Is Heaven Real?

A neurosurgeon's near-death experience

Eben Alexander:

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.

But that dimension—in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states—is there. It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey.

Two questions arise.  Were Dr. Alexander's experiences while in the coma state veridical?  This question must be asked since the mere having of an experience is no guarantee of the reality of its object.  The second question is whether the experiences, veridical or not, occurred wholly independently of brain functioning.  The two questions are connected.  If it could be shown that the experiences were generated by a minimally (mal)functioning brain, then then this would be  a reason to doubt the veridicality of the experiences.  Analogy: if I know that my unusual experiences are the result of the ingesting of LSD-25, then I have reason to doubt the veridicality of the experiences. The author deals with these connected worries in the following passage:

All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations. According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.

Although I reject materialism about the mind and consider it reasonable to believe that conscious experiences do not require a physical substratum, and that it is therefore possible to have such experiences while one is in a disembodied state, I don't think that the author has proven that the possibility was actual in his case.  For how does he know that his cortex was "simply off"? Failure to detect the functioning of the cortex does not entail that the cortex was not functioning.  It might have been functioning below the detectability of the instruments and might have been generating the experiences all along. This is a special case of the methodological maxim that absence of evidence is not conclusive evidence of absence. It is evidence, but not conclusive evidence, and the latter is what we want.

A second concern of mine is this.  How does Dr. Alexander know that his wonderful experiences didn't suddenly arise just as the cortex was coming back into action  just before his eyes popped open?  So even if his cortex was for a long time completely nonfunctional, the experience he remembers could have been simply a dream that arose while the cortex was coming back 'on line.'

My point is not that the doctor has not given us evidence that mental functioning occurs in the absence of brain activity; he has.  I could even grant that it is ‘good’ evidence. My point is that the evidence is not rationally compelling or conclusive. The evidence that Alexander adduces does not suffice to settle the matter.

Our predicament in this life is such that we cannot prove any of the following and many more besides: that God exists; that human life has an ultimate meaning; that the will is free; that morality is not an illusion; and that we survive our bodily deaths.  But we cannot prove the opposites either.  It is in some cases reasonable to maintain both limbs of a contradiction. Thus it is reasonable to maintain that God exists, but also reasonable to maintain that God does not exist. Could one and the same person maintain both limbs of a logical contradiction? Yes, if the ‘maintenance’ is performed at different times. It is possible because actual. Esse ad posse valet illatio. Is the ‘maintenance’ possible at the same time by one and the same person? No. At the same time by different persons? Yes.

And so on down the line for a number of logically contradictory theses that answer ultimate questions. This is not to say that a logical contradiction can be reasonably maintained; no proposition of the form p & ~p can be reasonably maintained, pace dialetheism. It is to say that in some cases, both conjuncts of propositions of the form p & ~p are reasonably maintained by different people at different times, by different people at the same time, and by one and the same person at different times.

As for the question whether NDEs prove the existence of heaven, many arguments and evidential considerations can be adduced.  Among the evidence is a wide range of religious, mystical, and paranormal experiences including near-death and out-of-body experiences.  The cumulative case is impressive but not conclusive.  It renders reasonable, but does not establish.  Philosophers, of course, are ever in quest of 'knock-down' or rationally coercive arguments.  This is because you are no philosopher if you don't crave objective certainty.  Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben  nicht leben! Edmund Husserl once exclaimed in the pages of his private journal.  “Without certainty I just can’t live!” He was the real thing as was Augustine and so many others. But so far no 'knock-down' arguments have been found with respect to the present question and many others.

In the final analysis, lacking proof one way or the other, you must decide what you will believe and how you will live when it comes to these ultimate questions. De-ciding, one cuts off reflection and acts, not like an actor on a stage, but like a flesh-and-blood agent in the terrifying but exhilarating crap storm of real life. This has been my line for a long time now. I see no reason to abandon it. But it is not a dogmatic pronunciamento but a life-guiding, but tentatively held, conviction to be ongoingly examined and tested against objections. That is the way of the philosopher.

And so I say one more time: in the end, one must decide what one will believe and how one will live. The will must come into it, but only after the intellect has done its work. There is nothing ‘arbitrary’ about these life decisions, renewed day-by-day, although they are cases of liberum abitrium indifferentiae. Within limits, we are free, not only with respect to what we do, but also with respect to what we believe in the sense of affirm, assert, endorse. That makes me a limited doxastic voluntarist.

Finally, I will add that the 'living' is more important than the 'believing.'  It is far better to live in a manner to deserve immortality than to hold beliefs and give arguments about the matter.

Related:

Eben Alexander’s work can be found online, here, for example.