Materialism is Contradicted by Medically Verifiable Statements from Out-of-Body Experiences
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Read previous related article: Physicalism is Unsupported by Similarities Between Drugs and Near-Death Experiences — The Common Caveat
This article on near-death experiences (NDEs) and out-of-body experiences (OBEs) is influenced by a 2 Corinthians 5:6-8 framework:
“So we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight. We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.”
Near-death experiences are strange. When hearing about them in passing, it is easy to write them off as hallucinations or detachments from reality. In light of treating them as a type of hallucination, I always assumed that no one having an OBE could give an accurate account of what was happening in his/her surrounding environment during the experience.
That is contradicted by Doctor Bruce Greyson’s words on page 72 of his book titled After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond.
He states:
“Counseling professor Jan Holden reviewed ninety-three reports of out-of-body perceptions during NDEs. She found that 92 percent were completely accurate, 6 percent contained some error, and only 1 percent were completely erroneous.”
I can respect the skeptic who might scoff that those numbers are too high.
“Did someone fudge these numbers?” he or she might ask.
But I also do not want to be misled by a question that can easily turn into an unverified assumption.
Doctor Bruce Greyson attributes those numbers to The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, where Janice Miner Holden writes in Chapter 9: Veridical Perception in Near Death Experiences. Unfortunately, many pages are unavailable in that online copy, and I have not yet been able to buy a physical copy for my verification purposes.
However, if the materialistic model is correct on NDEs and OBEs at all, we should be completely unable to find any veridicality (statements corresponding with reality) among OBE perceptions.
Still on page 72, Greyson quotes William James, who is dubbed as “the father of American psychology”:
"If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”
This relates to the principle of falsifiability that was championed by Karl Popper. It also reminds me of David Hume's problem of induction. We may repeatedly observe a population of things having the same characteristics (black crows), but we should never rule out the possibility of a single exception (white crow). Once we witness that single exception, we refute the universality of the rule (all crows are black).
Inductive inferences are useful to the limited extent that the future resembles the past. Natural laws and regularities can have uniformity but not forever. Eventually, things change. The use of observed things cannot guarantee incontrovertible predictions about unobserved things, no matter how plausible our predictions seem. The problem of induction haunts the materialistic and naturalistic assumption that no one can have veridical OBE perceptions.
As I already said above, if the materialistic model is correct on NDEs and OBEs at all, we should be completely unable to find any veridicality among OBE perceptions.
If the brain produces conscious experience, and the brain’s sensory and perceptual apparatus is dying during an NDE, the eyes and ears should be less receptive to outside stimuli. That is what the philosophies of materialism and naturalism should entail.
But the experiencers see and hear a lot of things, according to NDE data. They see and hear things very vividly, in fact. Everything intensifies instead of doing the opposite.
In 2015, Greyson authored the open access report titled Western Scientific Approaches to Near-Death Experiences. There, he states that most NDErs hold the conviction that the palpable feeling of leaving their bodies gave them a peek into what “postmortem consciousness might be like.” Patients have been able to accurately account for what happened in the external environment during their “out-of-body spatial perspective.”
Greyson admits that maybe the accurate accounts from the patients could have been ensured by scanning and remembering their environment before becoming unconscious, or by simply making lucky and astute guesses about things that commonly occur. However, Greyson counters that idea by mentioning “two extensive controlled studies” involving patients accurately accounting for distinct and unforeseeable things occurring while getting resuscitated, which had to be things not of any interest to the patients before becoming unconscious. The patients who reported NDEs were able to provide accurate accounts, while those who reported no NDEs could not make accurate accounts.
Greyson’s two sources for that are 1) Michael Sabom’s Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation and 2) Penny Sartori’s work titled The Near-Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients: A Five-Year Clinical Study. Unfortunately, those two sources are not completely accessible to me, free of charge, through the internet.
Some experiencers have reported perceptions that go beyond the capacity of their usual sensory organs, while in the operating room. One example is a case of a man who said he was floating in the operating room and could see many things that were specifically done to him by multiple medical staff in the intensive therapy unit (ITU). The medical team was able to substantiate what he said and made a verbatim written report of what he said. That is discussed in the report titled: A Prospectively Studied Near-Death Experience with Corroborated Out-of-Body Perceptions and Unexplained Healing, of which Penny Sartori was a part.
The man described this experience to be painless and enjoyable as he saw his father and mother-in-law standing close to “a gentleman with long, black hair, which needed to be combed…I don’t know who he was, maybe Jesus, but this chap had long, black, scruffy hair that needed combing. The only thing nice about him was his eyes were drawing you to him; the eyes were piercing; it was his eyes. When I went to look at my father, it was drawing with his eyes as well, as if I could see them both [at] the same time.”
A pleasant experience that involves being drawn to a spiritual entity contradicts the typically fearful messages we receive from pop culture and movies that describe death as such a horrifyingly final experience.
That seems to be compatible with Bruce Greyson’s 2015 report saying that some parts of people’s near-death experiences may be shaped by cultural influences, but the core features remain consistent, worldwide. This could be attributable to common mental reactions, brain activities, or even a real contact with an otherworldly hereafter. The aftereffects of NDEs are deeply meaningful and extensive for every experiencer, in spite of the various causes and interpretations that can be said about them, and the unpredictability of NDEs that make them difficult to scientifically study. The experiencer is significantly changed with respect to having a greater emphasis on spirituality, a greater compassion for others, a greater gratitude for life, and a diminished fear of death and competitiveness. The experiencers perceive themselves to be vital members of a universe operating on benevolence and purpose. Such significant changes are likelier among those who report NDEs versus those that report no NDEs after surviving “close brushes with death.”
If profound peace, unconditional love, and bliss are common among NDEs, it makes sense to me that 2 Corinthians 5:6-8 would say we are “well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.”
The author of this blog post is Matthew Sabatine, who was born in the United States and raised as a Christian but left the faith in his early twenties. He returned to the faith midway through 2022. Matthew has some experience in the mental health field as a direct support professional, caring for people with intellectual and development disabilities and people who were in long-term residency/rehabilitation programs. Though Matthew has no formal undergraduate or graduate degree, he has experience co-facilitating therapy groups under the supervision of licensed counselors. Matthew currently works in sales/marketing by day and blogs on his free time at night.
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