A strict materialist believes that our existence is limited to our physical bodies. They do not believe in God, Satan, heaven, hell, life after death, the near death experience, ghosts, angels, demons, spirits, souls, or any sort of supernatural phenomena. Not every atheist is a strict materialist, but by definition, strict materials are always atheists.
To which I say, fine. Believe whatever you want, because you have free will. It isn’t my job nor my responsibility to change your mind. As long as you can refrain from making any claims about the superiority of your beliefs over mine, we’ll get along just fine. When a strict materialist makes an epistemic claim, it is typically their own personal belief incorrectly presented as fact. Whenever that situation occurs, I must offer strenuous objections because anecdotes should never be confused for scientific evidence and of all people, the strict materialist should already know this because they’ve told me as much on countless occasions. Personal beliefs should never be argued to be indisputable facts. Anecdotes might be interesting stories, but they will never be evidence to you unless they are your stories culled from your own personal experience and observation.
If I tell you that I saw something, it’s merely an anecdote. However, if you personally witness an event, it is your personal experience, and observation is a key component of the scientific method. Conversely, if you tell me that you saw something, it is still only an anecdote. However, if I observe the same thing you do, I have become a corroborating witness, and we both applied the scientific method to the problem. Does that all make sense?
In the past when I’ve written about corroborated veridical NDE information allegedly learned while the mind and brain were separated, my atheist friends and critics have typically complained that I’m incorrectly referring to anecdotes as scientific evidence. They will also say things like near death experiences aren’t the same thing as dying, which is a completely irrelevant point about the scenario under which information was allegedly obtained, rather than the information itself. These are not serious inquiries or sincere efforts to learn truth, but instead determined efforts to dismiss potential evidence with prejudiced excuses. To be brutally honest I’m not really all that interested in the typical NDE symptoms or characteristics such as the sensation of traveling through a tunnel toward a bright light, seeing dead relatives, etc. that are often reported as part of the overall experience, no more than I am determined to convince you of my personal beliefs. I am only interested in those very specific aspects of an account where new information is allegedly learned by the mind while the brain is for whatever reason in a thoroughly incapacitated state, which would be evidence dualism is true (and strict materialism would also be false.)
I usually provide the same three examples when trying to explain the nature of the information which most interests me, which are the specific claims involved in the cases of Pam Reynolds, Michaela Roser, and Rose Kopp. Without reiterating all the details of these three examples yet again, the important takeaway was that Pam allegedly heard a conversation and saw surgical equipment during brain surgery after her eyes had been taped shut and her ears plugged. Michaela Roser was in an operating room (and a coma) after a car accident when she claimed to overhear a conversation between her family taking place in the hospital cafeteria. Two weeks later, when she came out of her coma, she remembered the details of a conversation she literally could not possibly have overheard. Rose Kopp never claimed to have any sort of a near death experience, but she was credited with providing crucial, accurate information learned during an alleged out-of-body experience in Hawaii that helped police in Louisiana arrest a serial killer. Three different examples, three different sets of facts, but all leading to the same conclusion: strict materialism cannot be true, if any of them are true. The problem for the strict materialist is that if any one of these three accounts or any similar account can be confirmed to be true beyond a reasonable doubt, then strict materialism can be assumed to be false. Conversely, every NDE, OBE, supernatural claim, and ghost story must be proved false if we are gong to believe strict materialism is true with any degree of confidence.
For whatever reason, some people simply don’t want dualism to be true. They will use contortionist logic and get twisted up like a pretzel arguing that anesthesia awareness or hallucination provides a satisfactory alternative explanation for the facts, but that is only true if all the facts are not carefully scrutinized. The most popular “alternate” explanation given for the facts in the Pam Reynolds case is anesthesia awareness, but that claim requires completely ignoring what the attending surgeon said in a recorded interview about her aneurysm operation, in which he completely ruled out any possibility that she could hear or see anything given her physiological condition at the time. Real hallucinations cannot create accurate memories. Furthermore, if Rose Kopp’s claims are false, then we must believe in the existence of a conspiracy theory involving the Louisiana sheriff who arrested a serial killer for sharing credit for his most important arrest and conviction with an alleged psychic in Hawaii, in spite of the serious jeopardy such a preposterous (if false) claim could make for the conviction in the hands of a competent defense attorney.
In other words, if sheriff Bill Landry was lying about Rose Kopp and her contributions to his investigation, then Daniel Joseph Blank should not be on Death Row.
My atheist and skeptical friends don’t appear to understand the profound difference in an NDE such as Pam Reynolds or the extraordinary evidence provided by Rose Kopp and the more typical and traditional NDE anecdotal account such as Jeff Olsen’s story, which is the lack of compelling scientific evidence or corroborating eyewitness testimony, or both.
NDE anecdotes often attempt to describe God, but they do not prove God’s existence. Nor does the evidence in my three favorite examples–but the evidence does seem to falsify strict materialism and strongly implies that a supernatural God exists.
Please don’t misunderstand–I absolutely love the NDE testimonial of Jeff Olsen and firmly believe there much is valuable knowledge to be gained from listening closely to his account, but I don’t think it quite rises to the level of what I consider to be scientific evidence. Sure, his trauma can be easily documented with medical records, but he doesn’t really give any specific examples of information that might be construed as evidence of dualism. The closest thing to corroborated veridical evidence was provided by one of the attending doctors, as seen in this second video below. Dr. O’Driscoll claimed to learn that Olsen would survive from Olsen’s deceased wife, but that’s a different sort of supernatural claim and although he’s a medical doctor not a scientific claim, either.
Olsen does describe an out-of-body experience during his time in the emergency room, but he doesn’t give specific details of any information he allegedly learned while his mind and brain were separated. Furthermore, Dr. Jeff O’Driscoll gives an extraordinary account of what he claims to have personally witnessed during that time, but lacks the crucial element of corroboration–he mentions that an ER nurse witnessed the exact same phenomena, but she isn’t there to substantiate his claim. It’s more difficult to believe in a hallucination when multiple people allegedly see the same thing.
Even so, there are several important points about this sort of phenomena that the reader ought to understand: First, there are many, many other examples of extraordinary claims that also defy strict materialism. Each example is unique. Second, while some of these accounts may turn out to be nothing more than fascinating, fantastic anecdotes, others are supported by well-documented scientific evidence and often corroborated with observations by credible eyewitnesses. And third, even those accounts unsupported by scientific evidence may still offer valuable information that we can learn, if we choose to investigate further. We may learn that death is nothing to be feared.
If we arbitrarily dismiss an NDE account and assume it was just a pleasant hallucination without learning all the details we might fail to learn something important. Even though I would be most reticent to describe Jeff Olsen’s story as potential scientific evidence, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that Olsen delivers a critically important message about the value of free will from his brief fifteen minute long interview: The past is over. The future may never happen. The present is the only truly important thing, and how we choose to spend our time. We have the amazing gift of free will, and the ability to choose between love and hate, right and wrong, and good versus evil.
Choose wisely. Pursue truth, and experience joy.
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