Catholic Medical Quarterly

The Journal of the Catholic Medical Association (UK)

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Catholic Medical Quarterly Volume 75(2)  May 2025

Do ‘Near Death Experiences’ provide evidence for or against the Christian concept of the afterlife?

Revd Dr Gareth Leyshon
Chaplain, Royal Glamorgan Hospital
Gareth.Leyshon@wales.nhs.uk

Near Death Experiences (NDEs) have been given renewed prominence by the publication of Lucid Dying, a popular work by Sam Parnia [1]. The author is the architect of two clinical studies, AWARE-I (2014) and AWARE-II (2023). [2,3] These provide robust evidence confirming the findings of previous authors on NDEs [4-6]: a significant minority of survivors of cardiac arrest return reporting lucid experiences drawn from a palette of common recurring features. These typically include:

• A sense that human language is inadequate to describe their experience;
• An awareness that their body is considered dead;
• A deep sense of peace;
• The sensation of moving through a tunnel towards a light;
• Meeting loved ones who have died;
• Encountering a compassionate and benevolent Being of Light;
• A life-review of how the person had treated others;
• Having to a make a decision whether to cross a ‘point of no return’;
• ‘Seeing’ and ‘hearing’ verifiable events around their death from a viewpoint outside their body;
• Re-entering their body and returning to normal consciousness.

My purpose here is not to review Parnia’s book, which I have done elsewhere, [7] but to address his finding [1, Chapter 12] that “survivors … do not link what they have experienced to any particular religion.”

On a wider reading of the published NDE literature, I can find nothing to contradict Parnia’s assertion that the ‘life-review’ often experienced consists solely of a focus on our kind and unkind deeds towards other persons, and the ripple effects on third parties; it does not offer praise or condemnation for taking part in religious rituals or acts of worship.

Nevertheless, other published accounts do describe NDEs with explicitly religion-specific content, of at least three mutually exclusive kinds. We must exclude cases where the survivor simply interprets the Being of Light as Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Krishna or any other particular religious figure; something more intrinsic is required. Nevertheless we still find:

• (A) Accounts where the Being of Light explicitly identifies himself as Jesus, through naming Himself or wounds in the wrists - several are documented by Burke. [8]
• (B) Accounts which explicitly validate Islam – Kreps [9] reports one Muslim being instructed to ‘keep halal’ and another seeing God’s throne garlanded with the words ‘Muhammad is his prophet’.
• (C) Accounts in which the life review seems to include details of a previous earthly life, or the decision not to pass the point of no return includes revelation of a possible subsequent life – both of which are reported in Parnia’s book. [1]

Islam explicitly denies that Jesus is divine, and, together with Christianity, denies the existence of a cycle of reincarnation, therefore these are three mutually exclusive viewpoints.

Catholic excitement at the presence of many NDEs which seem to validate Christian eschatology must be tempered by the reality that other NDEs indicate support for Islam or reincarnation. Such mutually exclusive spiritual realities cannot be simultaneously true. Serious thinkers have speculated that we actually live in a simulation, [10-11] in which case the programmers could create inconsistent experiences, but there is no way to falsify this hypothesis if our creator(s) can rewrite the rules as we go along. Let us then confine ourselves to asking whether NDEs are merely physiological responses to the dying brain, or probative of our transphysical existence.

Many theories have been advanced for possible physiological reasons for the reported NDEs phenomena. [12] But none can offer a physical reason why fewer than 20% of cardiac arrest survivors return with an NDE account [2-3,6]. Nor can these explain the testimonies of blind people, including those blind from birth, who see visual details of verifiable earthly events as well as the afterlife. [13] Parnia’s studies include awareness of conversations which took place at a time of brainwave inactivity. The AWARE-I study [2] was thwarted in its attempt to discover whether survivors would notice hidden visual cues, because only 2 survivors reported an out-of-body experience. Other reports in the literature include post hoc confirmation of a patient’s dentures being placed in a cupboard [6] and a shoe on a window ledge. [14]

NDE survivors commonly report that during their experience they had a form of expanded consciousness and understood the reasons for many things, including how suffering in their own lives was consistent with the existence of a supreme Being whose nature is Love; yet they cannot retain all this knowledge on their return. [1] Perhaps to this conscious limitation we have to assume the reality of an unconscious tendency to add details from one’s own religious tradition. This could account for the presence of incompatible Christian and Islamic elements in different accounts. It may also mean that a survivor is wrong in identifying themself with a past human life revealed to them – even learning a verifiable detail about another person’s life does not constitute proof that your soul inhabited that person.

There remains, however, the presence of cases where the NDE survivor reports specific details of the afterlife which are not from their own religious tradition but correspond to what they later learn has been revealed in another religious tradition. In his 2023 work, [8] Burke includes the cases of Santosh, a Hindu who saw a cuboidal heavenly city with 12 gates as described in the Christian Bible’s Apocalypse; and Rajiv, a Hindu anaesthetist, whose NDE was guided by two angels who called themselves Michael and Raphael; the latter name is found only in deuterocanonical (and apocryphal) scriptures.

The reality that NDE accounts can be found supporting mutually exclusive religious viewpoints must make us cautious in using NDEs as ‘proof’ of any religious perspective. An NDE may be a trigger to embrace a religious tradition of which a person was previously aware, but actively resisted or did not take seriously; in this regard NDEs would merely be like any other possible catalyst of a religious conversion. Therefore we should read cautiously cases like that of Swidiq, [8] a Muslim apologist well-aware of Christianity, who was rescued from a hellish NDE by Jesus and later become an Anglican minister.

Those few cases where specific knowledge of another religious tradition is imparted, such as Rajiv and Santosh, so far seem to support Christianity. This gives rise to a falsifiable hypothesis: “When an NDE imparts knowledge of specific details of the afterlife which correspond to the teachings of a religion not at that time known to the survivor, the details will be consistent with Christian revelation.”

This hypothesis does not prove the objective reality of the Christian afterlife, only that such reported details are part of the consistent phenomena reported following an NDE. (This raises questions about how eschatological writings may have been shaped by the accounts of ancient NDE survivors). Nevertheless, it would add a third objective element to the two which can already be asserted about NDEs: that a minority of near-death survivors recall elements of a consistent set of phenomena; and some NDE survivors report verifiable facts about this world, despite there being no plausible mechanism for their physical senses to have acquired such knowledge.

Incautious use of NDE accounts can be used to justify Christianity too freely (Burke [8] ignores the literature on Muslim NDEs [9]) – but it can also be used to dismiss revealed religions too quickly. Parnia [1] may not have found survivors who link their experience to any particular religion, but the wider literature contains many such cases; and so far it seems that if the survivor has been imparted specific details from a religious perspective contrary to their own, it will have been from a Christian one. As for whether NDEs are truly a taste of the afterlife – we shall all find out eventually!