Do Near-Death Experiences support Religion or God's existence?

[AgnosticBoy]

The near-death experience (NDE) is an experience that occurs during impending death when no sensory experience should be possible. These experiences tend to visions of Heaven, a bright light, seeing deceased loved ones, etc. Many theists claim that this validates the existence of an afterlife. Many skeptics claim that these experiences are hallucinations produced by a dying brain. Which side is right?

For Debate:
1. Are NDEs real? (And I don't just mean the experience being real but also that the experience is of an objective reality).
2. If real, how does it validate religious claims or God's existence?

 

[AgnosticBoy]

1. Are NDEs real? (And I don't just mean the experience being real but also that the experience is of an objective reality).

The one way that I would accept that NDEs are real is if they are verified with objective evidence, like the NDEr having information that should not have had given their condition, and that being verified by a third party or some objective measure. Some NDE experiments have involved placing images on shelves that are right above the patient's bed. That way, if the patient has floats above their body, then they should be able to see the image. To date, I have not found any studies reporting that someone saw the target images.

BUT, there is at least one verified NDE case involving someone being able to recount details of their cardiac arrest, when during that condition, they would've been unconscious. That case is reported in Dr. Sam Parnia's AWARE study. Here's an excerpt of that:

...a 57 year old man described the perception of observing events from the top corner of the room and continued to experience a sensation of looking down from above. He accurately described people, sounds, and activities from his resuscitation (Table 2 provides quotes from this interview). His medical records corroborated his accounts and specifically supported his descriptions and the use of an automated external defibrillator (AED). Based on current AED algorithms, this likely corresponded with up to 3 min of conscious awareness during CA and CPR.2 As both CA events had occurred in non-acute areas without shelves further analysis of the accuracy of VA based on the ability to visualize the images above or below the shelf was not possible.

[emphasis added]

I brought up this case in another thread and some dismissed it as being "anecdotal". It took me using their own sources to point out that anecdotal evidence does not involve objective evidence (e.g. medical records).

2. If real, how does it validate religious claims or God's existence?

Based on the above information, I not only accept that NDEs are real but that they also indicate that consciousness can persist without brain activity. The problem is that we don't know how to measure consciousness (like subjective experiences) directly since we only measure its correlates, i.e. brain activity.

Another excerpt from Dr. Parnia's AWARE study...

The finding that conscious awareness may be present during CA is intriguing and supports other recent studies that have indicated consciousness may be present in patients despite clinically undetectable consciousness.9–15 For instance, implicit learning with the absence of explicit recall has been demonstrated in patients with undetectable consciousness,9–13 while others have demonstrated conscious awareness during persistent vegetative states (PVS).14,15