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How can it be tested to verify that such a thing is happening? That's what I'm asking.
Someone else who alarms wants to conclude Without studying evidence first.Exactly my point. So apart from relying on one-off, unreliable claims that are near impossible to verify, how can they be scientifically tested?
I don't know. You tell me. This is the first time I've seen such a claim made, and it has a good whiff of falsehood to it. The more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the evidence needs to be.
I never said I've been studying this. I just said that I read some of the studies in this thread and have been reading this thread. This is the first time I've seen NDEs talked about somewhat seriously and it caught my attention.
The people doing the study ask medical personal, "If you see a person that meets xyz circumstances, ask them after they are brought back if they experienced anything unusual." or something like that. They are not actually trying to kill anyone to do the studies. They are simply saying, "If xyz situation happens, then report it to us."
That's literally all it is.
That's a bad way to go about studying it. This is what I mean by saying all the studies linked on this thread are all over the place: there is no definitive way to verify why NDEs happen, what causes them.
If you believe supernatural things happen today, then it's very easy to explain: life after death exists. If you don't believe in that, then, yes, it is very hard to explain.
Because they have been proven by neuroscientists to not be hallucinations or have brain activity correlated with hallucinations/dreams when observed in studies.Why are they not explained by dreams, hallucinations and imperfect recall?
saying it's supernatural is a copout answer.
Because they have been proven by neuroscientists to not be hallucinations or have brain activity correlated with hallucinations/dreams when observed in studies.
Imperfect recall is refuted by veridical OBEs
@ViaCrucis,
I understand your position. Unfortunately, your position does seem to go against scripture. Dreams and visions are something we in the West do not experience much in Christianity but they are much more normalized in other cultures. So that is just corroborative evidence and not what the Bible says, so you are not likely to believe such things. But if I were to say that the Bible teaches that dreams and visions are to last for all generations, what would you say? Acts 2 seems to say precisely that as it says, "For the promise is for you and for your children, and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call.”
I can personally attest to many supernatural experiences in my own life. One is of a vision I had of heaven and another was of a dream of hell. I have also audibly heard a voice that said, "The Lord is here," and I live alone and my door was locked. Whether it was Christ Himself or an angel, I do not know except to say that the voice was indescribable. I've also had prophetic prayers and such. One such prayer was that I told my Elder that I felt God was telling me his wife would get a new heart. About a year later, she got a heart transplant. I've had plenty of other experiences as well. Anything from unlikely coincidences to full-on prophetic words. I don't say these things to tute my own horn. I say them because it is confirmation that the Bible is true and we can indeed count on the promises the Bible makes about us experiencing the supernatural in more frequent terms this side of the new covenant. I had a missionary tell me one time, "[O]ut here, if you don't believe in miracles, you might as well go home." I'm not saying you don't believe in miracles. I'm saying if you DO believe in miracles then choosing this or that supernatural thing to believe in is more or less limiting God.
Finally, many people who have never even heard the name of Jesus report having a vision or dream of Him, and when someone explained who Jesus was they immediately recognized who they saw as Him. There are many stories about bringing just the right person at just the right time for someone to get saved. Many many examples of this.
Why?
Because it is. To say "Oh, it's beyond out understanding" which is what anything in supernatural is by the simplest definition of the supernatural, then it's basically a copout answer.
You are in no position to judge.Perhaps the biggest problem with NDE's is that they're based upon people's recollection of events. Unfortunately such memories can be adversely influenced by both time and the interaction with others, which is why the police make a point of separating witnesses so that each witness' testimony isn't unduly influenced by what someone else may say or infer, no matter how seemingly innocent that influence may be.
In Howard's case, unless someone actually wrote down exactly what Howard said after his intubation tube was removed we have no way of knowing what his initial description of events was. We don't know which details are purely Howard's, and which details he unwittingly and unintentionally picked up from Dr. Bellg's reaction. If it's just a simple sterile statement without any interaction with an outside source that's one thing, but the human mind can pick up on and integrate almost imperceptible cues, which can lead to Howard's story becoming embellished almost from the outset with details unwittingly furnished by Dr. Bellg herself. The human psyche likes the affirmation of others, so it will almost imperceptibly alter the words and phraseology of a story to make it more pleasing to the listener.
Now I have no doubt that both Howard and Dr. Bellg would thoroughly dismiss this possibility, but that wouldn't be unusual. We're often unaware of all of the minute things that go into shaping our memories, and how quickly those added details become indistinguishable from the actual events themselves. And in Howard's case those details matter.
So unfortunately, in this case I have to dismiss Howard's story. I don't know what Howard actually experienced. I don't know what Dr. Bellg inferred from Howard's description of it. And I don't know what she may have said or done to influence it, both initially and over time.
What we get from Dr. Bellg, years later, is a seemingly irrefutable case of Howard describing events and information that he couldn't possibly have known. But viewed through the eyes of a skeptic... I don't find it convincing at all. To me it's just a case of implanted memories
Sorry about that. Do you perhaps have another case that you'd like to have me address?
“Hallucinations are perceptions in the conscious and awake state that have the sense of reality, but in fact are not real. The “acid test” for the possibility that NDEs are hallucinations is the degree of reality of NDE content. As the NDERF studies have shown, NDEs have nearly uniformly realistic observations in the OBE state. Life reviews during NDEs are also highly realistic and may include real events in their lives, even if the NDErs had long forgotten the events. NDEs usually occur with a higher degree of consciousness and alertness than everyday life. None of these observations are consistent with NDEs being hallucinations.”Exists of something occurring that is not 'heavenly'.
"In an article in the Atlantic last December, Sacks explains that the reason hallucinations seem so real “is that they deploy the very same systems in the brain that actual perceptions do. When one hallucinates voices, the auditory pathways are activated; when one hallucinates a face, the fusiform face area, normally used to perceive and identify faces in the environment, is stimulated.” Sacks concludes that “the one most plausible hypothesis in Dr. Alexander's case, then, is that his NDE occurred not during his coma, but as he was surfacing from the coma and his cortex was returning to full function. It is curious that he does not allow this obvious and natural explanation, but instead insists on a supernatural one.”
The reason people turn to supernatural explanations is that the mind abhors a vacuum of explanation. Because we do not yet have a fully natural explanation for mind and consciousness, people turn to supernatural explanations to fill the void. But what is more likely: That Alexander's NDE was a real trip to heaven and all these other hallucinations are the product of neural activity only? Or that all such experiences are mediated by the brain but seem real to each experiencer? To me, this evidence is proof of hallucination, not heaven.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE
Comment on this article at ScientificAmerican.com/apr2013"
Only if the supernatural does not exist. If it does, then it's a perfectly good answer. That's the whole point of talking about things that cannot be explained naturalistically (like NDEs) is that there is no natural explanation so these are evidence of the supernatural. But if you are biased against the supernatural, and don't think it can exist, then of course, it is a copout.
So is your answer a copout.Because it is. To say "Oh, it's beyond out understanding" which is what anything in supernatural is by the simplest definition of the supernatural, then it's basically a copout answer.
But the supernatural, again, by it's own definition of being outside of nature (the word itself means 'outside of nature' in the root Latin; super (above, outside, beyond of) and natura (nature). It cannot be studied, thus cannot be verified, thus cannot be considered an explicable answer. It is, by it's own nature, a copout answer.
If you want to say that the supernatural is the reason for it, go ahead. But if you start claiming there is scientific evidence for it, then don't bring the supernatural into it.
"Near-death experiences have gotten a lot of attention lately. The 2014 movie Heaven Is for Real, about a young boy who told his parents he had visited heaven while he was having emergency surgery, grossed a respectable $91 million in the United States. The book it was based on, published in 2010, has sold some 10 million copies and spent 206 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Two recent books by doctors—Proof of Heaven, by Eben Alexander, who writes about a near-death experience he had while in a week-long coma brought on by meningitis, and To Heaven and Back, by Mary C. Neal, who had her NDE while submerged in a river after a kayaking accident—have spent 94 and 36 weeks, respectively, on the list.
(The subject of The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, published in 2010, recently admitted that he made it all up.)"
You are basically throwing out all the studies that say there is no natural explanation then, which is fine, but there are plenty of studies of supernatural things like healings and NDEs and all sorts of stuff.
I think what you are getting at is that supernatural things are not things we can reproduce. That does not mean there is no evidence for such things.
So is your answer a copout.
There is plenty enough evidence to say consciousness was elsewhere rhan the brain when the brain was shutdown.
Since it happens in nature, it is natural not supernatural. Whether or not you or science can explain It.
If it was as simple as “just hallucinations” then we would’ve solved the hard problem of consciousness years agoYou are basically throwing out all the studies that say there is no natural explanation then, which is fine, but there are plenty of studies of supernatural things like healings and NDEs and all sorts of stuff.
I think what you are getting at is that supernatural things are not things we can reproduce. That does not mean there is no evidence for such things.
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