The Sean McDowell Show - Debunking the Hallucination Hypothesis: Leading Doctors Speak on Jesus

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

Can the appearances of Jesus be explained away as hallucinations? Two leading doctors offer a medical critique. Dr. Harold Koenig is one of the world's experts in the intersection of science, theology, and spirituality. He has written 575 peer-reviewed scientific journals and 55 books. Craig Fowler, M.D., is Professor & Chair of Surgery at the Campbell University School of Osteopathic Medicine. He has received both Best Doctor in America and US Top Ophthalmology awards.Duke University Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health (https://spiritualityandhealth.duke.edu/)READ: Evidence that Demands a Verdict (https://amzn.to/3rtbGiP)*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/

Can the appearances of Jesus be explained as hallucinations? This is arguably one of the leading naturalistic explanations for the resurrection hypothesis. Now a lot of Christians, non-Christians, historians, apologists have weighed in on this topic, but for this video, I'm interviewing two leading medical experts. By leading medical experts, I'm going to take some time in this interview to read their qualifications so you understand how qualified they are to speak on this. One of them in particular, Dr. Harold Koenig, has over 575 peer-reviewed scientific articles that he's written and over 55 books.

So they're gonna bring their medical perspective to offer an evaluation of the claim that the apostles of Jesus didn't see him alive, but instead had hallucinations. This recording is in Zoom, not how I normally record things, but I think you're really gonna enjoy it and find it helpful.

Can the stories of the appearances of Jesus be explained as hallucinations? There's been a lot of discussion about this, but today we have two leading medical doctors who are going to give their medical expertise, addressing the question if that is a sufficient naturalistic explanation for the stories that the apostles saw Jesus. We're gonna dive into some of the questions here. What is the hallucination? Are there group hallucinations? But before doing so, I'm gonna take longer

than I normally do on the show to explain and read some of their bios. Cause it's very important that you understand who these gentlemen are and the expertise that they bring to this question of hallucinations. Dr. Harold Poneg has over 575 scientific peer reviewed academic publications, nearly 100 book chapters and over 55 books. He has done his medical training at Stanford University,

UC San Francisco and Duke. He is on faculty at Duke University Medical Center as professor of psychiatry and associate professor of medicine. He's also an adjunct or visiting professor at medical schools in Saudi Arabia, China and Iran. He has given testimony before the US Senate and the US House of Representatives

concerning the effects of religious involvement on public health. Dr. Craig Fowler's distinguished academic career of service began at Duke University Medical Center. He served as the associate medical director for the free electron laser laboratory. He began Duke's refractive surgery program. He then joined the university in North Carolina

where he has served 10 years full time in the department of ophthalmology, where he received tenure. He recently joined Campbell University School of Osteopathic Medicine, where he serves as professor and chair of surgery, has received a number of awards for the best doctor and top ophthalmologist.

Doctors, thanks so much for being to talk about this really important question today. Thank you, Sean. It's an honor to be with you guys. Well, let's jump right in. And I'm gonna start with you, Dr. Fowler. I'm curious, what interested you in your research and questions of the intersection of theology, spirituality, and health? Oh, that's a great question, Sean. Interestingly, as we all know, medicine hasn't always recognized the importance of faith. And it's not uncommon where people have labeled religion as a delusion.

Even in a Roses Freud did some call it aggression and escape a projection upon the world of primitive infelice all states but Americans have long recognized the healing power of faith and prayer. And it's interesting that roughly 82% or more of Americans believe in the healing power of prayer and 64% roughly think docs should pray with those patients who request it and 63% of patients similarly they want their doctors to discuss matters of faith and interestingly too, Harold, myself and a lot of physicians roughly 99% on surveys say that religious beliefs can actually make a positive contribution to the healing process.

Yet really most medical studies have failed to consider that impact until recently. And experts like Harold have helped bring this to the forefront, because we can see the impact of spirituality helping in prevent the disease processes and promote the healing process. And faith has been a forgotten factor. So it's really neat that when we look at now science is catching up and people are figuring

out that a personal relationship with God and investment in faith can help make sense out of illness. It gives hope. It changes health related behavior, reduces the risk of disease and many studies and Harold can enumerate on this, shows that faith improves our immune system, enhances healing, reduces complications during major illnesses, and much more. That's fascinating. Now Dr. Koenig, you are one of the editors for the Handbook on Religion and Health, which is the most cited publication in its field. Would you just tell us a little bit about your that does is it reviews all of the research, the latest research in the past 10 years on this connection between religion and health.

And I've been doing research in this area for almost my entire career, almost 40 years. And it's been fascinating to, you know, it's been fascinating to do the research and to be able to report the findings and to bring on colleagues from other universities like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, many different mainstream institutions that have also been publishing in this area and reporting similar results. So this has really been exciting to be part of, you know, the group of researchers that are actually documenting the benefits that faith has. Really appreciate all your work there. And I think our viewer is gonna see how this translates

to the question of hallucinations, cause that's where there's an intersection of a faith claim and a science claim. One more question for each of you, just brutally. As medical doctors, how do you approach just questions in terms of the relationship between science and faith? Because some would say there are odds, some would say they're asking different questions,

some say there's an overlap. What's your approach as a medical doctor to examine questions of faith? Let's start with. What's your approach as a medical doctor to examine questions of faith? Let's start with you, Dr. Fowler. Another great question. You know, historically, faith and religion is often fashioned, interestingly, the conceptual framework in which science has really flourished. And as science encounters challenging, you know, metaphysical problems, religion can help find solutions. And similarly, science can help distinguish or establish the role that religious faith can play in health and well-being

of both individuals and society. So faith, religion, and science from my standpoint should not be regarded as mutually exclusive, but rather as complementary. And just to highlight this point, consider what the Bible has said about preventing disease. It's really amazing. Back in the Old Testament Leviticus, it says you should not eat any fat from an ox, a sheep or a goat. And if you think about this fatty cholesterol rich blacks from such meats, they form an arteries block openings, leads to arteries, paroses and heart attacks. There's a proverb, it says, don't join those who drink too much wine or gourds themselves are meat. And if you think about, you know, Americans,

if we want to maintain optimal weights and avoid obesity, we could actually decrease coronary heart disease by 25% and strokes as well would drop maybe even 30%. And one of the things I think is so fascinating, you know, we don't look at it as a science textbook, but think about this. In Deuteronomy, it says, and I'll try to quote this, designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself and as part of your equipment have something to do with and when you've relieved yourself, dig a hole covered up with excrement. But you know, that sounds like, you know, common sense now. But if you think about this, if we had simply followed that biblical edict

that was written 3,500 years ago, before the theory of infectious disease spread was ever understood, we could have prevented devastations of typhoid, cholera, dysentery, and other epidemics. And one other thing, just to highlight this, there's a proverb that says, anxiety in the heart of a man weighs it down, but a good word makes it glad. Think about this.

And Harold's the expert on this, but there was a study of open heart surgery patients that found, get this, 75% of depressed patients died, but only 15% of all other patients died. And there was a long-term study, similarly, over 2,000 men that demonstrated that those rated at the outset of the study of psychologically depressed showed a cancer death rate that was twice that of the rest of the group. Isn't that fascinating? That is really interesting.

So you see a positive contributory role, so to speak, between faith and science. How about you, Dr. Koenig? Well, I totally agree with Craig that faith and science are really complimentary. You know, all of truth is God's truth. And, you know, science is a method of determining truth, and faith is a method of determining truth

and faith is a method of determining truth. And they ought to be quite complimentary. And I think they are, I really think they are. In fact, the whole notion of science is based on a predictable universe, a universe that you can predict ahead of time what might happen. And that's exactly what science does. It is designed to help to predict in the natural world assuming that everything is organized in a certain way. That was not true for other cultures other than within the Christian culture. So science and medicine and faith are all very complementary and in fact when one is used without the other I think we're losing something.

This is super helpful to give myself and our viewers a sense of how the two of you approach questions of science and faith. Let's narrow down, so to speak, to the question of hallucination, a scientific claim that that explains the appearances of Jesus to the apostles. Dr. Fowler, maybe it'd be helpful if we just start with the definition. So what is a hallucination? Well, simply speaking, and that's a great question because you want to clarify things at the start, but simply speaking, you know, just trying to distill it down in simplest terms, the visual experiences of things are not there. A little more technically, we can call them perceptions that occur in the absence of

what we would say is a corresponding external sensory stimulus. Now experientially, they're often vivid and clear and there's this full force and impact of normal perceptions, but they're not under voluntary control and they can occur in any sensory modality. What I mean by that, whether it can be visual, hearing, touch, taste, or smell. Now, as an example, auditory hallucinations, they're very characteristic in schizophrenia, and Harold can comment on that. And they're used to experience as voices, whether familiar or unfamiliar, and they're perceived as distinct from the individual's own thoughts. And true hallucinations, technically speaking, they've got to occur in the context

of a clear sensorium. Whereas if you had someone falling asleep, there's hallucinations are actually called hypnagogic, or if they're waking up, they're called hypnopompic. Those are considered to be within the range of normal experience. And similarly, hallucinations often occur with the use of drugs,

withdrawal from alcohol and alcoholics. And if people in certain cultural contexts, they can be part of a normal religious experience. And we can elaborate a little bit further as you need. Dr. Kony, that is super helpful. Just for clarification, sometimes I've heard people compare someone who had hallucination with somebody

who said they saw Bigfoot. Why are those very distinct phenomena? I think they are very distinct because when somebody says they've seen Bigfoot or a flying saucer, those are more what we would call illusions, illusions. Those are misperceptions or misinterpretations of perceptions. So they're not a hallucination, they're a lack of the ability to interpret correctly what they've seen. So that is more of an illusion rather than a hallucination.

A hallucination as Craig said is, you know, seeing things that aren't there. Whereas an illusion it's there, you know, but you're just misinterpreting what it is. Now that's really helpful. So hallucinations are entirely internal and a vision, Bigfoot, UFO, there's something external, but you misperceive what it is. Exactly. Now, when I study hallucinations, it's really textbook for me, but the two of

you have dealt with patients over the years that have had hallucinations. So maybe Dr. Fowler, we'll start with you. How often do you interact with patients and what are some of those experiences like when somebody's actually had a hallucinatory experience? Great question. And so first, let me preface it by just saying that, you saying that many people keep quiet about these phantom images for fear they're going to be labeled with dementia or having a psychiatric problem. And so their hesitancy to speak up really can explain why hallucinations were thought for a long time to be relatively uncommon until more recently. So in that backdrop, particularly in ophthalmology,

where we have people with low vision problems, it's not uncommon. Consider this, 12% of people with age-related macular degeneration experience visualizations. And what they're called are Charles-Bounais syndromes, or we call it CBS for short. But it's a condition that some people get

when they lose some or almost all of their vision and it caused them to have these visual hallucinations where they're seeing things that aren't really there. And what happens just to help the audience understand in normal vision, you know, in healthy patients, lights is entering the eye, much like a camera. And this light goes to the back of the eye, to the camera film part, which is really the retinas, the light sensitive tissue in the back of the eye. That retina then converts those light rays into what we call visual message signals. It's not actual vision, but signals which are sent to the brain. And then that's where vision happens. Vision happens in the brain. It's not in the eye.

And when people lose vision from diseases like age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, diabetes, it's called diabetic retinopathy, their visual system doesn't process new images. So without this visual data coming into the eyes, the brain amazingly fills this void. And it actually makes up images and recalls stored images, what they may have seen in the past for them to see. And that's what causes these visual hallucinations of CBS. And it's similar to how people have kind of, when they've lost a limb, they may feel this phantom pain and it's not a single mental health problems. And these hallucinations are people, you know, with significant vision loss and they're not stemming from neurological problems. But there's other ones visually we can talk about. But what's happening is their brain is creating these images to process. And somehow, since they can't find

anything, the brain resorts to kind of making up these images and we're recalling images from memory. And what happens is, characteristically, these phantom images, they may be simple lines, shapes, flashes of light, or more complex images of faces, even people or animals, and they can occur at any time. They can last for seconds, minutes, and reportedly even hours. And I've never seen them with hours, but I've seen them for the seconds and minutes. And sometimes the images will remain still. Other times they'll say they'll move around and those people's significant vision loss, especially if it's of the central vision, the ones most commonly affected

in my type of practice. That is really helpful and insightful that you've seen and diagnosed and worked with people more common than we would think who've had hallucinations. Dr. Koenig, your experience. You know, really what Craig is saying is making a lot of sense because people who suffer or people who are put into environments where they are sensory deprived, the brain will actually produce these images as well. environments where they are sensory deprived, the brain will actually produce these images as well. So it's this sensory deprivation

that causes the brain to produce this. It's the same thing with hearing. People who are losing their hearing start to have ringing in their ears. And what that is, is it's the result of low hearing that the brain creates this sound in response. So this is really what's going on with many hallucinations. Now, the kinds of patients I see, I see mainly older adults.

And in older adults, they may have dementia. They may have delirium, which is a physiological alteration. And then hallucinations will occur in that setting. But typically, those hallucinations are not real together. They're fragmented. They don't carry on interactions over time. You know, with other, they don't, it's more they might see something and they may see it periodically and then they may develop a delusion about it. And that way, but it's not fully formed like our interaction here together.

It just doesn't occur that way. So that's been my experience. So this brings me to the next question, which is, do hallucinations lead to a change in belief or do they just project something that's already present? Maybe you could weigh in on this one, Dr. Koenig. Well, hallucinations don't usually change belief. And they certainly don't cause a person to then die for that belief.

It's typically something that is manifested from the person's past that comes up in the hallucination. So it's something they've experienced or something internal that's already present. So it's not usually so convincing that they're willing to die for it. Okay, so that's fair. So there maybe are some examples of change belief,

but there are far more common projections of something already in the mind, maybe more like a dream, so to speak. Is that fair? It's just kind of expression of thoughts and stresses that you've had. Okay, that's awesome. Dr. Fowler, let me come to you. Maybe give a sense of who is most likely to hallucinate.

And by that I mean, are there differences between men and women? Are there certain emotional states? And does this match up with the accounts that we see in the Gospels of the hallucination accounts? Now that's a really great question. And without getting too technical, try to review literature. I like to kind of back off a little bit and just give some general things and overview and some perspectives on this controversial issue. So just to review again, hypnagogic hallucinations, like when someone's going to sleep are really pretty darn calm. The general population 37% hypnopompic hallucinations, that's when you're waking up, right? They're relatively common, 12.5% in the general population.

And technically speaking, just to kind of get this out of the way, hallucinations are not a specific diagnostic entity. You know, medically they're better classified as a symptom. So when we talk about this, we should say hallucinatory symptoms are commonly recognized and they arise from oftentimes some underlying causal factor. Now, what are the most common ones like what you asked? Well, for many medical reasons, and there's a whole host of them, but I'll list some of the common ones, delirium, migraine.

There's a thing called visual release phenomenon. It's typically manifesting in this impaired vision like we just talked about. But alcohol and drug-related conditions, seizures, dementia, any of these central nervous systems diseases that can do it, and particularly if they affect the visual cortex regions of visual pathways, especially stroke, strokes really an issue. And then of course, the psychiatric conditions that hair will talk about psychosis, schizophrenia, narcolepsy. And basically, clinically, they're manifested as individual uniquely subjective visual experiences and they're particular to the individual, much like a dream, like you mentioned. Now in ophthalmology, individuals who can experience what we call asophagalgic

or their migraine associated visual phenomenon, they get these zigzagging lines or starburst and they float across their visual fields and they're described as technically fortification spectra, but they don't experience the same visual phenomenon. They're individually distinct, much like a fingerprint would be. They're common, but they're not the same. They're unique amongst these individuals. And so if you keep that backdrop, that's really helpful. So those

are pretty common. What's not common at all are what's called multimodal hallucinations. That's a fancy term by saying, look, hallucinations can occur in different sensory modalities where vision, hearing, taste, touch, and so forth. But if we look at the prevailing literature, excellent studies done by Leroy, just to look at, and he looked at young, middle-aged, and old-aged, and I'm just going to highlight auditory and visual. They're combined together in middle-aged folks like the apostles, 0.8%. If it's auditory and visual, they're combined together in middle-aged folks like the apostles, 0.8%. If it's auditory and olfactory in middle-age, it might be 0.8%. But if you looked at auditory, visual, olfactory and olfactory folks, 0%. Tactile and visual in the middle-aged folks, 0%. And interestingly, just for a frame of reference to get our head around this,

because you hear a lot of talk about this, but the most common one really with a unimodal experience of what we call a sensed presence. And that's the most common and in middle age it's 20% and the older age it's almost 30%. And what's really common that you hear about are these adults that are in the midst of breathing and they get these grief hallucinations and it's roughly 30 to 60 percent depending on what studies you look at and it usually occurs you know among those have been married for quite a long time so that it's you know it's kind of helpful. Now with regarding does this match up with we know about the apostles well just briefly we can get into this more but when the disciples they encountered Christ you, shortly after finding the two men, they experience his bodily presence not as a mirage, not as an apparition, not as a phantom-like image

consistent with visualizations as we know them medically speaking, but truly as a living, physical, fully embodied form within the interact. Just keep in mind, hallucinating individuals, they don't report accompanying interactive group conversations, nor do they report that their apparitions physically consume food items, even if the responders may have offered some. These kind of details and interactions are way too specific, too detailed, and too interactive to involve group publicizations and normal individuals. And more importantly, as Harold will attest, these apostles, the apostles as his way to work, they have mental

disorders or delusions. That's really helpful. So if we just go statistically what we know about the group of people who experienced hallucinations, and then we look at what the Gospels report, it seems like probabilistically speaking, we wouldn't say it's impossible, but it's so far remote, it just doesn't match up with the kind of experiences that people have. Is that fair to sum up the key points you were saying? I'm so loving that you asked that. So let me comment on that for a second. Not to steal your thunder, but that you raise the key point in my mind. While multimodal hallucinations can occur, and we know they're rare, especially in three or more modes, like auditory, vision, taste, smell, tactile touch, right? They were reported to occur commonly together in the disciples accounts.

And, you know, we have all five senses involved. This is incredibly rare, right? So to occur across multiple groups and multiple days, as well as at least one account involving 500 individuals simultaneously is really uncommon. Let me give you just a way to dramatize this, to give you a mental picture. If we were to arithmetically use the multimodal prevalence rates for just the auditory visual, just those two, and we use it at 0.8% in middle-aged persons that were the same age of the disciples, seven disciples in John 21, all right? So just take that one case in John 21 where you had seven of them. You basically would have a prevalence of 0.8% in each individual, right? Each individual disciple multiplied seven times. That means 0.8 times 0.8 times 0.8 times 0.8 times 0.8 times 0.8 times 0.8

seven times. The computer result of this and get this, this, I'll look at my little note here, it's 0.0000000002%. That's basically impossible. I mean, it's not totally impossible, but think about that's 14 zeros before the 2%. That's all 40% is so, you know, is it unlikely? You bet. That was a great question. That's a great way to sum it up. That's super helpful.

Now that was, I mean, that was complete and you gave us the numbers, but before we move on, I want to see if Dr. Konegut, there was anything you wanna highlight or just add to help us understand the nature of the question. No, I think Craig has got it right on. And I think what he's done, he's calculated this based upon the existing literature

of epidemiologists who have determined that, you know, the prevalence of both auditory and visual hallucinations together is 0.8%. So 0.8% of people will have both auditory and visual hallucinations together. And if you have seven people, then all seeing and hearing the same thing, plus eating together and eating food,

I mean, that just is astronomically unlikely that that would occur. So I think that those figures really, really say pretty much everything in terms of the likelihood that the disciples were all hallucinating together in multiple modalities. Extremely unlikely. The idea of multiple modalities is so helpful to me because as a non-medic when I would study this, I just assumed that all the modalities were present, but it never crossed my mind that the different modalities all together are even less likely to occur.

And then you add the number of individuals having these individual experiences, mathematically it just gets more and more remote. Now, I wanna throw a curve ball at you, Dr. Fowler. I guess I'm trying to think of the skeptical. I might say, look, these are stats from today. This was 2000 years ago. How can we assume that the prevalence

of hallucinations today and this data would be relevant 2000 years ago in a different place in a different time? Oh, you know, that's a great question. But let me build on that's a great question. But let me build on that for a second, because you know, we picked the best case scenario of auditor and visual of point A. If you will think back for a second, if you just added instead of just auditor and visual, you added smell, the incidence in older folks is 0%. If you said eliminate the old fact,

auditory part and you add touch, vision and touch where they touched Christ, middle age is 0% and older age is 0%. It's only the young that's 1.5%. To do it across all five, we know it's basically zero. We don't have any record of, you know, across all five, you know,

and I mean, it's just, it now becomes not just astronomical impossible, incredibly unlikely. And so we have no documentation that would ever support that idea that it was any different in the past, right? And so Harold, you should weigh in on that too. So what do you think? Yeah, I think that we're dealing with human beings here. Okay, and human beings are not that different

than now than they were 2000 years ago. I mean, their physiology is basically the same. When you talk about evolution, if you're talking about evolution, you're talking about like millions of years, not 2000 years. So we were basically the same human beings as we were 2000 years ago,

physiologically and largely psychologically as well. That really helps. Let me come back to you here again, well. That really helps. Let me come back to you here again, Dr. Koenig, more about the nature of hallucinations. Are hallucinations one time events that people have or do they continue? Like people have them once every week for a while. Like how long do hallucinations often last?

Well, it certainly depends on whether a person has a psychiatric illness. If they have a psychotic disorder, then you can have hallucinations over time and it can last for months, years, decades, if they're not treated. So that's possible for, you know, but for the general population of just normal people,

and there is really no indication that the disciples had a psychotic disorder. There's no indication whether that they had schizophrenia, that they had bipolar disorders, that they had dementia. There's no indication because these disciples were leaders of the church. They had many, many people who followed and they organized and directed.

You know, somebody with mental illness just can't do that. So if you talk about just a normal person in the general population, those are typically not going to last that long. They They're not going to last for 40 days, I would, I would expect, you know, not not in multiple situations and different time points and in different in characteristic so The long-term nature for normal people is just, they just don't see these hallucinations, every day consistently. And so it just doesn't happen. In some ways you've answered this question, but I wanna have Dr. Fowler weigh in.

If that's your experience as well with hallucinations and how you see that matching up with the appearances of Jesus over time, at least for 40 days in the gospels and of course, in Acts. Well, Harold articulated that beautifully, but just to elaborate, in Luke chapter 24, Jesus appears to 10 disciples. Thomas was the one absent, as you recall. And he states, you know, look at my hands, look at my feet, you know, touch me, you know, make sure that I'm not a ghost, because ghosts don't have bodies that you see that I do. He also asked them, do you have anything to eat? And they gave him a piece of broiled

fish and he ate it as they watched. And if you think about in John 21, the count relates, you know, extended group interactions, conversational dialogue, the count relates, you know, extended group interactions, conversational dialogue between Jesus and disciples, you know, while they were fishing at the Sea of Galilee, as you call. And that included multiple appropriate question and answer response dynamics, including Jesus breaking bread, consuming a physical meal together. And, you know, that doesn't even talk about the one in 1 Corinthians 15, where he was seen by more than 500 of his followers at one time. So, you know, it's

really, you know, you know, it just doesn't match up with hallucinations from a, you know, medical perspective. That's great. Very, very helpful. Again, Dr. Koenig, let me come back to you with another question. I've heard some critics say that certain apostles may have been primed for a hallucinatory experience, and I've seen references to Peter, for example, who experienced deep grief and was already prone to visions. We see this in Acts chapter 10. Or maybe Paul, obviously not one of the disciples, but became an apostle. He was hostile towards Christians, very angry, and seemed to be prone to visions, as we see later in some of his writings as well. So is it possible that at least some of the apostles,

including Paul, were primed for this, so maybe the likelihood that they had it would be higher than the general population. It's possible it's possible that they had some predisposition towards hallucinations, but, you know, what about the other 11 apostles, you know, I you don't hear that they had these experiences. So, you know, perhaps, but again, it's a long shot, you know, and again, we just don't have any, we don't have any corroborating information from history that, you know, that they had those experiences. We just, we're dealing a lot with what we have in the scriptures.

And so if we are assuming that the scriptures are 100% true, then, you know, it's just unlikely that those predisposing experiences that we think were hallucinations or critics say were hallucinations, were then the cause then of all of the other experiences that not only they had, but the other people had as well. So again, it's possible, but it's just not enough

to explain all of these different appearances in multiple modalities, just not enough. I appreciate that you say it's possible. One of a good friend of mine, co-author, J. Warner Wallace, cold case detective, he says in a court of law, anything is possible. What I need to know is what is reasonable and most probable. So sure, it's possible with Peter and Paul, where's the evidence? And how would that account for the rest

of the apostles? That's where you say this just seems extremely unlikely. Exactly. Dr. Fowler, one of the big questions that comes up a lot is the group hallucinations that we see, whether it's the seven, whether it's the 11 or the 10 without Thomas, then with Thomas, the 500. What's your assessment of shared hallucinations? Are they possible? Do we see the showing up in the literature? I'm so glad you asked me that. Sean, this is one of the reasons why you're such a great apologist, because you research things so incredibly well. And this is largely ignored by, unfortunately, in the theologian community. You know, again, we're not sharing the coffee pot with the theologians in the medical community, but basically, shared hallucinations are possible. And while they're

uncommon, you know, things like mass hallucinations, or at least what we call the same hallucination by two persons is called a shared psychotic disorder, or it's also known as Foley-Adu and has a bunch of other names. They've called it communicated insanity, contagious insanity, a whole host of other names, which I won't repeat here, but basically it's a rare delusional disorder shared by two or more people with close emotional ties, delusional disorder. And to help differentiate it, the diagnostic criteria indicate that this disturbance is what we would say, quote, not better accounted for by another psychotic disorder, you know, something like schizophrenia or mood disorder and or something due to a substance or something, you know, medical. So the

hallmark of these disorders is that the patient doesn't even believe that he or she is deluded or in need of psychiatric assistance. That's clearly not considered with the apostles. And when we think about these historical accounts of the disciples, they didn't miss, they didn't, they didn't manifest any other psychiatric aspects that are required for a mental disorder or other psychiatric related pathological addition for that matter. Okay. So I want to make sure I'm tracking with this one. How is it that people have a shared hallucinatory experience if by definition, a hallucination is an individual experience like a dream? Well again, it's a delusional disorder.

So it's not a hallucination. It's a delusion. It's a delusion that they're sharing. And it's usually shared by two people with close emotional ties. And that's a really significant characteristic of that. So could you say you have close emotional ties amongst the cycles? Well, yes, but they were not delusional. And that's quite a different thing. And, you know, time permitting, we can talk about the definition delusion, but these were not hallucinations that we're talking about. And so hopefully terminology isn't too confusing. But that's why these other terms, you know, where we call it contagious insanity, right? Infectious identity, they also call it psychosis of association, which I think is a good term. Sometimes they call it double insanity, if that helps you think about it. Those are good terms

that give you some idea that there are two people that are delusional. So you have multiple delusional people, we just happen to call it shared psychotic disorder. So it may be bad nomenclature, but that's what's happening. Okay. So just to make sure our viewers and myself understand, you're not using these terms like delusional and psychotic as a way of dismissing this for apologetic purposes. You're appealing to what the literature and the medical community understands about this, and then you're comparing it to the apostles and saying there's no reason to think that they're in this delusional state as an explanation for the appearance claims, did I get that correct. You got it correct. Harold Do you want to comment on delusion so everybody understands why we're using that terminology? Well, a delusion is a fixed false belief. So it's fixed person cannot be dissuaded from it, but it's a false belief.

Now in terms of the group hallucinations are fairly simple. You know, if somebody, a group, for example, may claim that they see, you know, Mary, for example, you know, they're in the middle in Europe, I'm not sure if it's Paris or some other place, not Paris, but France or Italy, where they claimed, groups of people claimed to see the Virgin Mary. Again, these are fairly simple visions

that the group is having. They're not complex interactions, like we're talking about what the disciples of Jesus went through over 40 days in terms of eating together and, you know, doing stuff together. That is just unprecedented. Unprecedented. So. Okay, that's a really helpful distinction. I appreciate you weigh on that. Let me stay here with you, Dr. Koenig, and ask you this. One response that I've heard at times, the hallucination hypothesis,

is that hallucinations often occur in certain kinds of environments. The appearances of Jesus are inside, outside, different emotional states, individuals, the groups, and this seems to weaken the overall hallucination hypothesis. Is there validity to this criticism or would you push back on that?

Yeah, I'm not sure that there is any data to support this idea that, you know, the location of the hallucination, whether inside or outside, I'm not aware of any research that people have done that has looked at this. So I'm thinking maybe that argument doesn't have much scientific evidence to back it up.

I think that, you know, I think those are claims, but I don't know, I think, you know, hallucinations can involve, well, among older adults that I take care of, if anything, you know, they may see something outside, I mean, they're inside typically, and they might see something outside going on, but they're usually inside.

So I just want to also just add to that to realize that most accidents occur within 25 miles of home because that's what you're driving most commonly. Well, when we think about like the migraine related phenomena we have visually, they can have these what we call starbursts and blurring out of the vision or other kind of visual phenomena. They can occur when you're driving outside any term. It's not location specific. Stress of course may aggravate it,

but these spasms can occur independent anywhere, anytime. And we don't have good data to really differentiate this inside out matters, Her's a hair saying, but I can tell you location is not specific and a lot of the visual phenomenon we have, you know, our age-related macrogenerations folks that have those visual disorders that we're talking about, the 12%, it's inside outside as well. So no difference that we are aware of. That's really helpful. Very, very helpful to look at the data. I want our viewers to see. I'm going to come back in a minute

and ask each of you to just give your medical assessment kind of in some whether or not hallucinations are the best explanation for the appearance claims of Jesus. But I want to make sure our viewers understand some of you might be thinking, well, wait a minute, we don't think the Bible is 100% accurate and reliable as Dr. Koenig said, maybe it's legend. And I would say, okay, that's a different claim that we would then have to assess by different criteria. All we're looking at today is one naturalistic hypothesis that says the apostles did not really see the risen Jesus, they had hallucinations. And since a hallucination is a medical diagnosis, so to speak,

really a symptom to be more accurate, I'm learning and listening today. Thank you, Dr. Fowler. This is a medical question. Our two guests today are weighing in and saying, okay, let's look at this and see if it's the best explanation for these claims. So maybe we'll just have you each kind of weigh in and give your assessment medically speaking about the hallucination hypothesis. Let's start with you, Dr. Koenig, please.

Okay, Sean. So based on the information that is contained in the Bible, and the Bible is actually a very good, I think, a very good record of history at that time, because we don't have that many records of what's happening at that time, even historical records. We're talking about 2000 years ago. but assuming that what the Gospels are reporting is true. And again, we have four accounts of four different individuals also on that. the hallucination hypothesis just doesn't make sense. Just doesn't make sense when you consider that

if in fact Jesus appeared to multiple individuals, interacted with them in multiple different ways, to different sensory modalities across time. And these individuals were not mentally ill. There's no indication that they had a mental illness. Then the hallucination hypothesis just doesn't hold water based on medical or psychiatric logic. That's a great summary.

Dr. Fowler, your assessment of the hallucination hypothesis. Harold said I couldn't agree more. There's some other twists to this too. Just to rehash, just if we looked at the auditory visual, the computer result just on that one component was point, and it's four zeros, two percent. If you extract it to the touch and the taste,

we know it's virtually impossible medically. It's just can't, it's not likely. I did want to interject some other comments though, because people will argue about, what about apparitions? I would just like to interject because there's a lot of parapsychology literature out there and so forth. I won't get into a lot of detail, but I want to comment and say that experimentally,

the apparition is often misunderstood for a living person by those that are having this, and they may be three-dimensional, and they often show awareness of the living person in their presence, and occasionally apparitions capable of uttering a few words even, and may even be reflected in mirrors, so-called, in the literature that we can see, and sometimes not even peer-reviewed at all, but this apparitional experience that they can report may last for a few minutes, and if cornered it will disappear or pass through a wall or door, so forth. But importantly, those apparitional figures, they can appear opaque as if solid, but they are not able to grasp this. They can't touch them. They can't grasp them physically with it.

There's a whole lot of data we could comment on. Secondly, if you think about the big context of this, if you think about the disciples' appropriate non-delusional cognitive functional state, in the ancient world at that time, historically, since we were backtracking, someone in the ancient world, if they had visions of the deceased, they were not taking us that they were alive, but rather that they were dead. So, you know, non-psychotic, normal cognitive functioning individuals, relatedly, as you well know, you've done such great research on the, you know, non-psychotic, normal cognitive functioning individuals, relatedly, as you well know, you've done such great research on the, you know, martyrdom of the apostles. They might die for something what they believe is true,

but no one really dies for something they know is false. So, you know, if the purported heraldeosations were actual subjective visual experiences, including like auditory or taste, touch, combinations, other variants, experiences including like auditory or taste, touch, combinations, other variants, then you also have to ask the question because we think that's impossible medically, then Jesus's actual body should have been rained in the burial tomb, but it wasn't. It could produce it. So the culmination, that culmination of evidence just really makes this, you know, beyond unlikely. just really makes this beyond unlikely when you think about it in context. That's really helpful.

That's a piece of this we haven't added today because obviously it goes outside the medical data, but if they had hallucinations, the body should have been in the tomb. There's also evidence for the empty tomb. So that's really, really helpful. Thanks both for summing up. A final question for each of you.

Dr. Koenig, if there's people watching saying, you know what, I want to follow conversations that are taking place on the intersection of kind of science and theology and faith. What could people watching this do just to kind of stay abreast of the conversations and the research, what would be the best place for them to go to maybe? I would encourage people to go to our website, the Duke University Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health. It's gotten a lot of information there, most of it's for free, and I would encourage you to go there to sign up for our e-newsletter. I write, I spend a couple of days every month reviewing all of the research in the field, and I summarize it and comment on it. And it's for free, you know, all you have to do is go to our website and sign up for it.

And we've got videos of different speakers, different researchers on all sorts of topics, that we have a monthly seminar that, you know, that we have different speakers come in and it's by Zoom. So all of those are recorded, all of the PowerPoint slides or PDFs of those slides are there on our website. So just go to our WDUC website. It's got a ton of information that can help you learn more about faith and health and also continue to follow the new studies that are coming out all the time showing these connections. Please tell us the title just one last time,

specifically where we would find that on the Duke website. Well, Duke University Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health. All you have to do is put that in your Google search engine. It will be the first thing that comes up. Center, Duke University Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health. I'm so glad I asked that question. I'm gonna sign up for that newsletter cause I wanna be abreast of what's taking place

in the research. Super, super helpful. Dr. Fowler, I actually have two questions for you. One, I'm just curious, I wanna hear your journey to faith as a medical doctor. And obviously we could probably do an entire show on packing that sometime, but as a medical doctor. And obviously we could probably do an entire show unpacking that sometime, but as a medical doctor and you've made a huge impact in your field,

why do you believe in God? Some people would say that's unscientific. As you know, everybody's individual experience is different, but first, and Sean, you're clearly one of the leading experts on the, you know, the evidence behind Christianity. I mean, we know Christ died and we know he raised from the dead and there's a ton of evidence to prove that. How do they argue that away? So it's an intelligent fate and in terms of my own journey, I was blessed to be raised in a Christian home,

but I really didn't come to what I would say is a saving faith, committing myself as a Christian until age 16. A gentleman in my church, a big fan of wrestling, and that's what sports I did. My summer coach was a videotaper for the Olympic Olympic team and I came to faith through a fellowship of Christian Athletes Conference and was life-changing ever since. Not that I haven't made tons and tons of mistakes, but it's really grounded me and you know truth is truth. So that's the beautiful thing about when we look at these aspects of Scripture, it gives us a true roadmap for how we need to live our lives. It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be easy, but we know the ultimate destination,

which gives us a lot of hope. Did that answer your question? Yeah, absolutely. A final question, which is somewhat of a shameless plug, but you've been in two of my classes, and I'm just absolutely thrilled and honored to have you in class. Your posts are amazing, the insights you bring, I learn as much if not probably a lot more from you than I feel like you do for me. But with that said, I'm really curious why you chose to do

this program. You've thought about this and what you're, you know, obviously you've thought about these issues, incredibly educated on science and theological kinds of issues. So why do this program and what's your experience been so far? Oh, thank you for asking. And first, I'd like to say I've really had the pleasure. We have a Triangle Christian Medical Dental Association's chapter here of Duke, UNC, Campbell University Medical School. We will invite area healthcare trainees and all the disciplines. And we've hosted weekend retreats. We have a lake property and we've been blessed to have some really great apologists.

The late Norm Geisler, Frank Turek, Hugh Ross with reasons to believe. And it's amazing as we have these people come in, they really challenge you to understand why it is that you believe what you believe. It's not a blind faith that needs to be intelligent faith. And they so challenged me to say, look, you really got to understand this. And we've had great connections with Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, which is wonderful, but, you know, arguably Biola is the best Apollo genetics training program in the world and Sean you're certainly one of the best of the best teachers and you're very take a drink out of a fire hydrant. I can do sheik's. You're so modest. And if this goes out to anybody, I'm going to say if you want to take an apologetic program, it doesn't get better than the Biola program. And those professors are so gracious, so humble. And you guys are just awesome. I'm so privileged and honored to learn from you, an amazing

teacher and such a humble apologist. You're terrific and all the teachers down the line are just really spectacular. Well, you're too kind to say that and I want to personally thank both of you so much for just the work that you do helping people who experience things like hallucinations and as painful as that can be, but also weighing in on, as you described, the unlikelihood that the appearances of Jesus could be explained away as hallucinations. Those of you watching, again, make sure you go check out the Duke Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health.

Sign up for their newsletter. Dr. Harold Koenig sends out some of the latest research and data monthly. I'm gonna sign up for that. And think about joining us at Biola and the Apologize program. You can have class with me and Dr. Fowler. Information is below.

And make sure you hit subscribe because we've got some other interviews coming up, including one with an atheist talking about does our storytelling nature have an evolutionary explanation or does it point to the fact that we're part of a larger grand story and God has imprinted that on us. I get to have a conversation with an atheist about this so make sure you hit subscribe. God bless and have a wonderful day. Thanks for watching.