tennis shoe. The wear pattern and the lace matched Maria's description. The shoe was in a place Maria had never visited, visible only from a vantage point outside the building.7
I should note that some skeptics have challenged aspects of this case. Hayden Ebbern and Sean Mulligan attempted to replicate the sighting in 1996 and argued the shoe could have been partially visible from inside.8 Clark Sharp disputed their reconstruction. The case remains debated, and I include it because of its fame and its early date, not because it alone carries the argument. The weight falls on the cases that follow.
Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel published one of the largest prospective studies of near-death experiences in The Lancet in 2001. Among his cases was a man brought into the hospital in a coma, in cardiac arrest. A nurse removed the man's dentures during resuscitation and placed them in a drawer of a crash cart. Days later, when the patient recovered, he recognized the nurse and told him exactly where the dentures had been put.9
The patient described the room, the cart, and the drawer. He described details from the resuscitation itself, a procedure that took place while he had no heartbeat and no measurable brain function. The nurse confirmed every detail.10
The largest scientific effort to test veridical NDEs is the AWARE project (AWAreness during REsuscitation). It was led by Sam Parnia, first at the University of Southampton and later at NYU Langone. The design was clever and direct. Researchers placed hidden visual targets on shelves near the ceilings of cardiac-arrest bays, visible only from above. If patients truly leave their bodies during cardiac arrest, some should be able to identify those targets.11
AWARE I was published in 2014. The study covered over 2,000 cardiac-arrest cases across fifteen hospitals in three countries. Of 330 survivors, 140 could be interviewed. Of those, 39 percent described some form of awareness during the arrest. Two patients described verified out-of-body perceptions.12
One of those two could not be tested against the hidden targets, because his arrest happened in a room without one. But his case was striking all the same. He gave a detailed account of events during his resuscitation. He described specific actions by the medical staff and the sounds of equipment. His perception was timed, using an auditory signal from the defibrillator, to a three-minute window during cardiac arrest. Everything he described was confirmed.
AWARE II, reported in stages from 2023 onward, expanded the data set and added continuous EEG monitoring. This let the team verify, in real time, whether measurable brain activity was present during the events patients later described. Some patients did show unexpected electrical surges, including gamma waves linked to higher mental functions. But other patients reported detailed, accurate perceptions during windows when no such activity appeared on the monitors at all.13
I don't want to overstate the results. AWARE has not produced the clean "target hit" that would end the debate overnight. The hidden targets were rarely in the patient's reported visual field. Many arrests happened in rooms without targets, and many patients simply didn't survive to be interviewed.14
Still, the study confirmed something important. At least some patients perceived the world accurately when their brains should not have allowed it. That finding, from a careful, multi-hospital, prospective design, is not easy to dismiss.
Cardiologist Michael Sabom was an early skeptic who set out to debunk NDE reports. He didn't believe his patients were really seeing anything. So he tested them. He interviewed patients who claimed to have watched their own resuscitations and compared their accounts to the medical records. If the patients were guessing or confabulating, their descriptions should have been vague or wrong.15
They weren't. In case after case, the details matched. One patient described the specific movements of the needles on the defibrillator, a detail he had no training to guess. Another described surgical instruments he couldn't name but drew accurately. Sabom set up a control group of cardiac patients who had not had NDEs and asked them to guess what a resuscitation looks like. Their guesses were full of errors. The NDE patients' reports were not.
Sabom became a cautious believer in the reality of the out-of-body component. He did not set out to find evidence for the soul. The evidence found him.
These are not isolated stories. Jeffrey Long's database at the Near Death Experience Research Foundation has gathered over 5,000 NDE accounts from people in dozens of countries, many with veridical elements. Bruce Greyson at the University of Virginia has published decades of peer-reviewed research documenting the phenomenon. He developed the Greyson NDE Scale, the standard measurement tool used in NDE research worldwide.16
The data is not thin. It is broad, it is consistent, and much of it comes from researchers who began as skeptics and changed their minds.
Fair-minded inquiry requires taking the other side seriously. If there is a good explanation for these cases that does not involve the soul, I want to know it. Several have been proposed. Let me walk through them honestly.
When the brain loses oxygen, it can produce unusual experiences: tunnel vision, bright lights, confusion. Some researchers have argued that NDEs are simply what oxygen deprivation feels like.17
The problem is that anoxia produces confused thinking, not the sharp, structured, verifiable perception reported in the best NDE cases. Patients suffering anoxia typically show garbled thought and poor memory. NDE patients, by contrast, often report thinking with a clarity they describe as greater than normal waking life. Van Lommel noted this contrast directly: the experiences are too organized and too coherent to match the anoxia profile.18
The psychedelic compound DMT can produce experiences that share surface features with NDEs. Rick Strassman proposed that the brain may release DMT at death. Others have pointed to endorphins, ketamine-like compounds, or excess carbon dioxide (hypercarbia).19
I don't doubt that dying brains produce unusual chemistry. But chemistry explains the phenomenology, not the accuracy. DMT can make you see lights and tunnels. It cannot make you correctly describe a tennis shoe on a third-floor ledge or the movements of a defibrillator needle. The veridical cases are what distinguish NDEs from drug trips. The content of the experience matches the external world.20
Kevin Nelson proposed that NDEs are a form of REM intrusion, in which the dream-producing circuits of the brain activate during crisis. This could account for vivid imagery and emotional intensity.21
Again, the problem is veridicality. Dream imagery is generated internally. It does not match the outside world. Pam Reynolds did not dream the shape of the bone saw. She reported it accurately. REM intrusion cannot account for confirmed perceptions of events in the operating room.
A simpler version of the skeptical case says that people see what they expect to see. Christians see Jesus. Hindus see Yama. Everyone projects their own cultural furniture onto a meaningless brain event.22
This deserves a fair hearing. Cultural shaping is real, and I don't doubt that it colors the way people interpret and narrate their experiences. But the objection doesn't touch the veridical cases. Cultural expectations might explain why someone sees a tunnel of light. They cannot explain how someone correctly identifies a tennis shoe on a ledge they've never visited. They cannot explain how a comatose patient describes the exact drawer where a nurse placed his dentures. The verified-perception cases are not about symbols or archetypes. They are about checkable facts, and the facts checked out.
Perhaps patients unconsciously constructed their memories after the fact, filling in details they heard or inferred during recovery. This is a serious concern, and any honest researcher must consider it.23
The AWARE studies addressed this by timing verified perceptions to specific moments during cardiac arrest, using auditory cues. Sabom addressed it by comparing patient reports to medical records immediately after the event, before contamination could occur. In the dentures case, the patient recognized the specific nurse and the specific drawer before anyone told him. The best veridical cases resist the confabulation explanation because the details were confirmed by independent witnesses before they could have been learned normally.24
In 2013 and again in more recent studies, researchers found that the brains of dying rats showed a brief surge of electrical activity at the moment of cardiac arrest. Some proposed this as the explanation for NDEs: one final burst of brain function producing the experience.25
None of these explanations is foolish. Each captures something true about the dying brain. Anoxia is real. Brain chemistry is real. REM intrusion is real. Confabulation happens. But together, they still don't explain the thing that makes the strongest NDE cases so striking. People perceived real events, accurately, from outside their bodies, while their brains showed no measurable function.26
That is the data that needs explaining. And the simplest explanation is the one most people resist: the person who was seeing was not the brain.
The medical evidence alone would be enough to give any honest thinker pause. But it does not stand alone. A separate tradition of argument, from philosophy, reaches the same conclusion by a different road.
The NDE evidence doesn't stand alone. Philosophers have long argued that the mind has features no physical account can fully explain. The NDE cases give those arguments teeth.
Start with a question. What is it like to see the color red? Not the wavelength. Not the neural activation pattern. The experience itself. There is something it feels like to see red, something private and immediate that belongs to you and to no one else. No brain scan will ever show that feeling. You can map every neuron that fires when a person sees red. You will still never find the redness.
J. P. Moreland calls these qualities qualia. They are the raw feel of experience. And they present a deep puzzle for the physicalist. A physical object has a size, a shape, and a location. Your experience of redness has none of those things. It is not three inches wide. It does not weigh anything. It is not in a particular corner of your skull. Yet it is undeniably real. Moreland argues that the best explanation is that experiences belong to an immaterial self, a soul, that is the subject of consciousness.27
He also presses the point about the unity of consciousness. At any given moment, you are simultaneously seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, and remembering. All of these distinct streams come together in a single unified experience, the experience of being you. But neurons are separate cells. Nothing in the brain's physical architecture produces a single unified subject. Moreland argues that the unity of your conscious experience points to something that is not a collection of parts at all: a soul.28
Richard Swinburne makes a different but related point about personal identity. Imagine that scientists could duplicate your brain, atom for atom, and place the copy in a new body. Which one would be you? The physical parts are identical. The memories are identical. No physical test could tell them apart. Yet there is a definite answer: you are one of them and not the other. That fact, Swinburne argues, shows that your identity is not reducible to your physical makeup. There is a "you" that is more than the matter.29
Michael Wilkinson has recently pressed this insight in a striking direction. If we take seriously the Chalcedonian Definition's claim that Christ is one divine person subsisting in two natures, including a human nature of "a reasonable soul and body," then a person-nature distinction is not just a philosophical tool but a creedal commitment. Wilkinson argues that what is true of Christ as the man par excellence must govern how we define the creation of mere humanity. Each human being, by analogy, is a created person subsisting in a body-soul nature. The person is not identical to either body or soul, but is the acting subject who lives through both. This Chalcedonian anthropology does not import foreign philosophy into the faith. It draws the implications of the church's own Christology back into the doctrine of the human person.32
I find these arguments persuasive on their own terms. But what makes them especially powerful, for our purposes, is the way the NDE data connects to them. Gary Habermas and Moreland make this connection explicit. The philosophical arguments show that the mind has features no purely physical theory can explain. The NDE data shows that the mind keeps working even when the physical basis shuts down entirely. The two point in the same direction: the mind is not the brain.30
This is not an argument from ignorance. I am not saying "we don't understand consciousness, so there must be a soul." I am saying that the strongest NDE cases present a positive challenge to the claim that the mind is just the brain. And the best philosophical work on consciousness explains why that challenge runs so deep.
I want to be honest about the limits of this evidence.
The veridical NDE cases do not prove Christianity. They do not prove that the God of the Bible exists. They do not prove that the being of light reported in many NDEs is Jesus, though I'll make that case in Chapter 12. And a skeptic can always find reason to hold out. Science rarely closes a question with a single experiment. The AWARE studies, for all their careful design, have not produced the kind of result that leaves no room for debate.
What they do is shift a burden. The default assumption in much of modern culture, and in much of the academy, is that the mind is the brain and that death ends everything. If that assumption is true, this entire book is impossible. There can be no encounter at the threshold of death, because there is no one there to encounter anything. There can be no conscious intermediate state, because there is no conscious self that survives. The soul that Chapter 7 argues is necessary for postmortem hope does not exist.
The veridical NDE evidence cracks that assumption open.
It does not prove the soul beyond all doubt. But it shows, with the kind of evidence that can be checked against medical records and eyewitness testimony, that the conscious self is not identical to the brain. People perceive when their brains are flatlined. That is a fact in need of an explanation. And the simplest, most natural explanation is that the perceiver is not the brain.
I want to say one more thing before I close. The cases in this chapter are not just data points in an argument. Pam Reynolds was a real woman who had the top of her skull cut open and her blood drained from her head. The man in the dentures case had just been pulled from cardiac arrest. Maria was a migrant worker in a hospital far from home. These were real people, in real danger, and what they reported was not a theory. It was an experience that changed the rest of their lives. Almost without exception, NDE experiencers come back with a reduced fear of death and a deepened sense that they are more than their bodies.31
I don't think that settles the question by itself. But I think it matters.
The simplest explanation of the data is the one the Christian tradition has held for two thousand years. There is a soul. It is not the brain. And it does not die when the body dies.
That means the story doesn't end at the flatline. It means there is someone on the other side of death who can be met, and who can respond. And that is the door through which the rest of this book walks.
↑ 1. The Pam Reynolds case is documented extensively in Michael Sabom, Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), chs. 3–4. Reynolds's full name was Pam Reynolds Lowery. Her surgery was performed by Dr. Robert Spetzler, Director of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. Sabom describes the level of medical monitoring in extraordinary detail: standard EEG electrodes recorded cortical brain activity; 100-decibel clicks from molded ear speakers tested brainstem response; core body temperature was tracked by thermistors in her esophagus, bladder, and brain surface; and over twenty doctors, nurses, and technicians participated. Sabom called Reynolds's NDE "the deepest near-death experience of The Atlanta Study," occurring "at a time when her brain and body were extensively instrumented and monitored" (ch. 4). For a systematic analysis of the Reynolds case with cross-referenced medical documentation, see also Matthew Friend, "Can Near-Death Experiences Support a Dualistic Interpretation of Human Nature?" (Th.D. diss., Trinity Theological Seminary, 2025), ch. 4.
↑ 2. Sabom, Light and Death, chs. 3–4. Sabom interviewed Reynolds and confirmed multiple details against the operative records. Reynolds described the Midas Rex bone saw as looking "like an electric toothbrush" with "interchangeable blades" kept in what "looked like a socket wrench case." When Sabom obtained the manufacturer's manual, he was "shocked with the accuracy" of her description (ch. 4). The remark about her vessels was confirmed against the operative report of Dr. Murray, the female cardiac surgeon, who dictated: "the right common femoral artery was quite small, approximating the size of a normal saphenous vein bypass. Due to its 4-mm size, it would not accept a #18 arterial cannula." Spetzler's surgical report confirmed that this conversation occurred simultaneously with "the opening of the craniotomy"—precisely when Reynolds said her out-of-body experience began. At the deepest point of the surgery, her body was cooled to 60°F, her heart and breathing were stopped, and the blood was drained from her head. Brainstem-response testing showed no response to the 100-decibel clicks. "Total brain shutdown," Sabom writes.
↑ 3. For representative statements of physicalism from Christian scholars, see Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Joel Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008). The most thorough evangelical reply is John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), who carefully works through the Old Testament, intertestamental, and New Testament material and shows that "the metaphysical implication of the biblical data is dualism, not monism." Cooper's linchpin argument is that if the Bible teaches a conscious disembodied intermediate state, then dualism is entailed by the biblical material. See also Warren S. Brown and Brad D. Strawn, The Physical Nature of Christian Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), who argue that the soul is "not needed to work out Christian doctrine and practice"—a claim Cooper's biblical analysis directly challenges.
↑ 4. For accessible introductions to substance dualism, see J. P. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It's Real and Why It Matters (Chicago: Moody, 2014); Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). For the theological case, see Joshua R. Farris, An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020), who defends substance dualism "in an explicitly theological context" and builds on Cooper's biblical analysis with "closer attention given to philosophical specificity and systematic scope" (p. 289). See also Michael A. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor: A Chalcedonian Anthropology (Bellingham: Lexham Academic, 2024), who develops a "person-nature ontology" modeled on the Chalcedonian Definition's two-natures Christology: just as Christ is the divine person subsisting in a human nature (body and soul), so each human is a created person subsisting in a body-soul nature. Cooper calls his own position "holistic dualism"—emphasizing the functional unity of body and soul during life while affirming the soul's capacity to survive death in a diminished, incomplete state until the resurrection. See Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, ch. 10. The piano-and-musician analogy is my own, but it captures the basic intuition common to these dualist thinkers.
↑ 5. The term "veridical" is used throughout the NDE literature to designate cases involving confirmed perceptions. See Janice Miner Holden, "Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences," in Janice Miner Holden, Bruce Greyson, and Debbie James, eds., The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2009), 185–211.
↑ 6. Kimberly Clark Sharp, After the Light: What I Discovered on the Other Side of Life That Can Change Your World (New York: William Morrow, 1995), 9–15.
↑ 7. Clark Sharp, After the Light, 12–14. Sharp retrieved the shoe and confirmed the details herself.
↑ 8. Hayden Ebbern, Sean Mulligan, and Barry Beyerstein, "Maria's Near-Death Experience: Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop," Skeptical Inquirer 20, no. 4 (1996): 27–33.
↑ 9. Pim van Lommel et al., "Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands," The Lancet 358, no. 9298 (2001): 2039–2045. See also Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 171–173.
↑ 10. Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, 172–173. The nurse independently confirmed the patient's account.
↑ 11. Sam Parnia et al., "AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A Prospective Study," Resuscitation 85, no. 12 (2014): 1799–1805.
↑ 12. Parnia et al., "AWARE," 1802–1804. The verified case involved a 57-year-old man whose cardiac arrest lasted three minutes. His perception was timed using an automated external defibrillator's auditory prompts.
↑ 13. Sam Parnia et al., "AWAreness during REsuscitation—II: A Multi-Center Study of Consciousness and Awareness in Cardiac Arrest," Resuscitation 191 (2023): 109903. The gamma-wave findings also appeared in Jimo Borjigin et al., "Surge of Neurophysiological Coherence and Connectivity in the Dying Brain," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 35 (2013): 14432–14437 (a study on rats).
↑ 14. Parnia et al., "AWARE—II," 109903. Parnia noted that the hidden-target protocol produced limited data because most cardiac arrests occurred outside the target areas or the patients did not survive to be interviewed.
↑ 15. Michael Sabom, Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 81–115. Sabom found that the autoscopic NDE accounts of his patients far exceeded the accuracy of a control group of cardiac patients who attempted to guess what a resuscitation looks like. The control group's descriptions were "vague and often incorrect," while the NDE patients' reports matched the medical records with precision. Sabom's conversion from skeptic to cautious advocate is itself a notable feature of the NDE literature; he later acknowledged in Light and Death that the Reynolds case "jostled" his certainty about the boundary between near-death and after-death experience (ch. 3). His subsequent Atlanta Study expanded and deepened the original findings. See also Friend, "Can Near-Death Experiences Support a Dualistic Interpretation of Human Nature?", ch. 4, which builds on Sabom's methodology by developing a structured scoring system for veridical NDE evidence.
↑ 16. Jeffrey Long, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperOne, 2010); Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2016); Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin's Essentials, 2021). Long established the NDERF database in 1998; by the time of God and the Afterlife, over four thousand people had shared their near-death experiences through the site, with portions of the website translated into over twenty languages. Long calls this "the largest scientific study of NDEs ever reported" (p. 8). Greyson developed the Greyson NDE Scale, the standard sixteen-question measurement tool used in NDE research worldwide. See also J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023), who independently analyzed consecutive NDERF submissions and found a significant percentage reporting encounters with Jesus, challenging the common claim that NDEs are generically anti-Christian.
↑ 17. Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1993), 55–75. Blackmore's anoxia hypothesis remains the best-known naturalistic account.
↑ 18. Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, 107–117. Van Lommel argues that the clarity, coherence, and lasting transformative effects of NDEs distinguish them sharply from the confusion and amnesia typical of anoxic episodes. Sabom addresses Blackmore's bird's-eye-view hypothesis directly: Blackmore proposed that the out-of-body view is reconstructed from "memory and imagination," but if so, the autoscopic NDE should frequently appear as an in-the-body ("field memory") experience, not exclusively the bird's-eye ("observer memory") phenomenon that it is. When Sabom tested this among forty NDE experiencers, 73% reported dreaming as participants rather than observers—no different from those without autoscopic NDEs. The autoscopic NDE is "not fashioned from one's memory and imagination, but is most likely an actual experience." Sabom, Light and Death, ch. 4.
↑ 19. Rick Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2001). For the hypercarbia hypothesis, see Zalika Klemenc-Ketis, Janko Kersnik, and Stefek Grmec, "The Effect of Carbon Dioxide on Near-Death Experiences in Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest Survivors," Critical Care 14, no. 2 (2010): R56.
↑ 20. This distinction is central. As Greyson notes, the question is not whether the brain can produce vivid subjective experiences under stress (it can), but whether it can produce veridical perception of distant or hidden events. See Bruce Greyson, "Cosmological Implications of Near-Death Experiences," Journal of Cosmology 14 (2011): 4684–4696.
↑ 21. Kevin Nelson, The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience (New York: Dutton, 2011), 115–140.
↑ 22. For the cultural-expectation hypothesis and cross-cultural comparisons, see Allan Kellehear, "Census of Non-Western Near-Death Experiences to 2005," in Holden, Greyson, and James, eds., The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, 135–158. Kellehear notes both the cross-cultural commonalities and the cultural overlays in NDE reports.
↑ 23. Keith Augustine, "Hallucinatory Near-Death Experiences," Internet Infidels, 2008, accessed online. Augustine offers the most thorough skeptical treatment of confabulation in NDE reports.
↑ 24. Sabom, Recollections of Death, 83–87. Sabom conducted immediate post-event interviews specifically to control for retrospective contamination. His methodology was significant: he compared the autoscopic NDE accounts against the medical records, and "the degree of accuracy of the recalled procedures was much greater than that found in the common knowledge of hospital-savvy cardiac patients." He concluded that "these findings support the contention that the autoscopic NDE is not a reconstructed hallucination" (Light and Death, ch. 4). The Trinity Dissertation builds on this approach, developing a structured scoring system that evaluates each veridical NDE case across three dimensions: the severity of the medical crisis (10 points), the quality and specificity of veridical observations (10 points), and the strength of independent corroboration (10 points). See Friend, "Can Near-Death Experiences Support a Dualistic Interpretation of Human Nature?", ch. 3 and Appendix A.
↑ 25. Borjigin et al., "Surge of Neurophysiological Coherence," 14432–14437. A more recent study in humans: Xu et al., "Surge of Death Spikes in Dying Patients," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 19 (2023): e2216268120.
↑ 26. For a comprehensive summary of the evidential case, see Gary R. Habermas and J. P. Moreland, Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality (Wheaton: Crossway, 1998), 155–200. Cooper similarly concludes in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting that "while the evidence from different sorts of near-death experiences tends to support dualism and requires more than a standard physiological account of consciousness," it "certainly does not conflict with a dualistic anthropology—and that is really all we need to establish" (ch. 10). See also Friend, "Can Near-Death Experiences Support a Dualistic Interpretation of Human Nature?", which analyzes over 5,200 NDE cases using a structured scoring system. The quantitative findings show a statistically significant difference (Cohen's d = 0.93, p < 0.001) between scholarly documented cases and self-reported cases, with the scholarly cases carrying substantially stronger evidential weight. Friend concludes that the convergence of multiple lines of evidence "provides a solid set of empirical evidence supporting the biblical teaching of substance dualism" (ch. 4).
↑ 27. J. P. Moreland, The Soul, 83–108. Moreland develops the argument from qualia (subjective experiential properties) and the unity of consciousness as evidence for an immaterial self. See also Moreland, Consciousness and the Existence of God (New York: Routledge, 2008). Farris builds on this in An Introduction to Theological Anthropology by grounding the case for the soul in explicitly theological categories: the creation narrative, the imago Dei, and "the importance of knowing, hearing, and seeing God (who is immaterial in nature)" (p. 244). For Farris, the soul is not merely a philosophical postulate but a creaturely reality required by "a telos that is inclusive of both soulish realities and bodily realities." See also Farris, The Soul of Theological Anthropology: A Cartesian Exploration (New York: Routledge, 2017).
↑ 28. Moreland, The Soul, 109–134. The unity-of-consciousness argument is one of the oldest and most persistent challenges to materialist accounts of the mind, going back to Leibniz. Cooper presses the same point from the biblical side. The "generic dualism" entailed by the intermediate state is "a general pre-philosophical point of view, not a developed philosophical anthropology"; it "merely sets the parameters for philosophical theories" (Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, ch. 9). Any theory of human nature compatible with the Bible, Cooper argues, must provide for the possibility that persons can exist without earthly bodies. He coins the term "holistic dualism" to capture the full biblical picture: "Asserting only that biblical anthropology is dualistic is a half-truth which distorts the scriptural picture of human nature. But so is the unqualified claim that it is holistic. Only some combination like 'holistic dualism' will tell the whole story" (ch. 9). Farris distinguishes between "pure-substance dualism," in which soul and body relate only accidentally, and "compound-substance dualism," in which they compose "a larger compound, one that is whole by virtue of the fact that they are naturally and, for some properties, necessarily joined together" (Introduction to Theological Anthropology, p. 66). The latter is closer to the position this chapter defends.
↑ 29. Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul, 145–160. Swinburne's thought experiment about brain duplication is designed to show that personal identity cannot be reduced to physical continuity. Farris notes that Swinburne "provides us with the most sophisticated substance-dualist defense of human beings in light of science and biological evolution to date" (Introduction to Theological Anthropology, ch. 3, n. 20). Wilkinson's Chalcedonian anthropology takes a different but complementary route: the person is not reducible to the body-soul nature but is the ontological "I" that subsists in that nature. "At death, the human person continues to subsist in a human soul, absent the body, and in the resurrection, there is a restoration of the fullness of the human nature subsisting in the human person" (Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor, Foreword by Stephen Wellum).
↑ 30. Habermas and Moreland, Beyond Death, 199–210. They argue explicitly that the NDE evidence and the philosophical case for dualism are mutually reinforcing. Cooper makes the same connection from the biblical side: "it is clear that the doctrine of the intermediate state logically requires the possibility that persons can exist without earthly bodies. This follows from the teaching of Scripture; it is not a Greek import. Christians who affirm the doctrine are committed to this general anthropology whether they admit it or not. Denying this is simply being incoherent, not modestly refusing to speculate" (Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, ch. 9). The NDE data, in other words, provides empirical evidence for the very possibility that Scripture already teaches and that the church has confessed in its doctrine of the intermediate state.
↑ 31. On the aftereffects of NDEs, see Kenneth Ring, Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 140–170; Greyson, After, 77–102. Ring documented dramatic reductions in fear of death and increases in concern for others among NDE experiencers. Sabom confirmed these findings independently in his Atlanta Study: NDE experiencers showed significantly greater increases in intrinsic religious faith (Hoge scores averaging 31.5) than both non-NDE cardiac patients (26.2) and non-NDE near-death survivors. Sabom concluded that "the NDE independently affects major changes in beliefs, attitude, and behavior" (Light and Death, ch. 5). Long similarly found that changes following NDEs "are generally substantial and quite positively life-changing," including in cases of frightening NDEs, which "often result in substantial positive life changes, including a greatly reduced fear of death" (God and the Afterlife, ch. 11). These transformations are often permanent.
↑ 32. Michael A. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor: A Chalcedonian Anthropology (Bellingham: Lexham Academic, 2024), Introduction and ch. 7. Wilkinson's central claim is that "the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ gives us the man par excellence which must govern how we define the creation of man par ordinaire." His six summary theses develop a person-nature ontology in which each created human person is the ontological subject of a body-soul nature, the person subsists in that nature, and the person acts through it. The Foreword by Stephen Wellum commends Wilkinson's work as "the first to develop" a Chalcedonian anthropology "at length" and calls it "a tremendous contribution to theological anthropology." Wilkinson's model complements Farris's compound-substance dualism and Cooper's holistic dualism, while grounding the anthropology directly in Christological orthodoxy rather than arriving at it by philosophical inference alone. See also the engagement with these models in Friend, "Can Near-Death Experiences Support a Dualistic Interpretation of Human Nature?", ch. 2.