Tuesday, August 5, 2025

Near-Death Experiences Cannot Prove An Eternal Afterlife

There is no way to know that there is, or is not, an afterlife, as well as which logical possibility would be the case if there is.  That is, this is unknowable unless one was omniscient or lacked very particular epistemological limitations.  Near-death experiences provide a level of potential hearsay evidence, which is not the same as logical proof, but one thing is sometimes erroneously claimed about these enigmatic encounters with peaceful or "hellish" imagery or sensations: that the afterlife in question has no end.  However, if someone is really physically dead and medical personnel revive them or a spiritual being tells them it is not their "time", they did not experience this forever.  How could they know when it would end or if it would?

This is a key aspect of such experiences, whether or not they are immersions into a genuine afterlife (which I emphasize would mean that the Bible is wrong about the state after death prior to resurrection [1]), that entirely contradicts the idea that they could prove an afterlife of eternal torment.  Even then, I will add, they would not prove the existence of an afterlife of any kind to someone else told about the near-death experience afterward.  There is a host of epistemological barriers to knowing if there is an afterlife beyond the time-restricted nature of reported near-death experiences (or one's own, if applicable!).  But if someone truly was in an afterlife, and they were revived, then they were absolutely not in that afterlife for eternity!  Near-death experiences one way or another could not illuminate anything about whether anyone will endure eternal torment, however sensationalistic the idea might be.

Likewise, a finite experience with a positive afterlife before coming back to biological life could prove nothing about whether this too would last forever.  There is simply nothing about the nature of an unembodied soul that by logical necessity has to be eternal.  Perhaps the mind dies after a given amount of time, or at after a varying duration for different individuals.  Perhaps God or some other being actively extinguishes them even if for amoral reasons.  The vast spectrum of logical possibilities about what an afterlife could entail is routinely ignored, in part since many people, often enslaved to assumptions promoted by popular culture, believe that an afterlife could only be a set of binary destinies or must be eternal (the Biblical afterlives are binary, but only one is eternal [2]).

It is likely reading religious texts with the philosophical assumption that a soul must be eternal if it persists after biological death--or a desire for this to be true out of love for some people and fury towards others--that in turn influences the stories of popular culture, which then influences how non-rationalists approach texts like the Bible all over again.  Near-death experiences of a frightening kind then might seem to those experiencing or hearing of them like they "confirm" an eternal existence of the soul and some sort of eternal torture.  Of course, even if the soul lives eternally apart from the body after the latter's death, this would not mean the afterlife setting will never change.

Logic necessitates all the same that a temporal experience, in a real afterlife or not, does not prove that there is eternal life in either bliss or agony ahead for anyone.  Even if someone genuinely died and God or some other being in the afterlife told someone that short of bodily resurrection, they will be there forever, this is hearsay.  It might be true, yes, because this does not contradict logical axioms.  Nothing logically requires that this is true regardless, and, yet again, a finite duration of experience never proves that one's consciousness will never perish.  Were this to happen, though, a consciousness would not longer be around to perceive anything, so it would not be capable of thinking about this matter!


[1].  See passages like Ecclesiastes 9:5, 10, Job 3:11-19, 14:10-12, Psalm 6:5, and Daniel 12:2, which I address more directly in various posts tagged "Soul Sleep".

[2].  For instance, see Daniel 12:2, John 3:16, and Romans 6:23.  I have thoroughly written about many aspects of such verses and their ramifications in posts such as those tagged under "Annihilationism".

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