By Trevor Major
Journalist William Cash relates the fascinating story of one Freddie Ayer.i In May of 1988, at the age of 77, Ayer came down with a serious case of pneumonia. He was admitted to hospital. A few days later, his heart stopped beating. A nurse was able to revive him, and apparently, the patient suffered no ill effects. Three months later, Ayer wrote an article about his experience titled, “What I Saw When I Was Dead.” He reports seeing a bright light, and becoming aware that this light “was responsible for the government of the universe.”
Here is the kicker: Freddie Ayer is better known in all his books and technical writings as A.J. Ayer—one of the preeminent atheist philosophers of the twentieth century. This was the same guy who, in an early phase of his professional career, dismissed as nonsense any sentence using the word “God.”
Ayer confessed that the experience “slightly weakened” his conviction that death will be the end of him, but it had not weakened his conviction that there is no God. This is not what he told Dr. Jeremy George, the attending physician, shortly after his recovery from cardiac arrest. On Dr. George’s account, Ayer said the following: “I saw a Divine Being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.”
None of those revisions took place, and the later essay is taken to be Ayer’s official position. Privately, there were changes. According to his wife, Freddie “became so much nicer after he died,” and he spent a lot of time with philosopher and Jesuit priest, Frederick Copleston.
Ayer’s near-death experience (NDE) is not unique. More than 13 million Americans claim to have had an NDE episode, according to a Gallup Poll in 1991. There is now an International Association for Near-Death Studies and a Journal of Near-Death Studies. This is quite the cottage industry in academia, as well as in the Christian publishing world, with blockbuster titles such as Heaven Is for Real (2010), and The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven (2010).
Over the last few decades, psychologists, neuroscientists, and other researchers have examined hundreds of cases of NDEs and have found a distinctive cluster of features. Not everyone experiences all these features in exactly this order, but most NDEs share the following:
- A realization that the body is near to death, or has died. This occurs, not only in the classic cases of cardiac arrest or drowning, but also in cases where people are suffering from chronic illnesses such as cancer or cystic fibrosis.
- An experience of moving out of the body, and being able to see the body from above. Subjects often report hearing conversations among family and medical staff.
- An experience of moving beyond the earthly “death” scene to a totally different plane of existence. This is often where we hear accounts of people moving through a dark tunnel, or being guided by loved ones or spirit beings of some kind or another.
- Seeing light at the end of the tunnel. This often radiates from an individual. People with a Christian background will identify this “being of light” with Jesus. Buddhists say they encounter Buddha. Hindus say they encounter one of their gods or goddesses. These beings will often share some deep personal insights, or express some grand “truths” about the universe. Again, these revelations are typically consistent with the subject’s worldview.
- An instantaneous, panoramicreview of their lives.
- An option to stay in the light, or return to their earthly bodies. Some encounter a barrier, and realize that they have no choice but to return. This final phase is often accompanied by the impression thatthis is not their time to die, and that they have important, unfinished business back on earth.
This Is Your Brain on Death
Near-death stories are often used to back up the claim that we have a soul that survives the physical death of the body and goes on to have a conscious existence in the afterlife. Naturally, skeptics see this as something that has to be explained away.
Susan Blackmore argues that a variety of triggers, such as stress, fear, and lack of oxygen, can bring about a near-death experience.iii These triggers can cause “the release of pleasure-inducing endorphins, and can set off random neural activity in various parts of the brain.” Similar activity has been observed in the brains of people taking hallucinogenic drugs.
Ironically, accounts that try to reduce mental events to physical events lack the one thing that skeptics value the most, namely, empirical evidence. If anything, empirical studies show that NDEs cannot be described completely in terms of brain chemistry.
In the Netherlands, researchers followed the progress of over 300 patients who were successfully resuscitated after cardiac arrest.iv Less than a fifth of the patients reported some sort of NDE. Their experiences were not readily explained by medication or the length of time they were unconscious.
If NDEs have a completely physical explanation, then we should expect similar experiences under similar conditions, but only a few of the Dutch survivors reported having an NDE. Even more striking, survivors who had an NDE would often experience positive life changes. We do not see the same “after-death” effects in other survivors, or in people who have experienced drug-induced hallucinations. There is something profound and unique about NDEs that cannot be explained away by physiology and chemistry.
What Do We Learn?
First, NDEs throw a wrench in the assumptions of reductive materialism. We fail to see a one-to-one match up between, say, the physical state of an oxygen-starved brain, and the mental state of a patient who thinks he saw Peter at the Pearly Gates. Human consciousness constantly defies explanation in completely physical terms.
Second, NDEs throw a wrench in the assumptions of the euthanasia movement. NDEs are remarkable because they seem to take place when there is no measurable brain activity (as shown by a flat EEG).v The pro-death people would love us to step back at this point and say, “That’s it. Game over. Pull the plug.” But clearly, a lot is happening in the first few minutes of clinical death.
And third, to end on a somewhat negative note, NDEs are not a compelling argument for Heaven’s existence. Arguments from religious experience are highly subjective. Someone can tell me that she died, went through a tunnel, saw God, and felt an overwhelming sense of love and acceptance. She can tell me that this experience changed her life for the better. I can hear all of that, and I can rejoice with her, but I cannot build my faith on her experience. If she claims to have received extraordinary knowledge, such as meeting relatives she (thought she) never knew existed, I can hardly verify those claims for myself.
The objective evidence to ground our faith can be found in abundance elsewhere. Paul did not shy away from offering his personal testimony to Agrippa and Festus, but he never expected them to take his word on it. The central event of the Christian faith, he reminded them, “has not been done in a corner” (Acts 26:26). NDEs happen in a fascinating corner of the human mind; but, for the majority of us, it will always be someone else’s corner.
Further, NDEs are colored by a person’s worldview. Ayer’s NDE included a conversation about the laws of nature, but this is hardly surprising: The atheist spent a lot of his career thinking about the philosophy of science. Some NDE reports are simply inconsistent with Biblical theism.
In the end, we can acknowledge that NDEs have a profound effect on people’s lives. They cannot be ignored. At the same time, they cannot provide us with objective evidence of an afterlife, Heaven, or the existence of God.
