The Sean McDowell Show - Top 5 VERIFIED Near-Death Experiences

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

What are the top 5 best supported near-death experiences or deathbed experiences? And what do they tell us, if anything, about the afterlife? Dr. Steve Miller is BACK! He is a leading researcher on near-death experiences. While he has been on my show multiple times to talk about hellish near-death experiences, whether NDEs point to universalism, and more, the focus today is on discussing the top five documented cases. In other words, these five NDEs are among the best documented ones ever.READ: Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? (https://amzn.to/44NFMzq)*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 are the most evidentially supported near-death experiences and deathbed experiences? What do they tell us, if anything, about God and the afterlife? Our guest today, Dr. Steve Miller, is back by popular demand. He has been on my show at least half a dozen times, maybe more than anybody else now that I think about it. Steve, you and I have talked about hellish near-death experiences, whether or not near-death experiences support universalism, deathbed experiences,

but recently I thought, you know what? If we're going to pull out these hundreds of cases and list the top best evidentially supportive ones, like the top five, given that you've researched this and written so many books on it, which five would you come up with? Now I floated this idea to you. Tell me your initial thought when I framed it that way. My initial thought was

You know, I want to get people away from the individual experiences that they keep quoting over social media And some of them they don't even know where the people came from social media, and some of them, they don't even know where the people came from. And let's stick with the evidence of the best studies by competent researchers, physicians who have studied near-death experience. That's what I've done is said, what do the best researchers find? And so I was a little hesitant, and then I thought, well, no, actually there is a tier one of research which says, just start talking to people. What is the evidence?

And even one case well supported can be evidence enough to turn somebody around to say, hey, there's something spiritual going on here. So after I got into it, I thought, yeah, this is good. This is good. So let's do this. All right. I love it. Now all these cases you have documented in your books,

people can get them on Amazon, or you're willing to send them the PDFs for free, which I love. So you're not just making these up. These are not just from chat rooms. You have very carefully researched each one of these. So maybe tell us, how did you come up with these five? Like what was the criteria you used? And before we get into them, don't give us away which ones you're going to pick.

But why kind of these five? Why did they bubble to the surface? Yeah, and some of it is a personal thing. But number one, I wanted to know, did this really happen? Is this coming from a source that I trust? Because often, even in people's books, they're quoting people that just uploaded something to a website or they heard it on social media, and then they start talking about what evidence this gives us.

So we don't even know if this happened. This person may have mental issues. Who knows what's going on? So my criteria were basically, I want to know, is there evidence that this really happened? Do we have a good source or these good? Witnesses of it and then number two in what way does this point to the afterlife is this just a god of the gaps thing? Where we're saying oh, we can't understand it Therefore it must be God or does something about the experience after actually

Support the idea of the afterlife or something spiritual going on rather than a naturalistic process? Okay, that's really helpful. So there might be some strongly supported cases where we trust the witness, they report things that seem to be true, but they're not as significant about the afterlife, about maybe the character of God as some of these may be. life about maybe the character of God as some of these may be. So we're leaning into those that not only are evidentially supported, but are informative about truth and the kind of universe that we live in. That's real interesting criteria.

Now, last question, I know people are eager to hear, and I'm eager to hear you lay out your case for these. Remind us just again, what is a near-death experience and how is it similar and or different from a deathbed experience? Well, in brief, a near-death experience, for example, someone will experience cardiac arrest, clinical death or the cessation of heartbeat and breathing. They shouldn't be experiencing anything during this time consciously, but then they are revived and they come back with a story to tell about a super vivid experience they had during this time. That's a near-death

experience. They almost had a final death, but they were brought back. In a deathbed experience, there are actually a series of different types of experiences people have surrounding their final death. So for example, in a deathbed vision, they might see things on the other side right before they die like angels coming to welcome them or deceased relatives. That would be a deathbed experience. And I should add too, that these are five, this is not hard to come, the hard thing is to narrow down which five I'm gonna have. Gary Habermas has two very good articles,

one in a Blackwell companion of substance dualism, very academic source, also in the first appendix of his first book on the resurrection that he published recently. And he documents over 300 near-death experiences that he think have strong evidence that they're more than something physical. So I'm just pulling five of them that have impact on me.

And they're also kind of a variety of pack which have evidence going different directions as far as why I think they're evidential for spiritual realities. So the challenge was not how do I find five? The challenge was how do I narrow down? Because there's a plethora of so many are out there. And again, I just want to highlight and by saying this I'm not saying this means it's necessarily true, but there are neurosurgeons, there are doctors, there's philosophers, very careful thinkers assessing these from a range of worldviews in peer-reviewed journals. And I think of that 2017 or 2018 academic peer-reviewed book by I think it was University of Missouri State, laying some of these cases out.

This is not astrology we're talking about here or just dream assessment in some Freudian sense. These are very carefully assessed. Now with that said, people can make up their own minds. They can look these up. You will send them your book where you document these for free, which I think is remarkable. But with that said, let's jump in. Why don't we start with number five and then go to number one? Now, as we're going down, is this your order?

Like they are better assessed? Like number one when we get there, you think this is the top one or not necessarily so? For me, they're getting a little more evidential or I like something about the evidence. So, further as we go along. Fair enough. They're all well supported. Okay, so this first one that you told me you wanted to discuss, I was familiar with it. I think it's interesting. I was surprised you picked it.

It's Mark Twain's evidential deathbed experience. What on earth happened and why did you pick that one? Well I thought it was interesting because a lot of atheists and secularists pick Mark Twain as kind of one of their own because he was typically very very skeptical of religion. He was kind of down on organized religion and so they would think of him as a very secular guy. But here he is talking about some experience that can't be explained well with naturalism. So I thought it was good as an example of one that's coming not from a spiritual person, but somebody who's just telling it because it's one of the most remarkable things that happen in his life.

I love that. Alright, so tell us what what happened with it. Tell us kind of the story of what he reported, how it affected him, how we know it's evidenced. To keep it quick and to actually make sure I get details right, some of this I will read, some of it I'll just say personally, but Mark Twain, you know, pen name for Samuel Clemens, wrote some of the best books of history that we all love and enjoy, very famous during his time. But during his riverboat days when he helped on riverboats, his brother Henry was also working on a riverboat. They both went to go on a riverboat to New Orleans on the

Pennsylvania was the name of it and Mark Twain got into some kind of a scuffle with somebody and got thrown off the ship and he couldn't go so just his brother went. Well that night 11 o'clock in the evening Henry left for the riverboat. That night Mark Twain had an extraordinary dream. Now somebody online says, Oh, I don't think this really happened. I can't find it anywhere from Mark Twain, but I went to his autobiography. There it was. He dedicated a whole section to this. Probably one of the top biographies of Mark Twain mentions it as well.

So very well documented. So let's just allow him, these are his words from his autobiography. He says, in the morning I woke, so this was the night after his brother left, okay? And his brother was like 20 years old. You're not expecting him to die, right? So in the morning I woke and I had been dreaming. The dream was so vivid, so like reality that it deceived me and I thought it was real. In the dream I had seen Henry, a corpse. He lay in a metallic burial

case. He was dressed in a suit of my clothing and on his breast lay a great bouquet of flowers, mainly white roses with a red rose in the center. The casket stood upon a couple of chairs. I dressed, moved toward the door thinking I would go in there and look at it. but I changed my mind. So he went out, he got up, Mark Twain starts going, expecting that this is real. He thought it was something that really happened.

He went into the room and saw there was no casket there and said, oh, good, it was just a dream, but it was so vivid and so specific. Well, the next day, or a few days later, just below Memphis, Tennessee, the boat's boiler exploded. Henry was burned and bruised, and within a week he died. This is what happened. Again, Mark Twain's words. He was carried to the deathbed, and I went away for a while to a citizen's house, slept off some of my fatigue. And meantime something was happening. The coffins provided for the dead were of unpainted white pine. But in this instance, some of the ladies in Memphis

made up a fund of about $60, which was a lot at that time, and bought a metallic case. at that time and bought a metallic case. When I re-entered the dead room, Henry lay in that open case and he was dressed in a suit of my clothing. So this is reality. His brothers died, now he comes into the situation that's identical to his dream, dressed in a suit of my clothing. He had barred it without my knowledge during our last sojourn in St. Louis, and I recognized instantly that my dream of several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, except for one piece which was immediately supplied for just then an elderly lady entered the place with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses. In the center of it was a red rose that she laid on his breast."

In the center of it was a red rose that she laid on his breast. Now, in his autobiography, he says that he was telling some gentlemen about this later in life and one said, well, you know, your memories shift during life. It's been a while since that happened. He said, no, no, no, this is one of these things that's just like a picture in my mind. I can come up and I can see it. In other words, it was no ordinary dream from the beginning. This was something special that he couldn't forget, much like people's near-death experiences. They'll say years later

people who study them will re-interview the people and they'll tell exactly the same story because it's like a video they can rerun in their minds. So here's a person who's not excited about giving any kind of evidence for spiritual things, and yet this was a very important thing that happened in his life, and I mean how does it approach you? It doesn't really talk about God in heaven in a sense, but there's something that seems to not be consistent with naturalism here. It's bizarre on so many levels. I was trying to think of how naturalistically would I explain this away. Number one, maybe he misremembers.

You dealt with that. Maybe he's lying. Maybe he has some reason to tell it to sell books. Like you have to come up with some story, but why not accept the account that he gives, especially given the worldview behind it? Now the next question you and I have is, okay, if Mark Twain reports this, what does it mean? Now we're moving from fact to interpretation and sometimes in near-death experiences we will interpret them based on our worldview so even AJ Iyer I was curious

if you're gonna pick this one or AJ air you might say it an atheist has a near death experience it was it was life-changing but didn't shift his worldview that seems to be the case with Mark Twain. So I think it's well evidenced. I think it indicates like there's no way he could know this ahead of time naturalistically. Something supernatural was going on. I've heard you frame it this way Steve, that these are like suggestions that there's more to reality than matter. That there's something or someone who knows the future and the past. That maybe life

continues beyond the grave. I don't know that we can read more into it from this, but I think it's a fascinating case. Now you you sent me a little about this, which I thought was interesting. There was another evidentially near near-death experience case. This is before we get to number four, that came from atheist skeptic Michael Shermer. Now, Michael Shermer, I had him on this show about two months ago. We debated two hours, God, morality, and the soul, and I thought about having him back on to debate near-death experiences. So, if you're watching this and you want that show, comment below. Maybe we would do that.

He's probably open to it. I like him a lot. But he had an article in Scientific American titled In Frequencies. We admitted to an experience that he would have dismissed or disbelieved had it been reported to someone else. After his wedding, his wife was sad, regretting that her deceased grandfather was not able to share in their wedding.

When his old broken radio, which they had never been able to repair, started playing love songs. The odds of the old radio from Germany suddenly reviving it precisely the moment she needed it, being set precisely to a station playing love songs is quite extraordinary. Schirmer concedes. You'd figure the odds to be something close to one in a million or whatever the odds are. I don't hate you tabulating that. There's these type of experiences that are common that don't prove God, but can't be explained as coincidence or a lie,

especially when it comes from Mark Twain AJ Iyer or Michael Shermer Your thoughts in that one anything else in the mark twain one before we move to number four Yes, I think Shermer's wife said it well right when that happened. She said it's my grandfather You know there's my grandfather because she had was Regretting that her grandfather was not able to be there at their wedding and boom What are the odds that it would happen right at that moment when she's having that regret? And yet he had no explanation for it. Now, his explanation basically is when he gets to read that book in frequencies, if you're out there, I mean, read the article, it was in Scientific American, it's on,

it's available online. And basically, he says, well, this shook me to the core originally. Now later he says, well, there are billions of people in the world, weird things happen. It could just be one of those billion things. That's what he does basically with this experience that we just talked about with Mark Twain. He says, okay, well, yeah, he accepts that it happened.

Warley, another atheist, accepts that this happened to Mark Twain, but they just say, oh, well, it's one in a billion of things and weird things happen. But that argument falls apart when you start saying, now, wait a minute, this isn't the only one that happened. It's you start saying now wait a minute. This isn't the only one that happened You know, it's not just that this happened to you In fact my wife after I began studying these things She said you know did I ever tell you about when I had a vivid dream about my grandmother dying when she wasn't even ill And then a few months later. She sure enough died the next month

She was diagnosed with an incurable breast cancer. Then she died. She said, when I walked into that funeral, it was just like I'd foreseen. And I thought, this is my wife. You know, I trust her. And then so these experiences are actually quite common. And of course, the British survey that Dr. Sedgwick and others did from Cambridge University, they actually studied 17,000 people, interviewed them and found that 10 percent, maybe four to five percent of them

had had experiences of crisis apparitions where they saw someone who had died that they had no idea had died and that that would again, would reinforce that this is not just kind of one out of a billion thing, but it's happening normally to people all the time. You ready for number four? Now let's do it. This one is interesting. We're shifting from kind of a skeptic

to an evidentially supported near-death experience now, not a deathbed experience of a child, but it's reported by her physician. Tell us what happened. Yeah, so this is Melvin Morse, is a pediatric, academically oriented pediatrician who worked in emergency rooms. And so he was kind of agnostic at the time. So again you've got a person who's not, these are not evangelicals trying to support their faith, sort of agnostic researcher guy. And somebody was brought into the hospital room, into the emergency room, and he said, as I stood over

Katie's lifeless body in the intensive care unit, I wondered if she could be saved. And basically, she had been found face down in a YMCA swimming pool. Nobody knew what had happened. But when she came in, she was out of it. I mean, they did get her heart beat started, but she was just totally unconscious, no gag reflex, artificial lung machine was breathing for her. She was in the words of the other physicians there. She was just a train wreck, 10% chance maybe of surviving. But then suddenly she recovered. And within a few days, he was able to actually go back

and talk to her. So one of the things he wanted to know, and again, this is a good academic. This is a person who I've read at least one of his peer reviewed articles, and he's the kind that documents things meticulously. So he's talking to her. And he wants to know what happened. It's important for a physician to know, did she hit

her head on the bottom, you know, by diving? Or did somebody keep her under or what happened? And so he asked her, he said, What what happened? And she said, Oh, do you mean, when I saw my heavenly father? And he said, well, that's a good place to start. Why don't you tell me about that? And she says, she said, I met Jesus. This is a little child. I met Jesus and the heavenly father.

And he said, maybe it was the shot look on my face or her shyness, but that's kind of all she would talk about that day. So he came back a couple of days later and said, let's talk about this some more about what happened. She remembered nothing about the drowning itself. Her first memory was of darkness and feeling that she was so heavy she couldn't move. Then a tunnel opened and through that tunnel came Elizabeth.

Elizabeth was tall and nice, bright golden hair. She accompanied Katie up to the tunnel where she saw her late grandfather and met several other people. Among her friends were two boys named Andy and Mark who played with her and introduced her to many people. At one point she was given a glimpse of her home. One of her brothers was playing with a GI Joe pushing him around. Think of how specific this is much much like the Mark Twain.

This is detail, okay. He wasn't playing with something else, cars or MagSpot cars or whatever, it was GI Joe, pushing him around the room in a Jeep. One of his sisters was combing the hair of a Barbie doll, singing a popular rock song. She drifted into the kitchen and saw her mother preparing a meal of roast chicken and rice.

Then she looked into the living room and saw her father sitting on the couch staring quietly ahead. Later, when Katie mentioned this to her parents, she shot them with her vivid details and they confirmed that that's what was cooking. That's what everybody was doing in the house. Yet this was far away. Katie was in the hospital lying there, right? Finally Elizabeth, who seemed to be a guardian angel to Katie, took her to meet the Heavenly Father and Jesus. The Heavenly Father asked if she wanted to go home. She cried. She said she wanted to stay with him. Now this is counterintuitive. You know, you've got a child who wants to be with their toys, with their dolls, with their parents, she

is so comfortable in this heavenly home that she wants to stay. Then Jesus said, well don't you want to see your mother again? And she said yes, and at that point she awoke. So Morse, like a good researcher, he interviews the parents, he interviewed other nurses, the nurses confirmed the first thing she said when she woke up, or where's the two boys that she had met on the other side and called them by name, and confirmed it with others, and there you have it. It took him from being an agnostic to believing there must be something on the other side. Now, let me mention this.

Let me go back to how this may be evidential. But the great atheist Bertrand Russell was asked one time in an article, what kind of evidence would convince you that God exists? He said this, I think that if I heard a voice from the sky predicting all that was going to happen to me during the next 24 hours, including events that would seem highly improbable, and if all these events then proceeded to happen, then I might be convinced at least, I would perhaps be convinced at least of the existence of some superhuman intelligence.

So what are we seeing? Both from Mark Twain. Mark Twain saw things in the future that he couldn't have known before. To me, this fits the bill for the type of evidence that Bertrand Russell, who was really a great philosopher and has thought these things through would take as evidence. And then we see a little girl knowing things that are happening outside of her room in her home. She actually described the doctors who first came in and more said this was incredible. She described the first doctor that came in.

She described me to a T, how could this have happened? And so I think this is a good way of approaching evidence to say, according to naturalism, I don't know what's going to happen two days from now that are out of the normal, that are very specific. Via naturalism, I don't know what's going on at the house next door. They're purely guesses. We have much evidence of this that we don't know these things. So when people do know these things, I'm thinking this points to the supernatural, kind of like signs and wonders. It's a wonder in the sense that it goes against the natural order. It's a sign in that it points to something.

And in her case, to a heavenly father and to Jesus and to an angel who might be a guardian angel, I think it points to the other side. Do you have any thoughts on this one? I love that you picked this case. It's one I was familiar with before for a few reasons. Number one, it's a physician who was agnostic. And you know on my channel, I've interviewed Jeffrey Long, Michael Sabom,

and doctors are the best at analyzing this stuff because they're critical, and they're skeptical, and they're systematic, and they're thinking. I've got a Eben Alexander coming on soon, his book, Proof of Heaven, a neurosurgeon. You suggested I interact with him. Like these are very careful, formally critical physicians not looking to prove some thesis, but having their thesis shifted by these kinds of experiences.

Now you hit on it. There's a lot of accounts of near-death experience. I've told stories here, I've shared some with you of friends of mine, students of mine at in our apologetics program at Biola, that I believe, but they don't have the kind of evidential support that this case does. Where she says, oh here's specific details taking place in a different locale that you couldn't know if there wasn't either somebody giving you that information or a soul that can be separated from the body to see this.

And I started to think, well, my kids, you know, they can guess we're sitting at a dinner table and maybe we're talking about a superhero movie. Maybe dad's talking about what's going on in Bible or culture. Maybe they have this for dinner. But I started to think, well, there's different places we sit. There's different conversations we have. There's different toys. To get all those details right is where it becomes mathematically virtually impossible.

Not to mention, why would a kid make this up? Now, there are cases that a books that have been pulled back Stories about kids experience and it seems it's the adults who are maybe using them to manipulate and tell a story That's not the case here. So I'm with you. I think this one is perplexing If I were a naturalist, I would seriously take the time to read this story give pause think about it and just simply ask What's the best explanation? That matter is all that there is?

Or is there maybe a God? Is there life after death? Is there a soul? And this is one strong pointer that there is. Anything else in this case before we go to number three? Some naturalists would say, well, maybe she was primed for a belief like this, and she was just living out her expectation of what would happen at death. Well, number one, when you're drowning, I'm not sitting around thinking of my worldview.

I'm thinking of how to get to the top of the water. You know, I kind of doubt that she was even thinking about that at this time. But Morse did interview the mother and say, tell me about y'all's background. Is this what y'all as a family thought would happen at death? And she said, no, we really didn't talk about things like this. We said one time she had a relative who died and I said, well, it's like you're passing over a river, you know, which was nothing like what happened in her experience. So this is something that came totally unexpected

to the family. And children, children don't have that well developed a worldview. And so they just kind of tell things like it is without trying to feed it into a worldview. So to me, and if you go past this, there are people, Angela Ethier has done a PhD dissertation in nursing where she talked to parents about

their children's deaths. And I should mention also, so this is not just again, just a one-off one out of a billion thing. We've got research of many cases. I like this little book, A Window to Heaven by Diane Komp. She was an academic pediatrician, pediatric oncologist who taught at Yale. And she was an agnostic or atheist, more atheist existentialist is the way she would describe herself until she started working with children and seeing things that happened to them spiritually like this at death. Little Book, if you're not interested in reading a lot, it's very well written and you can get it for probably 99 cents on Amazon. So your point, I want to emphasize before I move on, about staying calm amidst something like drowning is really intriguing to me.

Because these near-death experiences sometimes are planes that are crashing, somebody is drowning, struggling for life, there's somebody's having a heart attack. I mean unless you are trained in the most elite special forces like the Navy SEALs or something where you stay calm under pressure, it's the opposite of human nature to have clarity of thought, calmness of reasoning. It just defies everything we know about human nature. And to me, it's just one other hint that suggests something else may be going on here.

This is not just a dream that somebody had for other reasons we could get into. All right, so we started with kind of a skeptic Mark Twain or so to speak, maybe an agnostic, I don't know exactly his worldview, but certainly not a Christian. We moved to a child reported by a physician and her mother. The third one that you said is a respected physician encounters his first near-death experience.

Now when you mentioned that, there's a whole lot of physicians who I was curious who you would be pointing towards. So tell us which physician you have picked and why. Right I mean you could have gotten Dr. Bruce Grayson on this with his first experience which shattered his worldview. You can look at Pim van Lommel who did a great study in the Netherlands on this. His first experience. This one was interesting to me because number one it's recent. Number two great study in the Netherlands on this, his first experience. This one was interesting to me because number one, it's recent. Number two, it came in the context of a New York Academy of

Sciences event. This is not where you expect to hear stories like this. And where a lot of physicians would hesitate to even talk about experiences like this because they're afraid of ruining their reputation. But this was, you can look it up. I don't think you can find it searching as much on YouTube as you would just Google because it's a video that's on their website. I believe it's on the New York Academy of Sciences website. It's 2019, moderated, this is a panel moderated by Sam Permania, who has an MD and PhD degree, Associate Professor of Department of Medicine, New York University.

He's all into critical care, and he's interviewing a panel of people within that panel is Dr. Tom Afterhide, who's a professor of emergency medicine and director of the Resuscitation Research Center of the Medical College of Wisconsin. Now, they're dealing with multiple issues of how do you tell when somebody's really dead and their past being able to be resuscitated? What's the latest technology we have to resuscitate people? They're dealing with all these issues. And then all of a sudden Sam

Parnea says, well, you know, tell me about these weird experiences that happen around death. And Dr. Afterhide says, let me tell you about one happened right at the beginning of my career. He was like an intern. He was in a hospital. The head physician had said, I'll be with you. I've got your back if anything really weird happens. But hey, I'm going to bed down here and you just you do your rounds. Well, he was a little disappointed that the guy wasn't with him but surely nothing special would happen. Well sure enough the worst happened. All the alarms go off. Someone's heart is stopped. They're all called in

to resuscitate. the nurses rush down, he rushes in, and they get the man resuscitated. But after they get him resuscitated, his heart stops again, and they have to re resuscitate him. And then he his heart stops again, he's not becoming fully conscious. They're just getting his heart stopped. Well, eventually, all the others left, left Dr. Afterhide in the room And so will you just keep resuscitating him? You know, I mean this guy's not gonna make it obviously

But he did make it so dr. After hide, uh comes by the guy's room to see him And uh finally and becomes kind of his physician Well before the guy's dismissed he said dr. Offer had I want to talk to you a minute about what happened that night. He said, uh, here are the things I remember. Number one, uh, I remember you going out into the hallway. This is the night when his heart, when he's unconscious, right? His eyes are not open. And he says, Dr.

Offerhout, here's what you went out and talked to my family in another room and to be honest you were not very positive about you know about me. Number two, in the middle of the night you ate my lunch and After had said well I mean he this guy wasn't gonna eat it you know there was this lunch sitting there. And he said, you ate for lunch. He said, thirdly, and he said, you in there, you were feeling sorry for yourself, because the main physician had not accompanied you on the on your rounds that night. Now Dr. Afterhide said, I started thinking about that. Now I could think of, okay, maybe somebody told him at some point what was being talked about in another room. Maybe he came just a little bit conscious and

actually saw me eating his food. You know, I mean, these are kind of way out. Yeah. Maybe it could happen. But how did he know my thoughts? I never said those out loud. He said, that's what made me realize there was something special about this. Now, to me, when you hear a guy who is,

who's a research physician who's got no reason to be up there lying i've never seen any book by him on this or trying to get uh you know get get on youtube and get hits from people you know people coming in and subscribe to his channel he's just telling you something that happened as an example of a lot of near death experiences and something that happens pretty commonly where Dr. Sabome and others found that people could actually describe things that were going on when they were experiencing clinical death.

He shares this and I think that's pretty powerful coming from a respected physician at a secular scientific conference And he gives me some things that have happened that he says I just can't imagine how this could have happened Naturalistically, it seems to point to something on the other side. What do you think of that? So a couple things come to mind. Uh, number one you said he has no So a couple things come to mind. Number one, you said he has no known reason to lie. I think he has good reason to not share this story. Yes. I think Sabam and Long and others, if I remember correctly, have said they've taken some criticism, taken some heat.

Some people think they're crazy in academic circles for sharing this. So one reason why I tend to give credibility to these kind of testimonies, including what you said, not selling a book, not building a channel. And by the way, hopefully people know that I have no problem building the channel. I believe in what I do, but it's not like he's trying to get something personal out of it or has just some agenda behind it. It would be easiest for him to just say nothing. Yes.

So that gives more credibility to me. That's the safest thing to do in his position. And it makes me wonder how many other physicians and other people don't share these things because they don't want to be called out professionally. They don't want their aunts and uncle and friend to think they're crazy. They don't want social media to cancel them.

I suspect there's a lot more of these than people even share. And so when you shared the story, you said that, I think the doctor said to the fellow these words, he said, just simply tell me more. Those words, when I first read your book, it's probably, I don't know, six, eight years ago or so. I really thought near-death experiences I just thought I don't buy it. I'm an apologist, but I'm not convinced. I was really surprised by the evidence And so just last week very surprised just last week someone mentioned a deathbed experience kind of thing

And I said tell me more about that and if you're listening for it, there's people all over the place. So even if somebody said these are all false, it is a common belief and experience that humans think they are having today. And we should minimally be talking about it, hearing people out. But this case you gave is well evidenced, shifts the worldview a physician pretty powerful stuff anything else on this one yeah I just say I just say somebody else's top most convincing near-death or deathbed experience is gonna be somebody that comes from your circles of trust like your family because I've had though I was just shocked as you were that when I started telling

people this is what I'm studying that I start getting these stories from people I trust like my wife, like others around me that I had no idea it had these and they're evidential as well. In fact, I was at a I heard Gary Habermas speak of the resurrection of CS Lewis event in the Atlanta area. And I just was saying hi to people. And somebody said, oh, this guy just read your book and is real interested in near death experiences. Let me let you talk to him. It turns out this guy was a top research scientist

for all his life, now retired. He shared with me a near death experience of his atheist dad, who was no longer an atheist after he had his experience. But he said he just kind of dismissed it as a child when he heard it as, oh, he had a hallucination. But then when he saw one in his own practice, and it was exactly the same experience going to the other side. But you know what? He never told anybody. He didn't tell his... I think he said, and he's retired now, this happened way earlier, like in the 1970s, when he saw his last near-death experience. He said, I never told anybody because I was afraid

in my profession being a research scientist that people would label me as a crazy. So there's no reason for him to be telling me this story. And then I was out in Houston at a top, probably cancer center in the world. I was there two weeks ago. So from my brother's recovering from a bone marrow transplant, having a lot of side effects, please pray. If you're in the listening audience for my brother Richard. But we talked to a nurse who was working with him and Richard said, oh let me tell you what my brother's studying because you said you used to be an emergency nurse and do you have any

experiences like that? She said yes there was a child who was severely burned, her heart had stopped, we were starting the resuscitation, and then I saw her spirit come out of her body. And she said it was not a charred spirit, it was a perfect spirit lifting up, and she saw a bright like heavenly light, and she said it just gives me chills down my spine you know to think about it and the other person I talked to the research physician said it caused the hair to stand up on his arms. Now these are researchers these are people like in the top cancer institute in the world and they're talking about the hair raising up on their arms and a chill running down their back because it's not something you expected from the naturalistic course of things and pointed to something else like the afterlife.

But go ahead. Let's, let's move through if we can. This is interesting stuff though. Thanks for sharing that personally about you, brother. This is not just academic. It's personal. It is brother. This is not just academic, it's personal for all of us. It is not, it is not. In different ways.

And my co-host of a separate podcast that I do, Scott Ray, when we were talking about this, he is one of the leading Christian ethicists in the world and deals with a lot of issues of the death and dying. And as we've talked about this, he's like, I need to really rethink how I minister to people who are dying because the reality of this. Now, we don't need to go into that right now.

You and I did a full episode talking about that. Yes. So people can go walk through and it's just so game changing. But so far, we've talked about a deathbed experience from Mark Twain, a near-death experience from a child, a respected physician encounters his first near-death experience. What about a respected physicist's report of a deathbed vision? Tell us about that one.

This is from Sir William Barrett, if you want to get the book and the original source. He was a very famous person in his time who, I mean, Sir William Barrett, he was knighted because of his scientific accomplishments, taught at a very respected, very well-respected school. His wife was a physician, and his wife came home one day and said, you've got to hear about this patient I had. She was

dying in childbirth. And the most remarkable thing happened. Let's see, let me just start here. Suddenly, this is talking about the patient who's dying. Suddenly, she looked eagerly towards one part of the room, radiant smile, illuminating her whole countenance. She's dying, okay? She's dying. She's about to lose her husband, her child that was just born, all these things. But she's radiant. And oh lovely, lovely, she said. I asked, what is lovely? What I see, she replied in low intense tones.

What do you see? Lovely brightness, wonderful beings. It's difficult to describe the sense of reality conveyed by her intense absorption in the vision. Then it went to another place. Oh, it's my father. I'm so glad to see he's coming. He is so glad to see me. It would be perfect only if my husband could be here as well. She goes on about the vision. I know we're running out of time, but then there was another part of it that made it especially evidential that something was going on. Dr. Phillips, and by the way, Sir William Varrett, he's a scientist. He goes and interviews not just his wife,

but the attending physician and a family member that was there. And they said that the most important evidence she gave was the following account. Her husband was leaning over her speaking to her when pushing him aside, she said, it's so beautiful. And then she said, oh, and there's Vida, referring to her sister of whose death three weeks previously she had not been told. And she said, oh, Vida is there. And she, so this is a special type of experience that's been studied where the, someone that they see on the other side,

they were never told of yet. And so he, the, Dr. Barrett interviews the mother and said, tell me about this. And I said, oh yeah, nobody was gonna tell her about the death of her sister because they're afraid in her state, this might put her in a depressed state. And so what evidence, this influenced Sir William Barrett so much that he wrote not only this book,

but two other books about deathbed type experiences his whole life, he would gather these stories look for the evidence and write about them because he felt like it was so impactful on evidence for the afterlife. What's fascinating about that is that it's not just the only case again if there were one I'd be like ah you know maybe somebody told her that we didn't know like maybe like, you know There's ways you could counter that but you've documented cases of people

Near-death experience is not so much deathbed experiences. Although maybe some of both people have experience coming back and saying I saw my twin and The parents never told them that in childbirth or delivery and the parents never told them that in childbirth or delivery, their twin had passed away. Or I saw my biological father, they were never my biological mother, never told that they were adopted. Multiple counts, I saw this person, and especially before technology, words sometimes took longer to reach people,

I saw him in the afterlife, and that person had been dead. Multiple cases like this which to me are just compelling and you've got a struggle for a naturalistic account for this one. This is another one that just gives me goosebumps, especially in that most vulnerable state of your life and you're dying. Why are you making up stories? life and you're dying, why are you making up stories? Like you're just, it's just not plausible to me that that would be the best explanation. Well we've got one more, but any last thoughts on that story? Well let's just move ahead and get one more under our belt and then we can see if there are any naturalistic accounts.

I should mention that typically when people give naturalistic explanations for near-death and deathbed experiences They'll talk about oh well It's some characteristic of the dying brain like lack of oxygen or some DMT type substance that might be released in the brain when it but some of these are not Some of these like Mark Twain. He was not dying, right? some of these like Mark Twain, he was not dying, right? They shared death experiences are by other people who are doing fine, but they share in some way the experience with others.

So when you look at all the naturalistic answers, if you do your research, you'll find that they're just not consistent with the data that we have so far from good researchers. Now the Pam Reynolds case, let's just go straight into it. She was a 35 year old mother who underwent a complex surgery to repair a giant aneurysm in her cerebral artery. This was reported by Michael Sabome who is a cardiologist, one that I know personally. I've interviewed him. Yeah. He said no nonsense type, Let's just stay with the facts guy I just go relentlessly after the facts

Okay, and a neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler They did a surgery on this lady where they lowered her body temperature to about 50 degrees Fahrenheit Drained all the blood from her head so that her brain had ceased functioning by all three clinical tests head so that her brain had ceased functioning by all three clinical tests. Electrocephalogram was silent, brain stem response was absent, no blood flowing through her brain. She was as dead as you can get and they had all the documentation because they wanted to make sure she was not going to wake up during the surgery, right? So they were monitoring this continually. Additionally, her eyes were taped shut.

She was put under deep anesthesia. Brain stem activity was monitored with 100 decibel clicks emitted by small molded speakers inserted into her ears. And her entire body, except for the small surgery area on the head, were covered completely. Yet, when she woke up, she said she talked about an experience she had during that time

when she was clinically dead by all counts. She described in minute detail the specialized instruments that were used for the surgery, the thing that looked more like a drill than a saw, it even had little bits that were kept inside of a case. She described them minutely. These are the instruments that you're not seeing before the surgery or after the surgery.

They're over here covered up to keep sterile. And yet she describes them perfectly. Well, during that time, she went through a tunnel, talked to deceased relatives who looked like they were the prime of life, and eventually came back and reported these. Now this is coming from Dr. Sabome's book, and he's got a whole chapter detailing his research into this where he talked to the doctors, read the doctors records.

He was not even familiar with this. He thought, this sounds crazy. Who would do surgery like this? So he went into it. He ordered the specifications for the instruments that were used to see if they looked like she actually described them. It's just a remarkable case that you can't explain away

by saying, oh, well, she may have had the experience before or after the clinical death and just read it back into it. She had to have been there during that time somehow out of her body. Remarkable case. You know as I thought about this, I was really skeptical of near-death experiences about seven or eight years ago when I read your book. But in my 2010 book, Responding to the New Atheists, I had a chapter on evidence for the soul. And I came across the Pam Reynolds case and thought, well, here's just one additional line of evidence for the soul.

But it just didn't cross my mind to say, okay, wait a minute, if there's one case, are there more cases? How strong is this? I don't know why I didn't. I thought it's just one small piece of supporting the soul and I think it does. Now some of these near-death experiences are more illustrative or worldview focused than others. It seems to me minimally they suggest that the physical world is not all there is. They suggest that the physical world is not all there is. They strongly suggest that life continues, not forever, but at least for a period of time after the grave, which means I'm not just my body, I'm also a soul.

But then there's such a religious, spiritual encounter of like a life review, relationships being restored, a tunnel of light. Like what do you, you've looked at these five and many more. What do you conclude from them like as a whole in terms of just your worldview and your belief system? Well, naturalistically, you would expect some event at death to be programmed by your prior expectations. And we've seen that it just does not go according to people's expectations.

Even conservative Christians, they're thinking they're going to go meet Jesus on the other side. They don't think anything about, oh, I'm going to go through a tunnel. I'm going to have this preliminary life review. I'm going to talk to deceased relatives on the way. I mean, this is just totally unexpected. So the fact that there's a pattern at all is remarkable. And there are like 15 or so specific things that across cultures and

across the ages have happened. That's remarkable. But to me, again, you can't say, well, this is just God of the gaps. Here's something that we don't understand, so we're going to attribute it to God. No, the event itself, often they're meeting a being of light, they're meeting Jesus, or they're meeting angels, or meeting deceased relatives. That's a part of the experience. So the afterlife hypothesis ought to be at least a legitimate hypothesis to see what it fits better with the data. To me the data of

50 years of near-death studies and over, you know, maybe 150 or so years of deathbed studies, maybe 120 years, is just conclusive that that these things are happening you can't deny it it's happening to such respectable people and such great numbers of people so you can't just whoosh it away and it's talking about God and angels and then you have all these agnostics and atheists that come back saying okay the afterlife exists and it's realer than real. To me, all this points to the afterlife, and it's very consistent, I think, with Christian

theology. Once you get into the nuance of it all and stick with the best studies rather than just things you hear over the internet. A friend of mine who's one of the smartest atheists that I know has said there's something about near-death experience that gives him pause about his naturalism. So if you're watching this and you're a Christian, I think looking into this will really encourage your faith, really help you realize,

wow, what I believe about the world? There's empirical and testimonial evidence on top of scripture. Not that you need it, scripture's sufficient, but it just encourages us to go, wow, this is really true. If you're skeptic, look into this. Now, you and I have done, we've done shows like I mentioned on, does this point towards universalism and do Hindus see Krishna and Muslims see Muhammad? It turns out that really is far more consistent with Christianity in the number of times people see Jesus than other worldviews.

But we talk about that elsewhere. You and I talk about hellish near-death experiences, the evidence for deathbed experiences. I'll link to some below, but there's a ton that people can go to. I'd say keep exploring it. Have an open mind. But your book, I think the title, the first one that I read is just

Evidence for Near Death Experiences. Did I butcher that, Steve? Near Death Experiences as evidence for God in the afterlife. There it is, excellent. That book, people can get it on Amazon. They can get it online. And if you do that and write a review, it helps Steve get the word out further.

But for those who go, I just don't have the funds right now or I can't buy another book, you will email them the PDFs of your books if they just contact you. Now, I don't know how much you want to put it out there. Some of your interviews, you've gotten hundreds of thousands. What's the best way for them to contact you where you don't get overwhelmed? To differentiate me from the Steve Miller band. I'm Jay Steve Miller the letter Jay Steve Miller at gmail.com I'm not in this for the money. I'm just fascinated and And if you've got legitimate questions, ask under this video.

Really looking at the other five videos would catch you up on a lot of the research that's been done. And you could actually read a lot of the comments where I try to answer people's questions. I'm a little bit behind on that, but I try to do that. So that would be good for people who are more listeners than readers. All my books are on Amazon, but again, want a PDF, I'll send it to you free. Can I mention one other thing?

One more thing, yep. I just think that these, what this has done for me in my spiritual life, I've been a doubter, a questioner, gone through ups and downs of doubts. This has solidified me in my faith, this afterlife apologetics, near death and deathbed experiences, more than anything. I just really don't have any doubts

anymore for the first time in my life. To me, it's like signs and wonders in the Bible, which I mentioned earlier in this interview. These are wonders in the sense that they're just things that astound you, as we've mentioned in this, that make the chills run down your spine, that'll take a doctor, researcher all his life, and then the hairs raise up on his arms. That's the idea I get of the biblical word for wonder. It's something that's astounding, but then it's a pointer in that it points to something and these people who experience them or study them all of a sudden begin taking the afterlife and God seriously because to me,

the data very strongly points to something more than this life and actually God and the afterlife. So I just encourage people study this and we've lost a sense of wonder I think sometimes in our churches and our Christian walk Paul said it's not the kingdom of God is not just about words But it's about power and to me This has really given me the sense of wonder that I feel like I've lacked in my spiritual walk. I feel the same and I don't know if I would have gotten there without your research, the books that you've written.

So I want to thank you personally for that and encourage others to pick up your books, email you for them, look at the other interviews we've had, maybe some you've done elsewhere. Skeptic or believer, this is worth your time looking into. It's not only interesting, there's some facts there that suggest maybe the world as we see it is not all there is. Now if you're watching this and you think, wait a minute, why didn't you put this near-death experience in the top five? Tell us which one you think we should have put and why. Maybe we'll come back to this and we'd be really curious to see which ones you think are well-evidenced.

That would help us in the future as well. Friends watching this, make sure you hit subscribe. We've got other shows on near-death experiences probably every three to six months. I want to keep you up to date with research on this, questions people have about this, other topics as well you will not want to miss on sexuality, the resurrection, etc.

Make sure you hit subscribe. If you thought about studying apologetics, we would love to have you at Talbot School of Theology, Biola. We'd love to have you in class. We have a distance program and an on-site program. Information is below. If you're not ready for a PhD, we have a certificate program. We'll kind of walk you through a little bit more formal training you can do at a Distance and we're the process of updating all that right now big discount code below

Steve always enjoy it. Oh think biblically oh There you go you got the mug we gave you a mug didn't you? There we go. There it is. There it is. I'm drinking your Kool-Aid. You better not leave me as gray You're good man Steve. Thanks for doing this. We'll do it again