NDEs as Evidence

No sooner had I finished the last posting than I had second thoughts. These arose because the experience of life somewhat contradicts formal distinctions such as those that I presented, thus between philosophy and metaphysics. Thought and knowledge live in the real world, as it were, and in personal experience, we’re interested in how things feel. We live our knowledge and only occasionally reflect back upon it in formal ways. An illustration of what I have in mind is the near death experience (NDE) and the literature, pro and con, that has developed around it.

The NDE is a genuinely modern phenomenon, but its modern character is not, when you reflect upon it, all that surprising. The medical arts are ultimately responsible that we have such reports in sufficient numbers to form the basis of investigation and debunking. Most of those who are today resuscitated almost routinely from severe injuries or illnesses would have died before 1900. In the twentieth century medicine had advanced enough so that Raymond Moody could assemble and publish a sampling of NDEs in his book Life After Life (1950).

The essence of an NDE is that a patient, in what is a critical condition, experiences an out-of-body experience. He or she observes the body lying on the operating table—or, say, at the site of an automotive accident. Afterwards the patient may have the experience of entering another world and meeting relatives and luminous beings. All those who render such reports recover from the trauma—else we wouldn’t have the stories. This is the essence of the NDE.

In Moody’s wake came a series of other medical people who carried on investigations of this sort. Some medical practitioners have also engaged in the systematic debunking of the NDE—not that it happened but suggesting that what NDErs had reported had nothing to do with out-of-body trips much less trips to heaven or hell. No. It could all be explained by physiological events in the brain.

Three ways of looking at this kind of evidence will give me an occasion to look at real life approaches to the evidence. One is my own, one is that of the debunkers, and one is by a hypothetical observer suspended in that vague space that modern life creates: impressed by science but reflexively traditional.

I well remember my own reaction to Moody’s book when I first read it years ago. It was, “Well, there you are!” I didn’t see Moody’s cases as evidence so much as confirmation of something I already knew. I knew it because I’d thought about life after death for many years already. I felt comfortable with the hypothesis because we accept metaphysical postulates if they are formulated comprehensively, if aspects of them don’t violate our broader structures of understanding, and if they add meaning to reality. My quarrels with certain metaphysical structures are not caused by their lack “positive” proof; when I quarrel with them, it is because they carry tenets that don’t seem to me supportable in my own tentative cosmology. Thus, in effect, I treat certain metaphysical theses as matters of fact—although less sharply resolved than matters, say, of chemistry or of consciousness or of will. I don’t draw very sharp lines in day-to-day life.

The debunking responses to Moody (and they swiftly followed Life After Life) illustrate another mindset. It rests on another metaphysical postulate, namely that nothing can be real unless it is materially detectable. For people who hold this position, there can be no evidence ever that might point in a transcendental direction. Books like Moody’s therefore, presented as such evidence—by an author who bears the letters M.D. behind his name, letters that the publishers, of course, never fail to put on the cover for everyone to see—represents a challenge to a world-view. It must be dealt with. But this hurry to defend the meaningless universe has a peculiar character too. It can, at best, convince those who haven’t done their homework.

I read the debunking articles myself, of course, but for me to do so is to engage in anthropology. The same people who wish to explain away the NDE also deny that consciousness or free will exist. Now I haven’t had an NDE and hence have no direct experience, but when it comes to consciousness and will, I happen to own the evidence personally. Thus I’ve learned to discount any debunking argument. Views like that have no standing in my court, as it were.

The third position is that of people who, for whatever reasons, have not delved into these matters directly, personally, and to any depths at all. They reflect the culture, and the culture, brother, he/she is mixed, like that pronoun. The culture rests upon a traditional view. That view rests on religious doctrines. The scientific overlay, particularly science as ideology, dominant in the academy, reflected back in the media, contradicts the tradition. For this person who has studied neither deposit with any energy, Moody’s had the peculiar effect of showing that, finally, science has found evidence for the hereafter. Raymond Moody, M.D. Alas, Moody’s evidence has no more scientific standing that the Gaia hypothesis. But for the person reacting in this way, words like tradition and science have a quite different meaning. They are like brand-names. They carry authority with a certain amount of experiential backing. Mom’s advice is sound. And the way they dealt with that ear infection at the hospital—wow! Science. And just look at that I-Pod of mine.