Gary Habermas, who has a long history with Talbot's philosophy program. I think we'll The way we'll put it is you mentored our colleague, J. Moreland, for many years. Gary Habermas : He may come around. When I first met him, he hadn't finished his PhD yet so he was-. Scott Rae : That's right. Gary is a prolific author. He has spoken all over the world on topics related to apologetics and philosophy, but he's a specialist known worldwide for two primary areas.
That on the resurrection of Jesus and on the phenomena of near death experiences. So Gary, I'd like to start with that. First of all, welcome and thanks for joining us. Gary Habermas : Well, actually, near death has different definitions, but it's usually said it's a state from which you could reasonably be thought to die, if there's not immediate intervention.
But because definitions of death come in different flavors CPR says we don't feel the heart beat yet but no machines. And then kind of my favorite is the one that the naturalists It's just many methodological naturalists use, if you came back, you weren't.
So because of the other That definition is it's irreversible death. So near death would be somewhere in between. And sometimes the little state might be you could have measurable, no measurable heart or upper brain activity. Those cases are quite common. And for that many minutes Let's say 30 minutes, you could be reporting data that would be highly evidential. But then when they resuscitate you, you're good to go and you don't remember it.
You think it was a wonderful experience, and you're not afraid to die. So for those 20, 30 minutes, you could have been It's more than near death. I mean some people call those the post-death portion, but you can return from these post-death portions. Scott Rae : Okay. So what's the significance for theologically and philosophically, of these near death experiences?
Gary Habermas : Well, the significance to me is Again, we're looking for scientific verification of a in this case, religious truth and about It's getting on to about 30 years now, science found out that if you have a cardiac arrest There's different kinds of cardiac arrests But if you had a cardiac arrest, ventricular fibulation, you will be brain dead in about 15 seconds. Now the old days, when NDEs first started I was hanging around with some of the guys at Pioneer Researchers.
I remember being at a meeting in Connecticut. We were saying "Man, the ideal evidential case would be somebody who's measurably flat brain, flat heart and they have data. Well, now, it's easy to tell. You don't have to have people hooked up to machines. Just have, as rough as it sounds, just have a cardiac arrest with ventricular fibulation and the rest takes care of itself. You will be measurably dead in less than a minute. And if you can report data during that time If you were in that state for 30 minutes, its very highly evidential state from which you could report data that you couldn't possibly have seen.
Even if you were staring right at it, you would never be able to tell what it is. But if it happens down the hallway or three floors away or back in your home, that's just more all of evidential. Scott Rae : So tell our listeners about some of the most unusual What are some of the best cases of these near death experiences that you're familiar with? Gary Habermas : Oh, they're incredible. I mean they're like the twilight zone. There's , at least evidential cases now on record.
People think this is twilight zone type stuff and it's not terribly scientific. Well, the leading researcher who just retired from the University of Virginia was an MD, psychiatrist and extinguished professor of brain sciences so it's a pretty high level thing.
He himself published peer reviewed articles on NDEs in medical and psych journals. So it's a lot of things going on that people don't know. Scott Rae : So let me just Habermas is using the tern NDE as a short for near death experience. That's right. One of the latest books came out from the University of Missouri Press by a bunch of medical doctors and other researchers.
And they estimate that in North America, the UK and Europe alone, up to 30 million people have claimed to have had near death experiences. So we're not talking so much about the old objection "Yeah you got a lot of evidence for the Resurrection, but you want me to believe in the Land of Oz. You want me to go with you to middle earth. So this is not the wild world we think. So what we're most interested in when they claim to hae those journeys is when they produce evidence.
I've divided the evidence into three categories and skeptics strangely enough like Some skeptics like one kind and other skeptics like another kind.
One would be data from inside the room. That would be of all the appearance to be in a first person. You had to be an eye witness to your own cardiac arrest.
Next, I think is more evidential and it's NDE data at a distance. So if something happens to you in L.
So the chances of you She doesn't make it every Tuesday night. And you report They get you stabilized and you find out what she was making for dinner, that's pretty interesting because it's miles away. The third one is the one that Bruce Grayson calls one of the very best evidence he says for spiritual existence. So the other realm would be experiences where the NDEer meets somebody Sometimes they don't know the person, but often times the person is very very close to them.
Their dad who died 10 years ago. Their wife who died two years ago. And the person who they're positive they're standing there. Just like you'd go back to your folk's house and say "That was my dad. I had dinner with my dad tonight. The person is sure with his dad. But the father's been dead for 10 years so he's irreversibly dead. The father, the son returns but dad gives him information that nobody else knows and it comes to pass. And example would be, "I hate to tell you this son, but your cousin just died in Afghanistan.
You'll be getting the telegram tomorrow? I just saw you last week. Or somebody tells some other kind of information, but they get it from a person who's irreversibly dead. A fourth kind is a shared NDE, which are weird.
It's where a healthy person witnesses, maybe even goes up the tunnel with, but they're sent back. And the other person stays, but they get to see the tunnel data. And there's one case where there's more than one person who witnesses it. And the last case is NDEs in the blind. That's the one frankly that has probably the less, least evidential cases.
But the people who never saw anything their entire life, except for this 20 minute, 10 minute, 30 minutes and they see corroborative things. So when that's in the presence of measurable You always have to say measurable, because people will always say maybe there's brain waves that we can't measure. It's funny how naturalists like the machines until the machines go against them.
So now it's measurable, but if it's in the presence of a cardiac arrest ventricular fibulation and with nothing else, the brain dies. And the brain stem follows very quickly, so evidence in those states is highly evidential I would say Well, Bruce Grayson says it's the spirit world. I would say continuing consciousness of the person who's having the NDE. Scott Rae : So just to be clear for our listeners here, what you're referring to is that period It could be 5, 10, 20, 30 minutes I've heard accounts as much as a few hours-.
Gary Habermas : Right. The longer you go, it would be interesting to get the ones that are flat brain, flat heart for hours. But I know a flat brain, flat heart case for 30 minutes. Scott Rae : We'll take 30 minutes as the max here. But it's what is that first person experience that I'm having if I'm the patient and I've had a heart attack. I could be pronounced dead by all clinical criteria and yet be resuscitated 20 minutes later.
It's what I experience as that person in that 20 minute interval that you're describing as the evidence for this new death experience. Gary Habermas : It's only what you cite is verifiable. You say "Well, only you saw your dad. We found out my cousin was killed in Afghanistan. The only criteria is that you have backup from at least one other person on the pieces of evidence that you're claiming.
I admit. Some of this does sound a little bit like the twilight zone. Scott Rae : So tell us a little bit more about how you connect the dots here theologically with what this implies for You mentioned briefly just a minute ago about our having conscious existence outside the body Like the existence of our soul and the evidence for the afterlife sort of apart from the evidence for the physical Resurrection of Jesus.
And those are great questions. Now J. Mooreland, your colleague, and I did a book years ago, the final title of it It came out with a couple presses was Beyond Death. And we give some of these cases, and J.
What we mean by that is, except for the cases where you meet your dad, and he's been dead for 10 years, someone else has been death for 22 years. You grandfather you saw there, except for those cases, most of these are minutes. Let's say less than an hour. So we're not claiming Unless you want to claim your father, you got at least 10 years. Grandfather, 20 years, but for most of these, they're initiations to consciousness after death and that alone is really tough on naturalism.
Scott Rae : Spell that out. Why is that so? The naturalists is the one that believes that we're nothing more than the physical substance of the world. Chemistry and Physics. Gary Habermas : [crosstalk] Says very briefly says the natural world is all there is. And so on. Actually, some of the best naturalists, Bertrand Russell, big names who are arguing, Ernest Nagel, who argue for atheism. They'll act like the two biggest planks that they have to destroy are God and the afterlife.
So it's big to them. And if you get either God or the afterlife, they're kind of in trouble here. I'm not claiming They could say Come on. Your best cases And that's not true because you got your father cases But your best cases only go for a few minutes.
Why couldn't there be a residue in the brain and naturally, you're still right. You're going to die. You're like five minutes away from being finally dead.
Well, to me, they're kicking and screaming about that because one minute is rough on them. He climbed aboard their boat and, discovering the battery was dead, flipped the charger.
He bent over and jiggled the connection, inadvertently causing a tiny spark. What happened next is believed to have been the result of a leak in the fuel line. He was ready to take up permanent residence in heaven with Jesus. The pain. The limited mobility. Would God still be able to use him?
Treatment included daily debridement — a harrowing and painful process of removing layers of damaged skin. Then, there were the surgeries, three in the first seven days alone.
Doctors used what little healthy skin Ayers had to cover some of his wounds. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.
This means that any message must be consistent with Jesus' 'in the flesh' teaching. His teaching is reliably recorded in the historical documents that make up the New Testament.
Even if an angel preaches us a different message for instance 'live according to your beliefs, whatever they may be' we are not to believe it. Alternative origins of revelation are someone's imagination[17] or a more sinister power. False prophets typically tell us the lies 'our itching ears want to hear'. Sadly, our sincerity offers no protection from deception: 'The heart is deceitful above all things'. In contrast, Jesus warns the faithful of their vulnerability to false teaching.
Instead, he commands us to be as shrewd as snakes and innocent as doves. All of the witnesses considered above stopped short of the threshold of death, only to wonder at what really lay beyond 'the final frontier'. They are inevitably ignorant of what will really happen when we die. In contrast to them, Jesus definitely died when he was executed two thousand years ago.
The Roman guard demonstrated his death by piercing his thorax with a spear and showing that his blood and plasma had separated. However, three days later, Jesus appeared once more, recognisable but different.
His disciples thought he was a ghost or vision but Jesus assured them, 'Touch me and see: a ghost does not have flesh and bones as I have'.
Recorded in the Bible, his words have greater authority than any man's and must be the measure of all others. Student conference Healthcare Sunday.
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Near death experiences. Near death experiences are surprisingly common, have standardised features, and are difficult to explain on the basis of drugs, endogenous endorphins, hypoxia, hallucinations or in terms of upbringing or culture.
Recent research has led support to the belief that consciousness out-survives the brain, prompting speculation about the existence of an afterlife. But, even if NDEs do provide knowledge about the supernatural, Christians need to measure their content against the teaching and 'real death' experience of Jesus Christ to ensure they are not being deceived.
Unlike personal experience, Jesus' words are fully trustworthy, and we need to advise patients and colleagues accordingly. God can speak through dreams, visions and visitations but the Bible warns of the dangers of relying on this form of revelation; spirits need to be tested. Is there an organic explanation? Are they drug induced? Are they endorphin-mediated? Are they a result of cerebral hypoxia? Co-researcher Sam Parnia is even more convinced: 'I started off as a sceptic but, having weighed up all the evidence, I now think that there is something going on.
Are they derived from upbringing or culture? One man recalls surviving pneumonia as a five year old: 'I saw the doctor put the sheet over my body as I too was rising over my own body. Are NDEs a supernatural phenomenon? What do NDEs tell us about the afterlife? Moreover, less well publicised are numerous negative encounters with eternity: 'I found myself in a place surrounded by mist.
God does speak through dreams, visions and visitations[14] but the Bible warns of the dangers of relying on this form of revelation; spirits need to be tested: 'Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. Jesus returned from a real death experience All of the witnesses considered above stopped short of the threshold of death, only to wonder at what really lay beyond 'the final frontier'.
More from triple helix: winter Personal communication. To be published in Resuscitation Fenwick P. The Truth in the Light.
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