The Sean McDowell Show - A Doctor’s Fascinating Investigation of Near-Death Experiences (ft. Dr. Michael Sabom)

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

As a critical cardiologist, Dr. Michael Sabom first thought near-death experiences were "hogwash." After designing and implementing the first scientific study of NDE's in the 1970s, he was stunned at what he found. In this interview, Dr. Sabom discloses his surprising findings and discusses how the professional field of NDEs has radically changed since its inception in the 1970s. WATCH : "After Death" (https://www.angel.com/movies/after-death) READ: Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (https://amzn.to/48my9B5) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for $100 off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Why would a skeptical medical doctor come to believe in near-death experiences? Doctors resuscitate. I can't be dead because I've never felt more alive. Hogwash. Hogwash. Our guest today, Dr. Michael Sabom, has been writing on and studying near-death experiences long before the popular discussions today. She showed me the book and asked me what I thought of it.

This was hogwash to me before I started looking into it. First off, Dr. Sabom, thanks for taking the time to come on and join us. Thank you. Thank you very much. So let's go back to your story. Take us back to when maybe you didn't use the term skeptical, but you were not convinced of near-death experiences. You start off thinking there's no way these are going to be legitimate. You're a cardiologist, so you're trained to follow the empirical evidence where it leads. What was your worldview and belief system and how long ago was kind of that state for you? Well, Raymond Moody's book came out, Life After Life, in 1975. Two or three months after it came out, I was at the University of Florida doing my cardiology training,

and there was a psychiatric social worker there, Sarah Kreisinger, and she had read the book, and we were going to a Methodist church there, the same church we were going to, and she showed me the book and asked me what I thought of it and the only response I could give that was appropriate was hogwash and that's where I started. This was hogwash to me before I started looking into it. She wanted to present this book to a church group there in Gainesville, Florida.

And I said, go ahead, Sarah, but, you know, good luck. But she twisted my arm enough. What she needed from me were some patients who had had the experience to show people that it's a real live event. So she convinced me to go and talk to a few of my patients who I had resuscitated. And the third one I talked to gave me a textbook picture of the near-death experience, just as Moody had written about in his book, Life After Life. So anyway, I took that experience, went with Sarah. We talked to the church group. It was very well received. Then after that, I looked at Sarah and said, you know, maybe we ought to look into this a little bit

further. Raymond, he had written a very interesting book, but it was very unscientific. The fact is, he had a statement in there at the end of his book, to all of my scientific readers, this is not a scientific study. So what I wanted to do with Sarah was to make sure that what he had done on a secular level could be shown to be true on a scientific level. So we designed a study and started interviewing patients on a regular basis. We recorded their background information. And the part of the experience that I was most interested in and spent the most time with was the out-of-body part. Because I, as a cardiologist, as you stated, am interested in empirical data of the material world to show that what these people are actually seeing

during their near-death experience actually happened the way they were seeing it so we went along for a couple of years collecting cases and writing down all the stuff we would transfer we would record the interviews transcribe them and then Sarah finished her training at the University of Florida at the same time I did. I went to Emory in Atlanta. She went to Tulane in Louisiana. And so she's still there. She got her PhD in social work. And I continued to study at Emory as assistant professor of cardiology. At the end of the study, five years, 116 persons had been interviewed, and I divided the experience up into three parts, because at

that time, there was no Grayson scale that could be applied or anything. I divided them up into what I call the autoscopic type of near-death experience, which is the autoscopic is a word that means self-visualization. And I would use that word to describe the out-of-body type experience. Then there was the transcendental part of the experience where people go down a tunnel, see a light, deceased relatives and friends, religious figures, told that it's not their time to be there. And then they come back. I was interested in the first type because the first type, these people claim to have floated up out of their bodies, look down on what's going on in the room, could see all the things, could hear occasionally what was being

said. And I, as a cardiologist said, aha, this is a place where I can show that this really is hogwash. So listen, I went into it and I actually had people come back later after they read the book and they would say, you know, when you interviewed me, I felt like you were trying to disprove the experience. I said, well, in a way I was. But anyway, what I found was amazing. Can I jump in here for a second before before we get to the research that you found? Why were you so skeptical at that time? Why did you want to disprove it?

Was it your worldview? Were you a materialist? Were you a Christian who had a certain view that science couldn't reveal this? What was the worldview why you just responded so strongly hogwash? Well, I was probably a, I was a Christian. I was raised as Episcopalian in the church, and I certainly would say I was a Christian, but not the way I am now. I was very, very shallow in my belief. The main thing I was interested in at that point was hard, fast data. I was in a cardiology fellowship. I was publishing papers for

medical journals and they were interested in not somebody's experience, but what happened to the heart and all the things that goes on with the heart. And so I was very, very scientifically oriented. I would say my worldview was very scientific. And it is to a certain extent continued that way, except I'm now a devout Christian, and we can get into that later. But as a scientist, you go up to a materialist. I wasn't a materialist, but I was certainly a scientist. And I would have to say that hogwash pretty much fits what I was thinking about. So it was less theological objections as it was that science should be rigorous. It should be empirical.

And these stories cannot have any empirical evidence behind them. That was the response initially from you. Absolutely. Okay. You said it beautifully. Got it. So I love it that some of the people you interviewed came back and their response was like, it felt like you were trying to disprove them, which just shows that you were approaching this with a very critical eye, not being just kind of vulnerable or gullible, so to speak. So take us back to where you were in the story. And by the

way, I just want, I want viewers to make sure they realize when you're doing this, there were not books that were available on near-death experiences. There were no other doctors doing this. You were really kind of coming up with these experiences yourself and this data and a way of testing it, weren't you? This was novel. Right. And not not only me but the people i were i was interviewing they had not heard of this experience either so this is sort of a virgin class of people who had not heard of the near-death experience and in fact in the in the movie we'll get to you know in a little bit the guy that opens the movie up is just his voice and me interviewing him. But I still remember he said, I said, have you ever told anybody about this experience? He said,

I wouldn't dare. I said, why? He said, they'll think I'm crazy. He had never heard of anybody else ever having it. So Raymond Moody's book had only been out two or three months and had been published by Mockingbird Books in Covington, Georgia. I'm sure you've heard of that publisher. And on the front cover was a smashed egg with a yoke in the form of a human body. I mean, it looked like a comic book. So anyway, that being said, you're right. I mean, this is a study that cannot be repeated today because you could not in this country go up to anybody and say ever heard of near-death experience of course i mean it's everywhere it's changed okay so if people are so reluctant to tell their stories you say 116 or 160 people? How did you possibly find them

initially to do this study over the five-year period? Most of them were my patients. I would go in there. Oh yeah, I was going in there and Sarah had some too, but most of them were mine and they had had a cardiac arrest or I knew of their history in their charts. So I would do all my doctor stuff. And then at the end, if they had been close to death and unconscious, I'd say, oh, by the way, did you ever have anything you remembered while you were unconscious? And they usually looked at me like, well, why do you want to know? And so I said, well, I'm doing this study, and I'm interested in whether people could remember things or not.

Anyway, that's how I approached it, very open-ended. But there was a lot of people who were reluctant at that time, obviously, because most, well, almost all of them had not heard of the experience at all. During the later part of the study, four or five years into the study, of course, they were learning more and more about what these things were in the public. But not then when I first started. Okay, that's really helpful. So I want to get to your research.

Actually, let's just jump there right now. Let's talk about what you... You know what? I just thought of a question. Let me ask you this. We're going to come to what started to convince you, but it's somewhat amazing to me that you had 160 people in your own practice over a five-year period that you found just by asking them these questions that suggests this is far more prevalent than some people might think. So as you have done this research over the past few decades and talked with other cardiologists, are you an outlier or are you hearing others say, no, we have the same experience with our patients? No, I was an outlier. I was assistant professor of medicine. I actually

published some journal articles. The book, Recollections of Death, was reviewed in the New England Journal of Medicine, which is the number one medical journal in the world, gave it a real positive review. And I'd written articles for JAMA, Journal of American Medical Association. None of that counted towards me becoming an associate professor of medicine from the assistant professor level. This was not recognized as legitimate research, period. So anyway, that's very true. I forgot your other question. Oh, so I guess what I'm getting at is if you had that many number of patients, just yourself from asking it, it doesn't seem that they would all have lined up and just been

your patients and that other cardiologists, if they leaned in, would also have a lot more patients. Is that the case as you've spoken to other cardiologists, if they leaned in, would also have a lot more patients. Is that the case as you've spoken to other cardiologists? Okay. There were two groups of patients. Maybe I was a little misleading at first. First of all, it's 116, not 60. Okay. Secondly, there's two groups of those. Those were the prospectively interviewed patients. Those were my patients. And I had no idea whether they had had a near death experience prior to interviewing.

And then I was being referred patients by other doctors once over the five years, they learned what I was about. Somebody would come up and say, hey, you need to go talk to this guy. I think he has something to say. So anyway, there was a referred group, but I kept them separate because the methodology was different in the two groups.

Okay, so the data I see will typically stay about four to 5% of the population have had some kind of near death experience. Would your research kind of roughly line up with that if you had to guess and estimate does that strike you as as accurate probably yes although okay i had a lot higher level i'm not sure why well i have some inclinations but that's really getting in the weeds uh okay yeah that's probably overall i 10 to 15% has been the usual standard frequency of these experiences. Okay, so let's get back to skeptical cardiologist in the 70s doing this novel research, trying to show that it's hogwash.

Start to walk us through some of the things that made you pause and go, wait a minute, there might be more to this than I realized. Okay. Well, as I mentioned before, the out of body part of it, I would begin the interview by saying, what do you remember? And I'd shut up and let them just go free, free narrative. And then once they had finished that, I'd come back to ask them detailed questions. Well, you said you saw, for instance, the monitor over to the

side of your bed while the cardioversion was going on. I can understand that. Yes, there was a monitor there. Did you see anything on the monitor? What did you see? What details did you see? And I had a guy actually, these old time cardioverter machines, they had a fixed needle and a moving needle on a little screen on the machine machine itself and that was the way they charged it and this guy watched these needles go back and forth while he was out of his body he gave me a very detailed description of this old machine and the way it worked uh it was the details it it's very important to get the details because you can't, it's not,

it's not like, well, I saw a bunch of doctors standing around, the nurse was over there and they were, they were doing some things to my body and yeah. And then I woke up. Okay. That the 30 out of body experiences that I, only six were what I consider detailed and unique enough so that it would convince me, not convince me, but over a period of time it did, that this was something different. The other 24 were general impressions of what was going on. And when I, when I nailed them down, what they said was accurate, but it was accurate in a general way.

So I discounted that. I wanted detailed, unique. And then the other thing that's important was I was very, and I continue to be very adamant about documentation. These things had to be documented. It wasn't that somebody saw this. It had to be somebody that needed to be medical records or somebody that was there, i.e. medical personnel, who could then tell me exactly what had happened. So I had a documentation, a third-party documentation,

which by the way is sorely lacking in these experiences then and now. And I think it really detracts from the scientific quality of a lot of these studies. That specificity is really helpful because it's not that the 24 you described out of the 30 didn't have an out-of-body experience. It's that we just can't confirm it. But then when someone starts, right, that's the distinction of why you trust some.

Okay. Yeah. So some of these details gave you pause going, wait a minute, he's not only describing a meter, but specific ways it went up and down that matched exactly what happened. When this person was in a state of what, what state was this person in where they should not have been? Was it no brain waves? Was it no heart waves? Like what physical state were they in while they come back and report these things? Well, the nice thing about a cardiac, a true cardiac arrest, which is ventricular fibrillation or straight line asystole, the nice thing about that within somewhere around 10 to 15 seconds, you have a flat EEG.

There have been multiple studies to show that. So these people, I had the rhythm, I knew what the rhythm was and I could then infer what the brain was doing at the time. Of course, they were unconscious too, but that was true then and it's true now. During a cardiac arrest, your brain waves are flat in 15 seconds. With flat brain waves, you're not able to perceive visually anything with your physical eyes. And these people were telling me what they were seeing. Now, we do know that hearing is one of the last things to go. And sometimes they can hear in there, but it's the sight.

It's the visual descriptions of things that were really important to me. And they had a, we didn't have an EEG machine on them at the time, although that's being tried now. But we do know that it takes several minutes to get in there and start to start resuscitating somebody, even in the coronary care unit at that time. So they had flat brain waves for a large percentage of the time. And then you could use what's called time anchors. In other words, if they said they saw somebody do such and such, or this happened this, for instance, that cardioverter machine, those things are not charged until they're ready to shock the patient. You don't just charge them because once they're charged, those things are dangerous. You could shock somebody else. So you need to discharge it on the patient. You know, at the time, if he was

seeing that monitor go, that was at a time when his heart was out, flatline. And so that's kind of how you can put all this together. Now, one of the cases I saw you refer to kind of in an interview online was of Pam Reynolds. And this is one that was particularly kind of pointed to you and a part of your kind of conversion, so to speak, to believing in these. Tell us a little bit about that account and why it was so impactful to you. Yeah, but this was during my second study and this was published in Light and Death, 1998. Pam, in 1991 or so, was found to have a giant cerebral aneurysm. That's the bubble off the side of the

artery in the brain. And it was located at the base of the brain. So they could not just go in there and take it out. We had several surgeons here in Atlanta look at her. They said, no, we're not touching her. The problem is that's a very thin wall aneurysm. When they're going in there and digging around, they're very likely to puncture it and then it's all over with. So they flew her out to Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, where Dr. Spetzler was doing this cutting edge surgery called hypothermic cardiac arrest. In that situation, what they do is bring the patient into the operating room,

put them on the table. They take their eyes shut. They put earbuds in both ears that are emitting 95 decibel clicks to check the brainstem to make sure it also is dead. They have it hooked up to an EEG. They put her on a cardiopulmonary bypass machine, and then they begin to lower the body temperature at some point. But before that, they have to open up the skull and expose the aneurysm, at which point they lower the body temperature to 60 degrees Fahrenheit, which is real, you know, 98 is normal, 60 degrees. And then they raise the head of the bed. They turn off the cardiopulmonary bypass machine and all the blood drains out of her head.

Now, when I first heard about this experience, I thought this was Twilight Zone. I mean, I'd never heard of this before. I was more impressed with the experience of the procedure than I was of her experience. So, but I had to, so I talked to Spencer, got all of her medical records. This is the number one best documented case on record. The reason is everything in her body was monitored. They had temperature gauges, they had EEG machines, they had these things in her ears, their eyes were taped shut, all of this. And under those conditions, she had an out-of-body experience. And she recalled a conversation between the surgeon and the cardiovascular surgeon down putting in the bypass machine in her femoral arteries.

There was some problems down there and she could remember the words and what they had said. She also identified, and this really got me too. She identified, she said, yeah, and I saw that thing he was holding in his hand. I said, well, what did it look like? That was the bone saw. Okay. I didn't know what it looked like either so I wasn't influencing her because I had to actually go to the company and find out what it looked at she said it was look looked like an electric toothbrush at which time I said yep okay and I recorded the rest of the interview and put it in the drawer this is called called the drawer effect. In other words, I didn't know what to do with it because the bone saw is not an electric toothbrush. So a year later,

I transcribed the interview and I had to go ahead and find out what the bone saw looked like. So I contacted the Midas Rex Company in Fort Worth, Texas. They sent me a booklet and pictures of this. And I have it in the book, light and dead, to have the picture. It looks like a electric toothbrush. So she also saw the equipment table and she said that all these attachments to the bone saw looked like the socket wrench set that her father used to have in the garage. And sure enough, that's exactly what it looks like. And a picture of that is in the book. So she was seeing things that she had never seen before.

She'd never heard of before. And I'd never seen before. And I'd never heard of before and I'd never seen before and I'd never heard of before. So anyway, this is kind of like, it's showing, it answers some of the, when you're interviewing somebody, sometimes you lead them to what you want them to say. Sure, sure. I was not leading her. She was leading me and I had to prove or to myself that that was accurate.

She then went down a tunnel, saw a light and had what's called a transcendental near death experience. And then at the end of that, when the surgery was over six hours later, she came back and watched her body be defibrillated again. They had to shock her heart back to normal rhythm at the end of the procedure. But the thing about this is this is almost like an experiment. If you wanted to do an experiment

to show a near death experience under all these conditions being monitored, this was it. There was nothing else to monitor. And so this has received, obviously, international attention, both positively and negatively. People who cannot accept the fact that there's more than just the physical brain there can't get over it. And they come up with the most ridiculous reasons why to disprove this. And I don't want to keep going on about this, but there's an anesthesiologist in Germany. His name is Gerald Worley, and he's a nice guy. And I've communicated with him quite a bit.

I like the guy, but you know, I go through all this with him and he said, well, you know, I know what happened. I said, okay,

well tell me what happened. He said, when they were talking, the surgeon with the other surgeon down by the legs that the airwaves and the vibrations of their voice was going through the air going down to the operating room table traveling up to her head going through her skull going through the metal thing that was holding her skull still and she heard it through bone conduction and not air conduction. Now, you may not know the difference.

Air conduction is you and I talking right now. Bone conduction is you can actually close your external auditory canals, and you can conduct sounds through the bones of your head. It bypasses the external ear. This was so ridiculous that, I mean, I just had to, I said, really? Do you have some evidence that this actually could happen? So this is how extreme this case is. Other people got involved in this too. And they invited Worley over to Phoenix, Arizona from Germany to put him on the operating room table to reenact everything.

They obviously didn't open up his skull, but to reenact him to see if he could hear somebody talking in the room by the vibrations going through the operating room table. Well, of course he didn't pick him up on it. I mean, that's how extreme this is getting. There's no explanation for what happened to her, except the explanation that somehow there is something more than just our physical brain that perceives things. You know, for near death experiences to be real, all we need is one. We don't need two. We don't need hundreds. All we need is one. If Pam Reynolds story is legitimate, then we are more than just our brains. But with that said, I'm just curious,

if you could put an estimate on of those you've personally studied, you've personally done the experiments on, or those you've read about, how many do you feel like are strongly warranted? Maybe not to the level of Pam Reynolds because of all the evidence that was there and the way it's been studied, but some you would say these are strongly warranted. A couple dozen, a few hundred. How many do you think could be supported in that way? Well, I've been criticizing. They say, you only have six cases of your, and you're right.

That one case, that's what's known as a white crow. If you wanted to prove that all crows were black, you don't need to prove they're all white. All you need to do is to prove one is white. Thus, all are not black. This is the white crow case of Pam Reynolds. To answer your question, I will have to say that I was in a very, I won't say chosen position, but favorable position to get the documentation as a cardiologist. And even I wouldn't have known about her unless I was a doctor. people who are writing about this are psychologists or academics who are using other people's data to come up with explanations, et cetera. And they're also, and I have to be careful because I don't want to talk down to the methodology used by these other people, but I'm very strict on

documentation with a Third-party reliable documentation and it's just not my opinion. There was two articles written in the 1990s 1990s by Ian Stevenson who is the Founder of all this at the University of Virginia. And he wrote these articles and he individually himself went to people who claimed to have had a near-death experience and had been very near death at the time, pulled their medical records, and he found that 55% of the people who think they were near death were not near death at the time they had the experience so that means that if you don't document what's going on then you don't it bad

data leads to bad results you can't get good results out of bad data well that that's fair i appreciate your your careful kind of methodology here to not just accept what others say, but do the data yourself. So the story of Pam Reynolds is in the 1990s, your second study. Let's go back to the first. You have at least the six cases of the 30 that give specificity and are enough to convince you there's something legitimate here. This couldn't be chance or some other naturalistic explanation. Now, if these folks were somewhat hesitant to often share, were you like, I've got this data proclaiming to the world? Were you like, my reputation could be marred if I speak this? How and when did you speak out once you were convinced that this is true? Well, when I had all the data, and by the way, in the 119 persons in the study, I collected

over 3000 bits of data and then statistically analyzed them in the appendix of the book. So I was presenting this stuff as a scientific study and I had actually envisioned this book to last a long time with this data because somebody could go to my book and they're all anonymous in the book. They didn't want to be identified and I didn't want them identified. But you could pick up all the information. You could reconstruct where the person was from how much education they had what kind of religious background I mean all this stuff is in the book and you can reconstruct the patient with the experience so I didn't once I found this stuff the people over me and this was at Emory once I got I was at Emory for five years,

and then I went into private practice in Atlanta. And Emory was very nice. They let me do the study, et cetera. But I certainly was not recognized for it. I didn't really care because I was finding something that I had the data. If they wanted to go back and look at what I found and documented it, they could either call me a liar or go find out for themselves. So that sort of was my attitude. I wasn't, I was kind of immune to this. Plus you got to realize as this experience became more and

more known in this country, people became very interested in it, very excited. So I would say that I would think that there's more, I wish there were more skeptics out there because skepticism leads to knowledge if it's true skepticism and not just ideology. I know everything's material. Don't tell me about it. That's ideology. But true skepticism means that, you know, I don't believe it, but I'll at least take a look at it. So, you know,

I think that's healthy. And I said that in that movie, too. So, yeah, you do. We're going to come back and talk a little bit more about the movie After Death, which I just think is fantastic. Watched it with my 11-year-old son. It's one of the best high-produced accounts of near-death experiences. But let's go back to when you first published the book in what year? 1982 was the first. The second was 1998. So 1982 you first published it.

And there was almost nothing out at this point. Tell me a little bit about the reception. Did you have people go, I want to hear more? Tell me about this. Were you just kind of like John the Baptist in the wilderness trying to get people to pay attention to this? What was the reception like at that point in the early 80s? Well, I'll tell you the truth. Once I published the book, I didn't publicize it. Harper and Row was a big publishing company. They sent me on a week-long book tour in America, and I hit all these shows. And then I came back, and i went into private practice and then i was buried in cardiology i didn't have any time to promote it so it basically is word of mouth the book but uh i don't forget what your question is how people receive the book i i think people who actually looked at it from a truly skeptical standpoint were impressed.

And one of the reasons I say that is I got it reviewed by the New England Journal of Medicine. I don't think they've reviewed any other books of near-death experiences, even up to today. I don't know that as a fact, but I was very happy to do that because those people don't mess around. That is empirical data or garbage can. I mean, that's the way they treat it. And I thought the guy treated it really very fairly, but that wasn't the only journal. I was getting very good reviews on this book if people took the time to read it. So I felt good about how it was received. Good.

Because I was skeptical before I even started it. So how can I blame somebody else for thinking this is all a wash until they look into it? That's totally fair. So you published this in 82, do a tour in the US, dive back into cardiology. What motivated you to write a second book and dive into further research and maybe how was that study different than the first one? The study was not different than the first one. The methodology was the same. I added a couple of other ways of evaluating different spiritual issues, but my first book was pure medical. There was no theology or spiritual discussion in the book whatsoever.

What happened in the early 1990s, I don't know if you remember, you may not be old enough, but there is an author, I think she's still alive, Betty Eady. She published a book, I think it was in 1991 or so, and it was number one

on the New York Times bestseller list for 58 weeks in a row. That's gotta be a record, but it goes to show you what happened. There was a big spiritual shift to the interpretation of the experience away from the pure science and medical part of it. So I, and Betty Eadie is a new age person all the way. And I don't know if you know Doug Ruth Ice.

Yeah, Doug's a friend. Doug wrote a wonderful book. It's entitled Deceived by the Light in 1995. He had a lot of my stuff in there too. But I need to meet Doug sometime. But anyway, in my upcoming book, I'm going to be using quotes out of that book a lot. But people like him,

they were pointing out that these people were using this experience and showing that it's the universalism or New Age stuff or the Eastern religions or reincarnation. But Raymond Moody got into the psychomantium occult sort of things. And I was seeing that shift. So I figured what I wanted to do is to do another study with more of a spiritual, uh, focus.

And so I did, I did that. And it just so happened as I was doing that, the Pam Reynolds case came along too. I mean, Pam's case is, I don't use it. I think she was Christian,

but, uh, that's case is, I don't use it. I think she was Christian, but that's not wise. That's not the thing that was different than anybody else who had the experience. But anyway, it was a big focus off the Christian view. They were using it to one of the biggest. Well, if we want to get into this now, one of the biggest problems, I think, with this with this experience itself is that it really is. It's a universalist experience. In other words, and I don't know if you know the difference between general revelation and special revelation. OK, well, this is the general level, general revelation and special revelation. Okay. Well, this is the general revelation event. The law of God is written on the hearts of all people, Romans 2.

And all people have these experiences, whether they're Buddhists or atheists or, you know true christians so uh they were using these experiences as afterlife experiences as proof that guess what there's no need for jesus christ christianity is a nice sounding religion but i've got my own nice sounding religion and by the way these ministers of the christian beliefs uh have the same experience as i had so why do i need to go through the problem of learning the bible and all that so in any way it was using it was being used as a counter-christian uh thing so i came out with light and death and i had some findings there that suggested that this could be understand within the christian religion and it actually supported i had some people who had near-death experiences who were christians before they had the experience and this deeply and this much, this solidified their faith

because it's a spiritual experience, it's a powerful experience. And if you're a Christian, it's a spiritual experience that leads you towards Christ and not towards universalism. But if you're not a Christian to begin with, then the general revelation is there is a God, but there's many ways to God, and my way is as good as your way. So I sort of lost my train of thought there. No, no, that's great. I was asking about some of the differences between the two studies. We won't necessarily go down the train of like the

universalism, et cetera.ve miller as you know you mentioned you watch a couple of my interviews with him has a recent book out and we talked about this probably two or three months ago offering specific responses to this in a way that i think is really helpful so i will direct people to his book to that interview but since your methodology was the same in the early 80s in the early early 90s, was the data basically the same? Was there the same support for near-death experiences, interpretation aside, in your second study? Yeah, yes. I had an opinion. What I was interested in there more was belief in God before and after,

belief in the afterlife before and after, and statistically analyze this. And believe me, across the board, the belief in a God and a master of the universe, as A.J. Ayer, who's a big famous atheist of the 20th century. He had a near-death experience, but he says, I'm still an atheist. This was not God. This was master of the universe. He described God, but he wouldn't use the word God so anyway uh that was universal that is universal that's romans 2. that's written on everybody's heart and i think this this experience brings that out in people and they do become more spiritual in a general sense that's really helpful now you asked about my dad kind of when we were chatting before this interview started,

and he's 84 years old. He was doing apologetics before anybody today was doing apologetics. So some of the questions I love asking him is how he's seen this entire conversation culturally change and how apologetics is done differently today than it was in the past. There's just very few people alive who have that perspective. You were doing studies on near-death experiences before it was cool. Now there's a lot of books. There's a lot of authors. There's research. There's this new documentary that's out again called After Death that I just think is fantastic.

Maybe you've answered this to some degree, but can you tell us just kind of from a 30,000 foot view perspective, how has the study and or reception of near-death experiences changed in the 45 plus years that you've been tracking and doing research in it? Well, the obvious change is more people know about it. I think the emphasis, both within research of this experience and in the general public, is not whether it happens or not. I think unless you've really been buried in an island somewhere off the coast of somewhere, you know that it's there. Okay. It's the interpretation of it.

I don't think the interpretation. And it's interesting because the book that I'm writing, I've been toying around with titles for it. And one title that really is attractive to me is The Near-Death Experience, The Three Battlegrounds. for it. And one title that really is attractive to me is the near-death experience, the three battlegrounds. There are three battlegrounds of the near-death experience. The first battleground is the materialist scientific, you know, there's nothing that leaves your body that's not there. That's a scientific on the conscious level on the subconscious level which we

we really don't have time to get into but there's a psychological component subconsciously where there it modifies the original experience into something else which shows that you absolutely need documentation of what you see and don't assume that what you need documentation of what you see and don't assume that what you see is really what you think it is. And the final battleground is a spiritual battleground, Christianity versus the other religions. So what I'm trying to do is bring them all three together. But it's a real challenge because people are entrenched in their beliefs. But I think that

it's really something that needs to be done because as when we first started, a non-Christian will most likely remain a non-Christian after a near-death experience. And quite frankly, I'm a co-founder of IAMS, International Association of Near-Death Studies. And the general gist, I'm one of the few outspoken Christians within that organization. Now, it's worldwide now. It has a symposium every year and etc it really supports

research into the near-death experience but the interpret the religious interpretation of it fact is after my second book uh i was people read it and there was there's a journal of near-death studies that this organization uh represents too and it's a peer-re-death studies that this organization represents too and it's a peer-reviewed journal it's very good but the title of this group of studies in response to light and death was that I had started religious wars within the near-death experience within the near-death studies field of near-death studies, field of near-death studies. And so I did. And I was writing journal articles right and left defending Christianity on this

because we have our beliefs. I believe sincerely that the Bible is a word of God. It's inerrant. And quite frankly, if there's a question about whether some part of this experience is right or wrong, I go to the Bible first as the final authority. And that doesn't sit well with people who are not Christians. I could see that. So, okay. So obviously when you started, there was not this international association of near-death studies. Now there is.

So that's one shift, the amount of study, the amount of attention to it. You said that it shifted in the sense that people doubted these things happened. Now we know they happened. Just how do we interpret it? Are there any atheists in the international association near-death studies? You described A.J. Ayer, who was an atheist who had a near-death studies you described aj air or ire who's an atheist who had a near-death experience are there any materialists or they all just other religions or kind of new age and a handful of christians well you know you uh new age and eastern people uh they're

they aren't materialists so we get uh it's it's composed of a lot of them uh as far as true atheists which i think is fairly rare uh no because they they may throw stones at the what being written but they're not a member of it and uh aj air as i guess you know is is a is a poster child for an atheist who had a near-death experience and described it, but refused to call it God. So different near-death studies experts have different opinions on what we can draw from near-death studies. I've had John Burke on, I've had Steve Miller on. This is a topic I find myself going back to. I'm curious, as a scientist, what do you think we can draw apart from going to Scripture? What can we draw fairly and logically from near-death experience is that the dying process is a process and not a single moment in time. And that's been shown both medically and biblically. And during that dying

process, there is an entity of extra bodily, they call it non-local consciousness that leaves the body and can actually visualize what's going on. That's the secular view of the soul leaving the body. But I think that conclusion can be drawn, Bible aside. That's from the observations that have been made. Anyway, I think to say, well, that's not true, is going now in the face of 30 years of published scientific research. So, I mean, I just think that's the materialist dualist argument. And I don't really think we'll ever get away from that, but I think this has made a big dent in that. And in the books that now come out that JP and Gary Habermas write a lot of chapters in, that is the near-death experience is what they point to as the example

that dualism is true, that is a soul and a body, and not just the body alone. Yeah, J.P. Moreland does. In fact, he makes an interesting principle argument that if we talk about the body being separated from the soul, then we already recognize that they're not the same things inherently to even have whether your soul can get separated from your body is a separate question from the idea of body being separated from the soul. Just being a plausible idea implies that body and soul are not the same and works in favor of dualism.

But then if we have evidence, like you've described and you document, that a sort of consciousness survives outside of the body, then that's also a case for dualism in a sense. I think it works on two levels. Does it matter? I'm sorry. Go ahead. There's a very important point here that if the soul does leave the body, if there's some non-local consciousness that leaves the body, I'm a proponent that's during the process of dying before final biological death.

These are not after death experiences. They're before death, spiritual, extra bodily experiences. So, and that's where I part ways with a lot of people including Christians. The whole heaven tourism genre of books is people having these experiences and going to heaven walking down the golden path yeah up to the throne of God all this that's after death that's that's not during the process of dying so I'm pretty pretty

solid on that view the problem is medicine cannot define the absolute point of death and the Bible can, and I can use a lot of references, but we just don't have time that this is a process and not a moment in time. So there is a gray zone. And so this is where the argument between Christians comes. Somebody says, in this gray zone, I actually went to heaven and saw all this stuff up there in heaven, as if it's out of revelations.

Is this a part of your personal journey? Because you described back in 1975, you would have been a Christian, but not the kind you are today. Was studying near-death experiences a part of becoming the kind of Christian you are today, or was there something else that caused that in your life? Well, it happened. The cause and effect. I'm sure I'm studying this as a spiritual endeavor. And I think that that is much enhanced by the near-death experience work.

Does your work in here, last question related to this, does your work on near-death experiences and talk with people who've gone through them, scripture aside, shape the way you face and think about death no well i consciously i i don't actually i remember a sentence that i wrote at the end of an article in the journal near-death studies that i believe in life after death, but not based upon the near-death experience, but based upon the word of God and my Christian beliefs. And I think that that's where my stake in the ground is put. The near-death experience is consistent with, but it's not proof of, the word of God is proof of. Oh, that's really interesting.

Now I see where some of the debate is amongst Christians and how they interpret these. So this could be a piece of evidence towards a dualistic worldview, but evidence after death, you would point towards something else to prove it or demonstrate it. Okay. But to have something else go after death implies the fact that you need something to go there,

a dualist situation, so the soul can break off on the physical body, which we know is in the ground. Okay, that's helpful. So this lines up with and gives support for a biblical view of what it means to be human, his body and soul, but you would point towards elsewhere, maybe scripture, the resurrection, et cetera, to demonstrate your belief in life

after death. Right. Is that fair? Okay. All right. Good stuff. Does it, I said it was last question, but I do have one more for you. Your book, would it matter if you published it in a popular Christian publishing house? Do you want to publish it in a secular or an academic place? Would an academic publisher potentially accept a book of this sort? I don't know. Oxford does. I mean, Habermas and Moreland have written stuff in those books that are pretty Christian. I will probably have, I will probably not have to, but my first shot would be, you know, Harper and Row was the first book. Harper Collins was the third book and uh i've got somebody involved he was my agent before uh and he knows people at harper collins so that's probably where i'm going now they do publish uh christian books but they aren't solely a christian publisher yeah that makes sense both thomas nelson that published evidence demands verdict and. Both Thomas Nelson that published Evidence Demands Verdict and Zondervan that published my more recent book are owned by HarperCollins. There's

something about a book like this, not with a distinct Christian publisher that might appeal to a wider audience. So there's different strengths you can make, but I was just curious what you're thinking in that regard that's a good question I think the first two parts uh will appeal to most people and they'll probably just cut off the third part okay I mean I'm serious they just that that will is what happened but that will deter and I will see as after death movie has seen that it's just too Christian is for the Christian people. If you're not Christian, you're not going to, you know, that that's a, yeah, I don't consider that a, a criticism, but, uh, it's, it's a point at which that can be attacked

by non-Christian. That's fair. It's a different focus, I think, is the key, and there's a place for both. You've mentioned a few times the movie After Death. The movie starts with you interviewing somebody in there. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Some of the producers and directors of the show sent me a link. I watched it with my 11-year-old and just walked away. It created

such good conversation with us. Tell us your thoughts on that film, especially since you started in 1970 in the late 70s seeing a film like this come full circle what does that movie mean to you well i think it was beautifully done as far as the the people they had on it and the the the cinematography, as a Christian, it's almost like it gets people interested in after death. Is there after death? Is there afterlife?

I think that's good. That generates interest. It's almost like pre evangelism, if you want to use that term, but it doesn't answer the question of well now that you're after death what then you know uh and i had a little bit of a reservation about the title of the movie after death oh gotcha as i just said yeah i think they're near-death experiences and not after-death experiences and to their the producer's credit

they allowed me to say that they didn't cut it out twice in the movie i said these are near-death not after-death experiences yeah i recall you making a confusion there but anyway i overall i thought it was very well done yeah i've never seen anything like it that really captures visually and also the key stories and key players in this field over the past few decades. I was blown away, and I would definitely recommend for my viewers to go check out. I've done probably four or five videos on near-death experiences, and they get great response. It just fascinates people. Well, we're talking about here. If you want to see Pam Reynolds and you want to see some of these other folks and, and John Burke and some of these key players way into this, uh, together in Hollywood, you know, level documentary check out after death. I loved it. Dr. Saban, keep me on the list when your book is, I'm guessing

when you finish it and publish it, we're a couple of years out. But we would love to have you back on to explore this further. Spread the word. Really appreciate what you're doing. Appreciate your skeptical, in the right sense of the term, and rigorous methodological approach to this. Don't want to be taken in by hogwash. As an apologist, I appreciate that. It speaks well to you, but also to the evidence for

near-death experiences. So thanks for coming on. Before I let you go, if you want to study apologetics, this is a topic I actually cover in my class on the resurrection. We walk through some of the evidences for near-death experiences. There's information below at Biola. We have the top-rated Masters in Apologetics. It's a fully-distanced program. And Mike, you'd find this interesting. We have every profession, including some of the top-rated doctors

in the world, medical doctors, have actually taken our apologetics program, which is really humbling. So information is below. Dr. Sabom, thanks again for coming on. Okay, thanks, Sean. Have a great one.

Thank you very much.