The Sean McDowell Show - How Deathbed Experiences Point to the Supernatural

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

Dr. Steve Miller believes that deathbed experiences provide stronger evidence for supernaturalism than the traditional arguments for God. While Near-death experiences have gotten much press lately, little discussion has paid to power of deathbed experiences. In this interview, I talk with Dr. Miller about his latest book.READ: Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1 (https://amzn.to/3qA3kpI)*Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf)*USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% 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

What really is the evidence for the afterlife? My guest today, Dr. J. Steve Miller, who's been on this show to talk about near-death experiences, has a new book out and it's on deathbed experiences. And he believes, at least many of his university students believe, that this evidence is as strong, if not stronger, than many of the classical arguments, causological argument, teleological argument, etc. So whether at the end of the day you agree with that or not, seems like this is some evidence we should explore.

And what's fascinating about this is I read this recent book that came out called Deathbed Experiences, and I've been studying apologetics for a long time. And it hit me, this is an area that I have not studied much and really taken into consideration. So I wanted to bring to my audience, Dr. Miller, thanks so much for coming back. Fascinating book. Can't wait to jump into this with you.

Thank you so much. Great to be back. Yeah. Well, let me just ask you the question at the beginning. Why have you spent years of your life and your research and your time and your energy studying deathbed experiences? Well, as I mentioned in my first interview, I'm just a natural questioner and doubter. I became a Christian in high school, began doubting and questioning my faith over periods of time. So I had to study apologetics a lot, the cosmological argument, the historicity of the Bible, all these issues academically through my career. Three undergrad schools, three graduate schools, but I never once came across this thing of near

death and deathbed experiences. So somebody had lent me a book, I read it on near death experiences and I thought, well, that's interesting. Some are saying there's research. So I thought, if this is being researched, I need to know about it. That's interesting. My original thought was there can't be any evidence there because this is all just personal testimony. How can I know if it's true or not? And, but once I got into it, I found out that, wow,

there are some compelling reasons to believe that near- death experiences are actual experiences on the other side. And so I delved into that, wrote that first book while I was studying, uh, doing my research for that first book. I ran across a study, very large scale study done in the 1960s, early seventies on a sister experience called deathbed experiences and I thought now That's that's interesting and these authors They interviewed thousands of people Doctors and nurses about people's experiences at death not a near death where you come back. Yeah before they die and

They concluded that this was more consistent with the afterlife hypothesis than some naturalistic dying brain hypothesis. And so when I read that research, I thought, well, this is interesting. In fact, somebody needs to study this because everybody's talking about near death experiences, but nobody's talking about deathbed experiences. It's true. So I thought, hey, and while I'm doing it, I've always wanted to get a PhD. Why don't I just find a place that'll let me research this for my dissertation? So I thought there'll be a hundred or so studies

that I find that are relevant and that could make a good tidy, neat dissertation project. But when I got to over 500 resources, I thought, this is huge. Why haven't we heard of all this top notch research that's been done on this? I thought somebody needs to bring it together, and I just kept studying it. I'm still fascinated. I just can't quit studying it because it's such a fascinating area. I can tell by reading the book that you're just intrigued and passionate about this.

Now I'm going to have you define deathbed experiences in a moment, but where are you area. Well, I can tell by reading the book that you're just intrigued and passionate about this. Now, I'm going to have you define deathbed experiences in a moment, but where are you getting this data? Is this just stories from people? Is this why I talked to my aunt and I read this on a blog? Where is the data that you were using to assess deathbed experiences in terms of what they point to in an afterlife? Yes.

The reason I never really took near-death experiences seriously is it seemed like these were stories spread over the internet. I don't know those people. I don't know their motives for sharing. If they wrote a book on their experience, maybe it's a money thing. Who knows? Once I found out there were studies though, I thought, ooh, this is what we need to bring together. What are the results of

studies like that cardiologists are doing and professional researchers where they gather groups of people who are not writing books, who are not trying to be famous and just take the average population, see what is the incidence of these things and see what they're saying in the studies. So in my first book, I tried to bring together the research up to date on near death experiences. So on this one, I'm concentrating on the studies done by very capable scholars. Now, this is one of the things that's astounding

about the research. This is not coming out of seminaries. This is not Christian apologists coming together saying, let's do some research and look at these, and they're already biased toward the afterlife. These are people who often start off not believing the afterlife, or at least they're very skeptical of Christianity and traditional religion, but they run across some experiences that they think, wow, this is significant. Maybe naturalism does not explain everything. This is important.

This is important for our ethics, some of them would say. If there really is an afterlife, maybe there really is right and wrong and the things that we do in this life do count for eternity. So I brought together studies of legitimate intellectuals in various fields, like one was a physicist, a famous physicist, a knighted physicist, Sir William Barrett. One was a French astronomer who received the highest awards in his country, like equal to being knighted in England. He received those awards in France

for his studies in astronomy. And he wrote several books. In fact, the last decade of his life, he wrote three entire volumes talking about these deathbed experiences and summing it up. So a lot of these top researchers, top scientists, some were top classic scholars, a variety of people.

William James at Harvard participated, one of our most diverse and respected intellectuals on American soil. And some of these spent their entire lives and came out with the conclusion of, this really makes more sense saying that it's not something naturalistic. This does give evidence for an afterlife. We're going to jump into some of that evidence and assess it.

I don't need to define deathbed experience, but I would say what surprised me is a lot of the studies you point to are not people asking if there's an afterlife, but asking how do we care for people as they die, and amidst this, emerges this data that challenges a naturalistic worldview. That was really interesting to me in reading your book. Before we get to some of the examples, tell us just kind of broadly speaking what you mean by a deathbed experience and maybe how it's different from a near-death experience. Sure. Well, in a near-death experience, which most of us are familiar with, someone may have a cardiac arrest, cessation of heartbeat and breathing, and then they come to and they

have these stories of what they saw on the other side. But they died, if you call that clinical death, they died, then they came back and they tell their story of what happened in a deathbed experience This is these are what I'm calling This is really an Cluster of different types of events that happened before a person's actual final death Okay, so a typical one like the one from the studies in the 1950s and 60s and 70s they studied

Deathbed visions which somebody's about to die and they start talking about oh I'm seeing my relatives on the other side, or I'm seeing angels on the other side, and oh, they're telling me that it's time to go. So they're right at their deathbed and they're talking about something that's about to happen. Now where evidence comes into this is some of the people don't even know they're dying or there's no prediction by the physicians as to the time of death and they're saying, hey, they're coming to get me. I'm going now.

I love you. And then boom, they just lay down and die. So that would be one example of a deathbed experience. And there are several others within that cluster that we can talk about. Well, we'll unpack those. Before we do, just give me a sense of how common are these kinds of reports? Because when I read your book, one study was like 10%, another study was 70% of a different kind.

Regardless, if it's 10%, that's like 30 million people in the US alone. And even near-death experiences, some studies would say 4%. And as I've talked with people since I've studied that, I've had so many counts of people sharing with me near-death experiences. It's far more common than I ever would have expected and realized a lot of people don't share these things because they think we're gonna call them crazy, but it's a phenomena that's just so much more widespread than we realize. So broadly speaking, how common are these? And then we're gonna jump into some particulars. Okay, let me just reinforce what you're saying about how important this is.

I'm usually a person that if you talk to doesn't talk about a lot of superlatives. I'm kind of laid back. I'm sifting evidence and saying, yeah, this is more, we got more evidence for this than that, but we can't be 100% sure. I'm one of those types. But I have been amazed at just how common these are. And the same thing with you with near-death experiences. When my wife will be in an academic setting and she'll, we'll be talking to someone, this is a secular academic setting, and she'll say, oh, tell them what you're studying. I'll talk about deathbed

experiences. And inevitably somebody pulls me aside and says, let me tell you what happened to, wow and you're studying. I talked about the deathbed experiences and he says, oh, let me tell you what happened to my mom when she died. Her and her mother had both kind of had a pact that they wanted to say goodbye when they died or some kind of communicate to each other. He said, well, sure enough, my mom and my grandmom were in separate hospitals and my mom had this vision of her mom coming to say goodbye. And it turned out it was the exact time that the grandmother died.

Now, I mean, this is just random. It's three people sitting there and one of them has an experience. I shared at KSU in a secular setting, again, a lot of hospice and different people, and people just start sharing these experiences. So what is the incidence? In the current research, because of hospice and because people major more in geriatrics

and actually try to specialize on helping the dying, we have many, many more studies and we have journals in this. So one group of people at a hospice in New York, this is an in-house hospice where you actually go into the facility and you have people taking care of you as you're dying probably of cancer. So rather than relying on the doctors and nurses testimonies, they went straight to the patients. And they would ask the patients every day, are you having any experiences? Because as you said, people are embarrassed to share.

They're afraid you'll think they're going crazy. So they just don't talk about them. So they ask them every day. Over 80 percent of these patients were having these very realistic experiences, like they're talking to people on the other side, heavenly experiences. Over eight out of 10 of the dying. Now, when it comes to something like

after death communications, like I talked about where the mother came back and said goodbye, I think about a third of the population says that they've experienced those if you talk to them. Some of this came out of a Harvard study where they were trying to understand the grieving and they had this surprise finding

that if they talked to them long enough, people would say, oh, by the way, I've seen my deceased dad or seen my deceased mom. And so over the years, we began to study those and found out that that was extremely popular. 10% of the population, this has been done over and over again in secular studies where psychologists will do a large range study.

Around 10% of the population says that they've seen someone who wasn't there, who wasn't physically there. They saw someone, they weren't physically there, and the largest category under that were crisis apparitions where they see somebody who just died or had an accident. And I think you also qualified that they would say they're in an awake state and know that they're not dreaming as well. Those of you who are watching this, if so far you're like, ah, I'm not sure I believe this, please don't tune out yet.

We haven't got to the evidential questions yet, whether naturalism or supernaturalism best explain this phenomena. So far, we're just trying to define what we mean, lay out the examples and talk about how common it is. Now let's do three examples here that our audience will recognize. And you go into depth in these in the books, so we don't necessarily need to go into all the particulars. But these are three interesting cases that seem to suggest an afterlife. And then we'll get into the big studies and the data itself and consider some naturalistic responses. So what is unique about the deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and what do you think

this suggests? So I read a lot of atheists and people like Susan Blackmore and others would say that we really don't have any free will and that we don't have minds, we just have brains. And so everything that's going on with the mind is really just the brain working itself. So we can't have anything like intentions or mind over matter or free will, those are just illusions, consciousness of self,

the eye that's controlling our brains, they would say doesn't exist. Now, in the case of these two early presidents that we had, in their latter years, if you read their letters, they often talked about the afterlife. They would see each other in the afterlife. And when we talk about these things in the afterlife, talking about the founding of the country, here's something we would do. But in their last year, they were both elderly, very old for their time. I mean, most people would probably die in their 50s or 60s and here they were much beyond that. And they had been going downhill for the last year almost

and people thought they were gonna die earlier. But they really, really wanted to live to the 50th anniversary of the nation. And they talked about it, people were asked inviting them to events. This was going to be huge in the United States, you know, the 50th anniversary. And so they wanted to live to it. But they were going downhill physically. But you could tell they were trying to they wanted to and it got to up to the last couple of days and they would ask somebody what day is it and finally on the day the fourth of july they both live to that

day and would die on that day now adams had an interesting thing he said uh jefferson, he said Jefferson survives at one point. And you'd think he's just saying, well, I'm about to die, but at least Jefferson is surviving. But if you think about it, that's kind of an odd thing to say, they were, you'd have to ride by horseback a couple of days to get between them. How did he know that Jefferson, he knew Jefferson was dying, they both knew each other were them. How did he know that Jefferson, he knew Jefferson was dying,

they both knew each other were dying. How did he know he was alive? Well, the word survives often meant during that time period still lives in the afterlife, survivalism we call it. So it seems like he may be, now I don't know this for sure, but he seems to be saying he saw Jefferson in the afterlife before he died.

But my main intent in that chapter, however you take that, is that it seems like the will, the mind is influencing something going on in the body, the time of death. And that has been shown in a lot of experiments like studying breast cancer patients who go through some therapy where you begin to think more positive thoughts. And I think it's very common today, which shows us that, you know, it seems like there is a mind that works separately from the brain, unlike some people like Susan Blackmore and others would say. Now, not all atheists go that way, but I think this does come against that hard view of the

brain only that some atheists hold. Okay. So in fairness to those watching, they're thinking, what does this prove? It's speculative. You admit this doesn't prove that there's an afterlife. What you're saying is they both died in the 50th anniversary of July 4th, 1826. I don't know how many hours apart in terms of if they were on horseback at that time. And Jefferson dies sometimes around noon. John Adams, closer to 6 or 7 PM, says he survives. There's a sense that there's a will distinct from the brain which doesn't prove there's an afterlife.

You might say that's not sufficient, but it's necessary. And this awareness that Adam seems to have about Jefferson is suggestive of the afterlife. So you are very cautious in what you conclude from this, but these are the kinds of stories you're saying, we should take a closer look at this and see what it suggests further. Now tell me the case of Steve Jobs. Okay, now back to what you were just saying.

So I think it's good. What I encourage people to do is they're reading my book, and you take each chapter and deal with these lines of evidence. I would look at the Jefferson Adams thing and say, well, that shows me pretty good that there may be a mind that's controlling the brain, but it doesn't really give me much on the afterlife. I give it maybe a 10%, 20%, but you could just as likely explain that on a naturalistic basis. But on each of these,

I just encourage people to think through scientifically, when we see something that could be explained by more than one hypothesis, we try to see where do the facts fit? Do they fit best in this case with the afterlife hypothesis or a dying brain hypothesis? So we're just trying to look at this scientifically.

So you're saying the Mark Twain? We could go, yeah, let's go to Mark Twain and then we'll come back to Steve Jobs. Let's talk about Mark Twain, his experience of seeming death premonition. Sure. So Mark Twain is claimed by a lot of atheists as one of their secular friends. You'll see him on list. So he's not a person who's running around preaching and looking for fodder for his preaching. He tends to be secular, tends to be very critical of the church, but at one point in his 20s he had a night vision, is probably the best way to put it, of his brother.

He had a vision of his brother. Now again, they're in their twenties, you're not expecting each other to die at that age. His brother is in a casket. The casket is a certain type. It's a metal casket as opposed to wooden. It is set on two chairs in his vision. It's extremely realistic. It's got flowers on top of it. There are white flowers with a red one in

the middle, a very specific arrangement. And his brother is wearing his suit, Mark Twain's suit. Well, that's all just very random. I mean, very specific. And so he was having this vision and he walked outside and then he realized, wait a minute, wait a minute. Maybe this didn't really happen. Maybe it was just some kind of a vivid dream. And he runs back in the house and looks and sure enough, there's no casket, there's no anything there. And he just kind of breathes a sigh of relief. But this was the first time this had ever happened in Twain's life. It was just an extremely

realistic vision. Well, within a month his brother died in an accident on a steam ship where the boiler blew up and either because of how the doctors treated him with too much morphine or because of the blast itself, he died. Well, when Mark Trane walked into the parlor where the casket was, it was exactly as he had seen it. Now, if you go on the internet and search this, someone will say, well, it wasn't in his biography or what it is. No, it was in his biography. I looked it up, his autobiography. It was also in a biography by a

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who wrote his larger biography. And he said, as life went on, he could remember it just as clearly as the day it happened because he said it was just etched on his mind as like a story. So you can look at that and you can say, what are the odds? What are the odds that all these would have happened? And then what I do in the book is I tend to give an illustration and then I say, oh, has there been any study of this? Well, that would be a crisis apparition.

And I don't know if you want me to go into it now or later, but most of the atheists like Whirly or Shermer, they will talk about the Mark Twain incident. And then they'll say, yeah, but think about it. Somebody has, how many dreams do you have in a lifetime? What are the odds? Well, isn't one of them going to come true in some way just because of the thousands of dreams you've had?

And I would say, but this was not an ordinary dream from the start, but the vast majority of my dreams were forgotten within five minutes of the time I wake up. This was extremely vivid. It was different from a normal dream. If it were a dream at all. Secondly, they'll say, you know, there are billions of people in the world. Now they're just going to be some events in this world that don't make sense just because there are billions of people in the world. Now there's just going to be some events in this world that don't make sense just because there are billions of people.

So I don't know if you want me to go into the British census or wait on that, but that takes the evidence to a new level. Let's wait before we come to the big study. We're giving three examples. So it sounds like this to me is you would rule out there's no reason Mark Twain would make this up. It seems to suggest an afterlife when he was critical of the church and religion. There's too many details for it to be explained as coincidence. This points at least the best explanation in your mind towards some premonition and awareness through this kind of vision, a kind of premonition supernatural awareness of the afterlife.

Is that fair? Just kind of in some what you would draw from that study? Yes, I want to look at it critically and I think, okay, well, was he just having a bad day and some DMT type chemicals squirted off in his brain in the middle of the night. Well, that would give, that might give him a very realistic vision. Okay. What are the odds that it would come true in all those details? That just seems more consistent with an afterlife hypothesis or at least a supernatural hypothesis than a

naturalistic one. Okay, got it. Let's look at the one of Steve Jobs and then jump into these larger studies and see what the data shows. Sure. Well, I've read the, probably the most, the standard biography of Steve Jobs, and he was just not the type person that sat around thinking about spiritual things. He was just pretty much obsessed with his business and that's why he made some great products

and had made some good business decisions along the way. He was very much obsessed with it. But when it came to his death, he had pancreatic cancer. He did what a lot of people do and tried to ignore it and act like it wasn't there at first, but finally he started getting treatments a little too late and that one can really take you quickly. But if you look at the British Medical Journal, they did a study on how doctors, how accurate

are they in predicting when a person's gonna die who has a terminal illness? And typically they can't get it within weeks. Typically they'll be more optimistic thinking you will live longer. But when it's a terminal illness like that and you're fully conscious, they can't tell if it's gonna be tomorrow,

if it's gonna be weeks or what. So it's seemingly a little bit evidential when he calls his sister in New York and says, fly out here, I want you to see me before I die because I'm about to go. And she says, don't die yet, I'll be out there. She hops on a plane, heads out there. She gets there and he's laying there,

cutting up with his wife and family, having fun, you know, going back and forth, and the thinking is he's not gonna die, you know? But pretty soon, he starts slowing down, he kind of goes comatose, and then I think it was that night and later that morning he He looks up in the corner of the room and says oh wow. Oh Wow. Oh wow, and then he dies hmm now Hey, he's hallucinating at death most of would say

what if we tie that into the research that says 80% of the dying are having these afterlife visions? It's very much, I think, very appropriate to say it seems like he's looking at some great beauty on the other side like many people report and there he is saying oh wow not because he's a religious person and expecting to do this and this but because that is typical of so many people Thomas Edison another person who was not so spiritual often argued against spiritual things his his last words were it's very beautiful over there. Interesting.

And then he died. The commonality of this is partly what surprises me. Now when it comes to Steve Jobs' example, part of what you're saying is this fits that there's some design and purpose in ongoing life that someone would have kind of clarity at that moment and an awareness of their death that points towards some larger design and intelligence giving them awareness to say goodbye to folks around them. Is that the inference you're drawing from this? Make that clear to me as best you can. Yes, that's under the category of terminal lucidity.

And this has been very much studied. A long-range study is going on in Europe right now, and they're trying to get more of an incidence of it. But the different incidents are well documented. So you'll have a person who's about to die. I had one of my students share one of these. I don't have like a sharing time when I teach at a secular university.

I teach intro to religion. I teach a class in death and dying. I don't have like, okay, this is when we're gonna share about our experiences, but they'll be doing readings and then one of them will just raise his hand and say, let me tell you what happened to me. Okay.

And this one student says, my dad was in the hospital. He was dying of something like pancreatic cancer. He brings in his, um, he calls his family in one day and talks to them all individually about things he wants them to know. He was a religious person and he told them that he was gonna die, I believe it was in seven days, but he gave them a very specific time. Sure enough, he died in that time.

In terminal acidity, often you'll have someone who's been in a coma, maybe for weeks, maybe for months. Even Shermer in his book says, okay, the brain when it's going downhill because of something physically, our expectation from physicalism or naturalism is that that brain is going to continue to go down. It's not going to pop back up when physically it's being destroyed. And so with something like Alzheimer's or some other diseases that,

or a brain tumor that doesn't just take up space in the brain and push the brain aside, but it's actually eating up the brain as it grows. And so your expectation and naturalism is that you're gonna keep going downhill. So why would it be that all of a sudden at the end of life and the timing being right before you die, why would you pop up, be fully conscious, fully aware of what's going on around you, and say your goodbyes, maybe say some things that need to be

said? Maybe God is patient toward us. We're not wishing that any should perish, but all should have an opportunity to repent, right? Maybe he's giving you a final opportunity to get things right with God. Whatever the case, it doesn't seem consistent with naturalism, that you would know that this is your time to die, number one. And number two, that your brain would be working optimally at a time when science and naturalism is saying it shouldn't be working at all.

Okay. So before we get to the British study, which I keep promising, since we started talking about terminal lucidity, there's one of the stories in your book that really jumped out to me. I thought, okay, this is interesting. It's the story of, his name is David. And this was reported by Dr. Scott Hague at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

What happened in this case and why does it fit under the category of terminal lucidity? Okay. This was a boy, if I've got the case right here, you're pulling one out of my book where I had a ton of experience. There are a ton. He was dying, his family was there, and he had a tumor in his brain that was eating away at the brain. The doctor had seen the scans and said that there was just no brain left.

There was just tumor in there. There was just tumor in there. And the boy just becomes very loose. Okay, the doctor was not there, but he heard the report and he got back with the mother who was there and said, tell me what happened. And she said, oh yes, he just became fully lucid. He knew he was about to go. And as I recall, he was thanking everyone for what had gone on, and then he died. But he was saying, according to the scans, and again, when we're quoting these people, this is not a doctor somewhere, another specific doctor,

respected doctor, not just your average surgeon next door, but one who is from a respected university or teaches at a specific university. And they share these stories where these people should not be able to talk. Their brain, it seems like, and what this doctor concluded was, he said, this is not this person's brain. This is their mind that seems to be separating from the brain, and it's actually allowing this person to talk because the brain could no longer do it at that point. So there's tons of examples of these. You give a few in the book of people.

Some I thought were interesting, people with mental disabilities gain a sharp clarity right towards the end of their life. People, their brain is fading away where physically and naturally should not be able to communicate with clarity and yet are at the timing of their death suggest to you that there is a better explanation that there's an afterlife and a God who's given us a moment

maybe to have reconciliation with others, reconciliation with him. Is that a fair summary of how you see the data pointing in terms of terminal lucidity? Yes, and as you mentioned, it's not just people who are dying of something, but some that have been like the Katharine Emmer situation in Germany.

This was in a long care facility. The doctors were very respected that reported on her, but she had been for years and years and years, maybe as long as they had known her in that facility, she had not shown any indication of being in any way aware of her surroundings. She just soiled her clothes when she needed to, she just seemed to have no awareness of what was going on.

And yet some nurses came to the head doctor and said, you've got to come back here. Catherine is dying. And she was singing a hymn about going to heaven. And she just sang all the words, just like perfectly lucid and then died. And you say, what could have caused that? But the implications of this Sean are that sometimes the people who you consider the

least of these, maybe a terminal ill person who's just comatose and everybody's just kind of talking trash around them and not really concerned that much. Listen, there's a person in there if they've not yet died. And if you're talking about people who have mental issues, severe mental issues, those of us that take care of them, and I've been taking care of the elderly and firm in my own family for the last 25 years, that's as significant as it gets. There are real people in there. And what we do to the least of these is what we do to

Jesus. So this is important work for all of you who work with the dying, either in your families or you have individuals you try to help that have severe mental issues. You'll be rewarded for that. This is important stuff because these are real people inside of those bodies. That's a great word. Let's shift. We've been telling a lot of individual stories and there's probably some people going,

well, you can pull individual stories, not if I'm convinced. But this British census of the 19th century, which was updated in the 1980s, suggests that this phenomena is far more common than we might think. Tell us about that, the British census. Yes. Well, these were some of the top academics at Cambridge and Oxford universities that were involved with this. They did a preliminary study that was published in two volumes, Phantasms of the Living.

You can get it through your local university. I think it's still published somewhere if you get kind of a condensed version. But what they decided to study, this was at a time when naturalism and reductionistic materialism were coming on strong in academia. In other words, people were saying,

now that science is figuring everything out, we can pretty much reduce everything to its smallest components and realize that really everything in the world can be explained physically. Now these people felt like there were certain things that were being ignored, certain phenomena in the world that didn't fit with that materialistic reductionism.

Among them were Henry Siddwick, one of the most respected professors at Cambridge University. He was an ethicist. He also studied the economy. He was just a very well respected. In fact, in the 2000s, a philosopher at the University of Chicago wrote a big, thick intellectual biography of Henry Sidgwick, extremely. And his wife was also well respected. She was a mathematician who often worked with some of the cutting edge scientists to help them with their math and to explain their things mathematically. They and some others were commissioned by an international psychological association to study International Psychological Association to study these crisis apparitions. So what they did, and this goes back to what Mark Twain had experienced. So atheists such as Shermer and Worley are going to say, billions of people are out there.

One out of a billion, you're going to have some kind of crazy dream that happens to correspond with reality. They wanted to test that theory. Their end game was not to say, therefore there's an afterlife. What they wanted to say is this cannot be explained by chance. They said, let's just stop there. Let's just do a minimalist thing. So what they did is they surveyed, and I talked about this in our last interview, 17,000 people. Now just in the general population, they're not looking for people with stories. Okay. 17,000 people in the general population.

They find out that about 10% of the population has claimed to have seen someone who is not physically there. So they narrow it down to those, and the greatest subcategory under that were people seeing someone who had just died. Now, often this was a person who maybe was in a different country, even a different continent, someone they didn't even know was ill, but they'd be laying there in bed, or it would be in broad daylight, they would

see this person, they're not real chatty, but they'll just say, indicate that they're leaving and you come out of this and go, Oh, my goodness, Uncle so and so just died. And many would write it on a calendar or make a note to self as to when it was. And then they might find out weeks later, you didn't have email at that time, but they would get a notice that this person had died. So they studied these and they did in-depth interviews with the people who were making these claims.

They would go and look for the records of death to make sure it corroborated. They weren't just, these people like the Sidwicks, Nora Sidwick, the wife, her family said, you got to read a biography of each of these just to see their personalities. But Nora, they would say you couldn't ever convince her that anything really happened. She was just one of those super skeptical persons. And she was the main author of the study, which was published in 400 pages in a technical journal. So they concluded when they saw how many people were having these crisis apparitions, they said, okay, well, that could

happen every now and then, right? That somebody could just happen to have a vivid dream and it corresponds with somebody's death. But they also knew how many people, what the odds are that any given person in England was gonna die on any given day. So they said, let's narrow it down to the ones who saw somebody who had died within 12 hours before or after the apparition, and let's see what the odds are.

And they came up to, there weren't just the same number as you would expect by chance, which would have been, they should have seen none, basically. It wasn't just twice as many, it wasn't just five times as many, but 440 times as many of these crisis apparitions that were seen, then you would have expected by chance. So to me, Warley and Shermer,

when they argue for the chance hypothesis, I really think these people did a great job of showing that that's just not a good hypothesis. And that was replicated beforehand in the earlier study, and William James did the same thing around Harvard, did the same study, found about the same percentage. It's pretty remarkable. You're talking about this is done in the 19th century, 17,000 people, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard updated by William James, 1980 to 1984, a similar study was done

on 45,000 people from different walks of life all around the world if I assessed it correctly. Now let's press the evidence a little bit. So far it sounds like you're saying 10% of people believe that they have seen somebody in an awake state who's not physically there. Why should we believe their testimony? We see all sorts of stuff that's not actually there. Seems like this could be a common human experience. I'm not saying they're lying. I doubt most if any of them are lying, but how do we leap from them saying they had this experience to saying it's at least more likely true and evidence for the

afterlife? Well, I think that's precisely what the people at Cambridge were trying to see. Somebody could say, well, okay, so 10% of the population hallucinates at some point. Well, la-di-da, what does that mean? But if they're hallucinating about something that actually happened, then that's different. This is quite a hallucination if it's about a real person who actually died right at that time. So hallucinations are just made up things in our brain, our brain, and they're very varied. Hallucinations are very different

than what they're experiencing here, if you compare them. Penny Sartore and others that have studied near-death experiences have compared hallucinations to people who have had near-death experiences, and they're very different experiences. The hallucinations vary wildly, just like an LSD trip or something, where these are very, very consistent, as

would not be expected through a hallucination. Plus, if you're seeing something that actually happened, that brings it into reality. A hallucination just doesn't explain why you're really seeing this person at the time that they died. And this is common, again, once you see it in the studies and once you start talking to people about it You'll find family members and friends and others who'll say wow, you know, I I experienced the same thing But I've never told anybody I I had a vision of my mom when she died and I had no idea

She was sick or as I shared in the last time Bucky my relative that when I told him about my research He told about that experience where he felt a huge weight on his chest in the middle of the night, popped out of his body, saw a vision, saw a tunnel in the edge of the room, popped back in his body, immediately got a phone call from a nurse saying his dad had died of a massive heart attack, which was totally unexpected. So you look at that and you say,

okay, well that could have just been a hallucination. Well, it could have been, but what are the odds? What are the odds that it would happen at the precise time that his dad died? I just think that the supernatural hypothesis fits the facts better than a hallucination. So that's fair. And I think when you introduce the idea of somebody having this kind of experience at

the moment that somebody dies adds an additional amount of information, namely the timing that brings it out of somebody's experience to narrowing down the chance that it can be explained by chance. So it's kind of like near-death experiences that you wrote in your other excellent book that we talked about. A lot of people have these experiences. And when people, I've had a number of people since I've studied this the last four or five years, students at Biola, friends, a pastor I seemingly randomly met while I was studying

near-death experiences, sits down, he didn't know this and he goes, hey, can I share near-death experience with you? I was like, okay. Like, I believe him, but there was no, there was minimal evidential value for that for me because it can't be confirmed outside of his experience. Now, what gets me in some of this data is when you talk about shared deathbed experiences. That's where I go, wait a minute, now there's confirmation of this, and you have a few cases of these. So talk about what you mean by a shared death experience, and if you remember, maybe one example that jumps out that you think is pretty well documented of this. Sure. Well, some people will say that, such as Susan Blackmore, oh, well, we can best

explain these experiences by the dying brain. But if it's experienced by people whose brains are not dying, now really Bucky's example that I just gave would be a shared death experience. If they say, oh, it's caused by an oxy, a lack of oxygen, it's caused by all kinds of things that happen when your brain's dying. Well, wait a minute, Bucky's brain was not dying. He didn't have anoxia. He wasn't having a special problem. He didn't even know his dad was sick.

How can you explain it psychologically? So since this is happening to someone who's perfectly healthy, a lot of those naturalistic explanations just don't work. So a shared death experience, it's someone else seeing it. Let me see if I can look this one up and get the details a little bit better. As you're pulling this up, I have a huge amount of compassion as an author. Sometimes people are like, hey, page 191, you share this story.

I'm like, remind me what I wrote. So I totally get that. We'll give you a second to turn there. That's no problem at all. But if you can think of just one example, and gosh, I might even be able to pull it up too from your book as I think about it. Yeah, okay. So, I just, this is a lady who's sharing, the Guggenheims did a lot of research on this

and they have a whole chapter on shared death experiences. Dr. Moody has a whole book on shared death experiences. So, these are not rare. I'm not sure what the incidence is. Okay. But, so, this was one, this is one that Dr. Moody, in fact, shared. These are not rare. I'm not sure what the incidence is. This was one that Dr. Moody, in fact, shared. This lady says, I had just gone to bed and turned the light off when I saw my father

standing in the doorway. Her father had died. All the lights were out in the house, yet I could see him very clearly because there was a glow around him. I kept thinking, this is really daddy. This is really him. I was so excited that I sat up and said, daddy, I wanted to go over and touch him

and started to get out of bed. He smiled and said, no, no, you can't touch me now. I began to cry and kept saying, let me come to you. And he said, no, you can't do that. But I want you to know I'm all right. This is typically the reason that these people give. I'm just letting you know I'm all right. This is typically the reason for the, that these people give, I'm just letting you know I'm okay on the other side.

You know, it's just, it's very simple. It's almost like there's some horse, some hush order that says, don't talk about theology and this and that and whatever, just tell them you're okay. And then you can go. And he said, you can't, you can't do that, but I want you to know I'm all right. Everything is fine. I'm always with you. Then he paused and said, I can't do that, but I want you to know I'm all right.

Everything is fine. I'm always with you. Then he paused and said, I have to go look in on your mother and Curtis now. Curtis is my son and he and my mother were in the next room. I got up, followed my father to the hallway, but he disappeared, just faded away. So I went back to bed and kept saying to myself, this is just grief. Okay, daddy really wasn't there. This is what we would all say. We said, okay, no, no, no, that really didn't happen. Surely. and saw granddaddy last night. My mouth fell open. I said, you did? He said, yes, he came into my room.

He was standing by my bed. And the mother thinks, how could a three year old come up with something like that? And I questioned it. You know, were you dreaming? She says, no, mommy, I had my eyes open. I was awake. I saw him. So then she says, I knew that daddy had to have actually been there. She would have probably explained it away just when she experienced, but here are multiple people who are not dying, who are experiencing the same thing. It's a shared experience. So that adds another layer of evidence onto what we're saying. Gotcha.

Now, assuming, and I think you would say that they are, assuming that these reports are accurate and trustworthy, having two independent accounts of the same story, same place, same time, that seems pretty evidentially stronger than somebody's experience that they have met somebody from the afterlife in some fashion. It doesn't mean they haven't, but there's an added weight to this And I think that's what you talk about in the book. What about children and the kinds of deathbed experiences they have? What's common that children will experience when they report kind of a deathbed experience? And what are some of the factors that you think are evidentially significant?

experience and what are some of the factors that you think are evidentially significant? Sure. Well, one interesting thing about children is they have a lot less developed worldview than us adults have. So when they express things, it's less colored by a worldview and it's just the way they see it. So one little girl, for example, when she was talking about the afterlife, and this is a difference between near-death and deathbed experiences. In a near-death experience, you've got a person whose body is laying there. They come out of their body and they tell about it later. In a deathbed experience, you're laying there and you're fully conscious of the people around you, but then you're having the vision at the same time. So you can talk to people and say, what are you experiencing? So this little girl was, um, was laying there and

her, um, her, her mother, well, let me tell you about this one first. She said, um, her, her, she told her mother that she was seeing angels and she was very hesitant because she knew her mother might not believe her because she knew nobody else was seeing them. And her mother said, oh, she said, I see them too. And the girl, the girl was pretty smart. She said, so what are you seeing? Describe them to me.

The mother said, oh, the one I'm looking at has huge wings. And they had said with a pinky promise that she was going to tell the truth. And she says, mom, you don't have to lie to me. They don't have wings. And this was one of the things that impressed Sir William Barrett, the great physicist in Ireland, when you had children talking about seeing things on the other side that were dying, typically the angels would not have wings. And biblically, there's nowhere that it says all angels have wings. Maybe some of them do. I don't know. But we just get that from our popular culture and all the children's books show it. So a child you would expect if this is just coming from their mind, they're going to describe the angels with wings. But often they'll say,

no, that's an angel, but doesn't have wings. And one girl kept talking to her deceased brother on the bed, and she would tell her mother who was sitting there what she was discussing. And the mother said, tell me how you're talking. I don't see you talking. And then you tell me you were just having a conversation. And she said, oh, we talked with our think. And I thought that's just an adorable way of a child saying what we've seen in near death experiences, a very, very common experience in near death experiences, is that they talk

about communicating mind to mind on the other side. Well, here's a child expressing it in her own way, saying, well, we just talk with our think. And so you're thinking, well, okay, this isn't the type thing that a child would make up. And yet often they would see things on the other side, And yet often they would see things on the other side, like this one saw someone on the other side who was an old childhood friend, and the neighbor knew, and when she described him, she said, oh, she is talking to my friend.

So again, or to my child. So another layer of evidence when you see a convergence on what children are reporting. When you say another layer of evidence, it's important for viewers to realize, as you lay out in your book, this is a cumulative case. It's not like one case nails it, but there's a lot of different factors that seem to not fit within a naturalistic worldview as you see it and suggest an afterlife.

So that's an important framework in terms of of methodology. A couple questions for you left. One is an objection. Why couldn't evolution explain this? One common naturalistic response to all sorts of phenomena is to give an evolutionary explanation. Why do you think evolution in some fashion? I'm sure somebody could spin a story that would account for why we have these kind of experiences. But why do you not find that satisfactory for

at least some of the deathbed experience phenomena? Sure. Well, I'm no evidence on evolution, so I'm outside of my field speaking. So I'm just kind of thinking out loud. But it seems like in general, when I read current evolutionists, they will say that evolution favors things that help for survival. And when people say things like, oh, but compassionate behavior and all that, even though it hurts the individual, it helps the community survive. Well, that's a theory that a lot of people hold to, but typically they'll say, the ones that I read, will say that evolution is trying to help you survive. It wants you to survive longer so that you can reproduce

and that your species survive, survival of the fittest. So in general, this is not going along with evolutionary theory because why? Evolution should be making us want to live and to keep going so that we can have more babies and so that we can, it's all about survival. So why would evolution make us, when we come to a point where maybe the doctors are not even saying your Terminal but some else I I know I'm dying and I'm eager to go there. I'm ready to go. Why would it do that? That's a problem. Now. I would think that some evolutionists would say oh, well, this is just a survival Mechanism to help us deal with death so that evolution has equipped us when we

come to our scariest moment it's just a way to kind of get outside of our bodies outside of ourselves and to come up with a positive outlook so that it helps us psychologically. I think that's the way a lot of evolutionists would probably explain it. Now of course the problem with that is, okay, if it's just a hallucination or series of hallucinations that help us to be okay with dying, then why are they accurate? And pointing to things that are actually happening

in the real world again, unless you believe that the body physically has the ability to know what's going on in other people's lives in other countries or wherever, unless you hold to that, and most secularists that I read don't hold that we have those psychic abilities, it would be hard to rationalize with that evolutionary theory. Now, how do you square this? This is more of a theological question.

I know you're trying to look at this scientifically, but you have people like Steve Jobs, not a Christian as far as I'm aware. Thomas Jefferson seemed to be more of a deist and yet both talking about seeing people in the afterlife in a positive fashion, Jesus seemed to teach that the road was narrow and not happy for people who reject him. How would you kind of square that theological question with what deathbed experiences seem to point towards? I'm actually going to come out with a volume two, which discusses that in depth.

And it really deserves an in-depth response, but let me give you the shallow response. Near-death experiences are not about the end of your life. Okay, they're like a half-time. You go up and you get a half-time report on how your life's going. Now, some people say, well wait a minute, if these people are renegade, bad people, murderers and whatever, and they're not believers in God, they ought to be experiencing hell. Well, the Bible doesn't say that in a midterm event everybody should experience hell. That's something at the end of days, new heavens, new earth, all this, right?

Now Romans 2-4 says that the kindness of God leads us to repentance. I think God will often give a renegade, sorry person a good experience to see the love of God on the other side and he shows them his life and shows how rotten he's been in his review, but then he comes back. Same thing with a deathbed experience. You say, wait a minute, that is the end of life. Yeah, but it's not after the judgment. I think it's very likely that at the end of life, God wants to show us his love, that he gives good gifts to the evil and the good,

according to the Sermon on the Mount. We don't expect him to kind of be torturing bad people. We're going through the valley of the shadow of death. He ministers to the good and the evil and he may show them some beauty on the other side, but I think what he's trying to do is to get their attention and say there's more to life and they got a last opportunity to get their life right with God, to get their relationships right because God is patient toward us. So again, a lot of people expect that if a person is not going to make it to heaven in

the future, that they should have a horrible experience before they die. I don't see anything biblically that says that ought to necessarily happen. I think God's still trying to woo people. And yeah. I look forward to having a chance to read volume two. We will have a conversation about that if you are willing, but just maybe close it out by saying, practically speaking, why do you think this research on deathbed experiences matters? Like, who cares? Why is this significant?

Apart from being a cumulative case for the existence of an afterlife? Are there any other applications for Christians or non-Christians? Oh, wow. We could go on for an hour on this because it has all kinds of implications for counselors who counsel the grieving. So the grieving come to you and they say, oh, I've been visiting with my deceased. Do you say, oh, well, you're involved in the occult or you and they say, ooh, I've been visiting with my deceased. Do you say, oh, well, you're involved in the occult

or you're having hallucinations or we need to get you on some medicine. Let's say that you're a hospice or a nurse person who's trying to help the dying and they begin reporting seeing deceased relatives on the other side. You've got to make a practical decision. Do you adjust the morphine or do you say,

oh, this is, no, this is a realistic experience that people have? And I think what we tend to do is when people share those experiences, we're uncomfortable talking about it. So we say, oh, you've been through a lot. And we, rather than saying, engaging them in conversation and saying, well, let's talk about it. What are you experiencing? This may be the most significant thing the person's ever experienced. So let's talk about it. For me and you, ethically, what this means is, for the last 25 years, I've been taking care of relatives

who were infirmed, my first wife died of cancer in her 30s, took care of her for four years, or three years while I was helping to raise my little boys. A lot of people would look at life and say, wow, that sucks. You have to do that. Think of all the ministry, all the research, all the writing you could have done. But if Jesus was right, and I believe he was when he said, whatever you do for the least of these you've done for him, then there was nothing more significant than me giving my little boys a bath or changing their diapers, taking care of my wife. Then my dad was ill. My grandmom, we helped her through till her death. My mom right now is just turning 90,

a lot of time spent with her. When you're doing these things that other people think don't really count much, oh wow, if I could be Tom Brady. Well, wow, I got a ball across a line better than anybody else in this world. Is that really going to be one of the biggest things on my resume for my life review, or when I get to heaven? I really think the things that count are loving the people around you, loving God, because nobody comes back from these experiences that I've seen yet saying God was unkind and God was unjust.

They all say, oh God, oh they just didn't want to ever leave the presence of that being. Love God, love people, and seek truth. People come out of these experiences and say, there's more to this life than I knew. I want to know what counts for eternity. So for me, I keep searching for spiritual truth. I read the scriptures. I go to church where I find another group of, not everybody at church is real spiritual, but I find a group of people

that are seeking like me so that I can learn as well. So it's very, very life-changing to me when you study these experiences. Steve, I appreciate your heart, which you just expressed, but also your mind. I think you lay out some very fascinating cases that Christians and non-Christians, people of all stripes, should take seriously and consider in a larger question of related to the afterlife. I think you lay out things pretty judiciously in your book. You try not to overstate the evidence.

I think sometimes you try not to understate it. So you give your evidence, then after each one, you say, how would you assess it? And sometimes I found myself agreeing with you. Sometimes I'm like, oh, it's stronger. Sometimes it's weaker. But I think that's what you want us to do in the book, is not think for us, model how, but ask what we're going to do with the data in these mainstream scientific journals, brilliant

thinkers over the past hundred years plus. I think you're onto something here. It's amazing how many people have these experiences, how much evidence there is in the scientific community, and yet how little evidence there is in the scientific community, and yet how little discussion there has been about this. So I hope this is the beginning of a lot more studies and research and conversation about what deathbed experiences point towards.

So I would definitely encourage my audience to pick up a copy of your book, Deathbed Experiences, Volume 1 by by Jay Steve Miller, my guest today. And I will have you back when Volume Two comes out. And for those of you watching, make sure you hit subscribe. We've got some other interviews and videos coming up you're not gonna wanna miss on all sorts of apologetics, worldview, theological, cultural topics.

And if you've ever thought about studying apologetics, join me, I've actually got my Biola shirt on we have a full distance program and I teach on near-death experiences in my class in the resurrection Steve But as we were talking I'm thinking I've got to now incorporate some of this data on deathbed experiences I think my students would love this because it's part of a larger case as is the resurrection For life after death,, appreciate you my friend. Thanks so much for coming on. Thank you, Sean.