The only source of knowledge is experience. – Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was arguably one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century.
This quote is particularly interesting because there are some renowned modern scientists who would try to convince you the opposite is true — they actually claim that careful inference is superior to personal experience.
However, seeing is indeed believing.
In my book Divine Evolution, I wrote about my personal experiences — yes, I do mean to imply there were multiple occurrences — with ghosts. Many of these paranormal experiences were witnessed by other people. And in another chapter, I wrote about my personal encounter with the risen Christ on the night I connected the dots that linked Matthew 7:7 and Revelations 3:20.
Then in my Counterargument for God, I sought to examine what I perceive to be a connection between the near death experience, or NDE, and ghosts, which of course could be called ADES, for after death experiences.
My personal experiences were not hallucinations. They were nothing less than evidence that strongly indicates that the mind and brain are actually separable entities.
There is scientific evidence to support my claims, known as corroborated veridical NDE events. These events involve a person who has a medical emergency of some nature that puts them temporarily in a state near death, and they claim to have out-of-body experiences.
What makes these claims of particular interest are two facts: their medical condition can be verified, and these people make a specific claim of acquiring new knowledge while in that physical “state” that can be investigated and either validated or refuted.
Two more famous examples of corroborated veridical NDE information are found in the cases of Colton Burpo and Pam Reynolds.
When Colton Burpo was four-years-old, he became critically ill due to appendicitis and underwent emergency surgery. When he recovered, he told his mother and father that he met an older sister in Heaven, though Colton reportedly had no knowledge that his mother had suffered a miscarriage before he was born.
His story was made famous by the book Heaven is for Real, and movie of the same name.
In Pam’s case, during a procedure known as Operation Standstill, while her metabolic processes were being carefully monitored, she reported seeing and hearing things that her normal senses were simply incapable of experiencing.
Nor does the compromise idea of “pleasant hallucination” hold water when the information Pam and Colton claimed to learn while in a physically incapacitated state can be investigated and corroborated. We do not have the luxury of assuming they might think they are telling the truth, but in fact they both hallucinated a visit to Heaven.
These people must all be lying in conspiracy — if even one is telling the truth, then both strict materialism and atheism must be false.
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