Near-Death Experiences (Part Three)

If near-death experiences are valid, why does everyone who is medically resuscitated or almost dead not have one?  This needs to be understood as it relates to logical necessity and possibility irrespective of Christian theology and then as it relates to Christianity, the religion that is both consistent with rationalistic truths and that has much historical evidence in its favor.  First of all, it is not true by logical necessity in itself that if there is an afterlife, every single person would receive it.  If Christianity or something similar is true, then yes, all people who die have some sort of afterlife, even if only for several minutes or some other limited duration to receive judgment and then be annihilated (Revelation 20:11-15).  This is if Christianity is true.  Perhaps the uncaused cause only grants some people an afterlife of any sort.  It could also be the case that the uncaused cause allows some other being to arbitrarily decide to bestow an afterlife upon some of the human dead.

Second, just because not everyone mentions that they had a near-death experience does not mean that they did not have one that they distinctly recall.  Moreover, those who genuinely have no memory of such an experience could have still had one.  Whether or not the Biblical afterlife of eternal bliss in New Jerusalem or torment leading to eternal death (nonexistence) in the lake of fire await us, people being revived from death or from near-death states without any memory of an afterlife would not mean that they did not experience a conscious existence.  God or some other sort of supernatural being could have overridden their memories or they could have simply forgotten as the neurological activity correlating to mental phenomena (which is immaterial) resumed.  This epistemological barrier goes both ways--remembering an afterlife after resuscitation does not mean there is one, or that it is that particular kind of afterlife, and not remembering an afterlife does not mean there is not one.

As far as Biblical stories go, however, none of the people resurrected by Jesus, such as the daughter of Jairus in Mark 5 and Lazarus in John 11, say anything about experiencing an immediate afterlife of any kind.  If this was as directly as the Bible touched upon the status of the dead between now and their resurrection (Daniel 12:2), it would not explicitly establish that there is no conscious experience until the resurrection, but it would be evidence for what is sometimes called soul sleep.  In light of the multiple verses that clearly refer to death as an unconscious nonexistence or sleep (some of which are mentioned below), it is very weighty that none of these resurrected individuals hint at the opposite.  Even the spirit of the prophet Samuel, summoned by the witch of Endor in 1 Samuel 28, is surprised when he is called up, perhaps because he was revived as an unembodied spirit by being stirred up before his resurrection.

It is indeed very significant that, in addition to the Bible saying with almost the same level of directness that the dead are not conscious until their resurrection (Job 3:1-19, Ecclesiastes 9:5-10, Mark 5:35-40) as it does that people will come to an end in hell (Ezekiel 18:4, 2 Peter 2:6), its resurrection accounts do not involve people saying they saw a proto-heaven or proto-hell before the final judgment.  To clarify, the doctrines of annihilationism and soul sleep do not have equal directness of clarity because, while the nature of hell and Yahweh's cosmic justice is very blatantly affirmed by prophets, Jesus, and Paul (and on a repeated basis, though only one direct comment is enough), the references to the dead sleeping or being in a state of nonexistence could be the assumptions of people who has not know what comes after death in the case of Job and the author of Ecclesiastes and a metaphor in the case of Jesus and Paul.  However, this seems unlikely, and the people who pretend to take the Bible literally whenever the text is consistent with this are sometimes the first to disregard the literal statements suggesting soul sleep.

Does this mean that all near-death experiences are illusions if Christianity is true?  No!  To a soul that dies and then is resurrected, it would seem like only a moment passed from the death of the body to resurrection before God, and there is nothing logically impossible about a consciousness perceiving the last position of its body upon awakening even if those circumstances happened long ago.  It could still be true that the "dead in Christ" see Yahweh and Jesus immediately upon death because their very next experience is that of their resurrection to eternal life.  Unless there is an afterlife that is vastly different for various individuals, at least some near-death experiences are mere mental perceptions while a person is almost dead, and even then, a person could not know from a near-death experience alone that there is an afterlife.  They would have to be dead and know with absolute certainty that they are dead, something they cannot even have when trying to know if the sensory world of this present life is as they perceive it.