Richard John Neuhaus, who died a few years ago, reports a near-death experience in his book, As I Lay Dying: Meditations Upon Returning (Basic Books, 2002, pp. 112-115):
It was a couple of days after leaving intensive care, and it was night. I could hear patients in adjoining rooms moaning and mumbling and occasionally calling out; the surrounding medical machines were pumping and sucking and bleeping as usual. Then, all of a sudden, I was jerked into an utterly lucid state of awareness. I was sitting up in the bed staring intently into the darkness, although in fact I knew my body was lying flat. What I was staring at was a color like blue and purple, and vaguely in the form of hanging drapery. By the drapery were two “presences.” I saw them and yet did not see them, and I cannot explain that. But they were there, and I knew that I was not tied to the bed. I was able and prepared to get up and go somewhere. And then the presences—one or both of them, I do not know—spoke. This I heard clearly. Not in an ordinary way, for I cannot remember anything about the voice. But the message was beyond mistaking: “Everything is ready now.”
That was it. They waited for a while, maybe for a minute. Whether they were waiting for a response or just waiting to see whether I had received the message, I don’t know. “Everything is ready now.” It was not in the form of a command, nor was it an invitation to do anything. They were just letting me know. Then they were gone, and I was again flat on my back with my mind racing wildly. I had an iron resolve to determine right then and there what had happened. Had I been dreaming? In no way. I was then and was now as lucid and wide awake as I had ever been in my life.
Tell me that I was dreaming and you might as well tell me that I was dreaming that I wrote the sentence before this one. Testing my awareness, I pinched myself hard, and ran through the multiplication tables, and recalled the birth dates of my seven brothers and sisters, and my wits were vibrantly about me. The whole thing had lasted three or four minutes, maybe less. I resolved at that moment that I would never, never let anything dissuade me from the reality of what had happened. Knowing myself, I expected I would later be inclined to doubt it. It was an experience as real, as powerfully confirmed by the senses, as anything I have ever known. That was some seven years ago. Since then I have not had a moment in which I was seriously tempted to think it did not happen. It happened—as surely, as simply, as undeniably as it happened that I tied my shoelaces this morning. I could as well deny the one as deny the other, and were I to deny either I would surely be mad.
“Everything is ready now.” I would be thinking about that incessantly during the months of convalescence. My theological mind would immediately go to work on it. They were angels, of course. Angelos [ἄγγελος ángelos, L. angelus] simply means “messenger.” There were no white robes or wings or anything of that sort. As I said, I did not see them in any ordinary sense. But there was a message; therefore there were messengers. Clearly, the message was that I could go somewhere with them. Not that I must go or should go, but simply that they were ready if I was. Go where? To God, or so it seemed. I understood that they were ready to get me ready to see God. It was obvious enough to me that I was not prepared, in my present physical and spiritual condition, for the beatific vision, for seeing God face to face. They were ready to get me ready. This comports with the doctrine of purgatory, that there is a process of purging and preparation to get us ready to meet God. I should say that their presence was entirely friendly. There was nothing sweet or cloying, and there was no urgency about it. It was as though they just wanted to let me know. The decision was mine as to when or whether I would take them up on the offer.
A skeptical response: Near-death experiences (NDEs) prove nothing for two reasons. First, no experience of any external matter of empirical fact can prove its own veridicality. Put otherwise, no such experience can guarantee the reality of its intentional object. Neuhaus had an intensely vivid experience as of two angels delivering him a message. The two angels and their messaging were the intentional object, or, if you prefer, the content of his episode of experiencing that night. But the unforgettable force and vivacity of his experiencing is consistent with the object of the experiencing being merely intentional and not real. Add to this the fact that the unusualness and rarity of near-death experiences entail their non-coherence and non-integration with the massive interconnected evidences of ordinary experience, and you have a powerful reason for dismissing such experiences as transient mental aberrations caused by a body and brain in extremis.
Apart from this general consideration, there is a specific reason why near-death experiences do not prove that one will survive death: the subject, though near death, is not dead! One who 'returns from the dead' has nothing veridical to report about the 'far side' for the simple reason that he was not dead. He did not make it to the 'far side' if there is one. The truly dead do not return, and those who do return were not truly dead. So it can be plausibly argued that near-death experiences give their subjects no rationally compelling (rationally coercive, philosophically dispositive) reason to believe in an afterlife.
Skepticism about the skeptical response: A consistent skepticism calls into question everything including the power of reason that the skeptic himself must rely upon. If he trusts his power to doubt as a power revelatory of something true (e.g. that near-death experiences are justifiably dismissable as transient mental aberrations), then he is not being consistently and radically skeptical. He is stuck with a dogmatic posit, namely, the conviction that his reason is utterly trustworthy.
It may therefore be argued that doubts about the 'far side' are not to be trusted since skeptics are too much alive, too much in the grip of the ego-illusion, too tightly embraced by the conviction that this world of ordinary experience is all there is and can be. So if those who are near death are in no position to know what it is like to be dead — if there is something it is like to be dead — for the reason that they are not dead, then those who are full of the concupiscent “pride of life” (1 John 2:16) are equally in no position to know what it is like to be dead precisely because they are alive.
It cuts both ways. If the skeptic says that Fr. Neuhaus was not dead when he had his eldritch experience, then it ought to be pointed out to the skeptic that he is too much alive and enamored of this world to be a trustworthy source of information about the 'far side' if there is one. If not being dead disqualifies, then so does being alive. If the weakened state of Neuhaus' body and brain casts doubt on the veridicality of his near-death experience, then the excess of animal spirits of the materialist worldling casts doubt on his opinions about spiritual matters. His being sunk in his body and enslaved to its lusts blinds his spiritual eyes. If the skeptic calls the believer credulous, the believer can call the skeptic spiritually blind. Even if the skeptic is not enslaved to his bodily lusts, he is almost sure to be arrogantly proud of his intellect as almost all intellectuals are. The spiritual blindness deriving from pride is even worse than that deriving from lust.
The truth may be that the ego-weakening and loss of control that the approach of death brings about first makes possible certain glimpses of reality that cannot be had by those whose egos are in the full bloom of their worldly vitality. So, yes, those near death are not yet dead, but they are perhaps in a better epistemic position than those who are fully alive. It is an ancient thought, common to many wisdom traditions, and their ascetic practices, that mortification (literally: deadening) aids spiritual perception. Those fully alive to the world and fully claimed by their robust bodies cannot but take the sense world as the ne plus ultra of reality.
But on a topic like this nothing can be proven one way or another. It is reasonable to be a materialist scoffer, but also reasonable to be a spiritualist believer. Neuhaus was reasonable to take his near-death experience as confirming something like what he believed all along. Since nothing can be proven on this topic one way or the other, and since the opposing positions are both reasonable, one must in the end decide what one will believe and how one will live. Faith goes beyond the knowable and the provable.
Contrary to what some people maintain, a limited doxastic voluntarism is true: belief on a topic like this one is within the control of the will. Those who have near-death and other mystical/religious experiences are free to form or not form beliefs in accordance with them. And those who do not have such experiences are free to form or not form debunking beliefs. This is not to say that the truth of the matter is a matter of free, personal decision; what is a matter of decision is what one will believe and how one will comport oneself.
The imprudence of suspending judgment. Some, taking a page from the Pyrrhonians, will say that on a question like this one, where the arguments pro et contra balance and cancel, the reasonable course is to suspend judgment and rest in doxastic equipoise, neither affirming nor denying. That may well be the reasonable course for questions that are purely theoretical. Whether the “existing individual” (Kierkegaard) survives his bodily death, however, is not a purely theoretical question. We are not mere transcendental spectators of the passing scene but embodied participants embedded in it. The rationality appropriate to our situation as embodied participants is practical/prudential, not theoretical. An analogy may help.
Consider the case of a man dying of thirst in a desert. He comes upon two water sources. He knows (never mind how) that one is potable while the other is poisonous. But he does not know which is which, and he has no way of finding out. Should the man suspend belief, even unto death, since he has insufficient evidence for deciding between the two water sources? Let us suppose that our man is a philosopher and thus committed to a life of the highest rationality.
What has been called absolute evidentialism implies that the desert wanderer should suspend judgment and withhold assent: he may neither believe nor disbelieve of either source that it is potable or poisonous on pain of either irrationality or an offence against the ethics of belief.
On one way of looking at the matter, suspension of belief — and doing nothing in consequence — would clearly be the height of irrationality in a case like this. The desert wanderer must simply drink from one of the sources and hope for the best. Clearly, by drinking from one (but not both) of the sources, his chances of survival are one half, while his chances of survival from drinking from neither are precisely zero. By simply opting for one, he maximizes his chances of reality-contact, and thereby his chances of survival. Surely a man who wants to live is irrational if he fails to perform a simple action that will give him a 50-50 chance of living when the alternative is certain death.
He may be theoretically irrational by so behaving, but he is prudentially rational. And in a case like this prudential rationality trumps the other kind.
Cases like this are clear counterexamples to evidentialist theories of rationality according to which rationality requires always apportioning belief to evidence and never believing on insufficient evidence. In the above case the evidence is the same for either belief and yet it would be irrational to suspend belief. Therefore, rationality for an embodied human agent (as opposed to rationality for a disembodied transcendental spectator) cannot require the apportioning of belief to evidence in all cases, as W. K. Clifford famously demanded. There are situations in which one must decide what to believe on grounds other than the evidential. Will I believe that source A is potable? Or will I believe that source B is potable?
In terms made famous by the American pragmatist William James, the option is live, forced, and momentous. (It is not like the question whether the number of ultimate particles in the universe is odd or even, which is neither live, forced, nor momentous.) An adequate theory of rationality, it would seem, must allow for believing beyond the evidence. It must return the verdict that in some cases, to refuse to believe beyond the evidence is positively irrational.
The argument summarized. The question is whether NDEs prove the reality of their intentional objects. In the Neuhaus case, did his experience that night in the hospital prove the existence of angelic messengers? I have argued in the negative on the ground that there are good reasons to doubt the veridicality of NDEs. But I also argued that these good reasons for doubt do not prove the non-veridicality of NDEs. So while the reasons are good, they are not rationally coercive. Theoretically, it’s a wash. But a man on his death bed having vivid experiences as of angelic messengers prepared to conduct him beyond this vale of misery is not a merely transcendental spectator but an indigent soul with interests, chiefly an interest in not becoming nothing forever, or ending up in a ‘place’ or ‘state’ that he would find ‘unacceptable.’ And so while theoretically it’s a wash, practically and prudentially the man should exercise his will to believe, to invoke a title from James, and execute the leap of faith. What, after all, does he have to lose? He is on his deathbed aware as never before of the nullity of a passing world that can offer him nothing. It never could offer him much of anything, but now the hora mortis, the hour of death, makes this truth inescapably luminous by contrast to the night about to fall.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 45/45e: Glaube Du! Es schadet nicht. “Go on, believe! It does no harm.”