Why Dismissing Near-Death Experiences may Undermine Science Itself.

[Rational Voyager]

There’s a recurring tactic some atheists use when faced with phenomena that challenge their worldview. They dismiss near-death experiences (NDEs) as nothing more than hallucinations produced by shared brain chemistry and psychology. They wave away universal moral intuitions as evolutionary illusions. At first glance, this might sound like a tidy explanation, but it carries a fatal flaw. This kind of blanket dismissal doesn’t just undermine NDEs or morality; it undermines the very foundation of human knowledge itself.

Think about what we call objective evidence of something as obvious as the sun. Every answer ultimately comes down to shared human perception. We all see its light, feel its warmth, watch its daily path across the sky, and confirm its existence through telescopes and instruments. The validity of all this rests on intersubjective agreement, different people, across cultures and contexts, consistently perceiving the same thing.

Now compare that to NDEs. Across religious and cultural boundaries–Hindus, Jews, atheists, agnostics, Christians–people report strikingly similar experiences: moving through a tunnel, reviewing their lives, meeting deceased loved ones, feeling detached from their bodies. These aren’t random, isolated mental events; they’re structured, recurring, and cross-cultural. In fact, this kind of consistency is precisely what we mean when we talk about objectivity. Millions of people are reporting something deeply coherent.

If we dismiss NDEs simply because they can be traced to shared human neuropsychology, then we must apply the same logic to everything else, including our perception of the sun. After all, our experience of the external world also arises through shared human neuropsychology. Rejecting NDEs on those grounds means rejecting all human perception, and with it, science, reason, and truth.

The pillars of science rest not on direct access to some external, mind-independent reality, but on shared human experience. Verification happens when multiple observers agree on what they perceive under controlled conditions. Falsification occurs when shared perception contradicts a theory’s predictions. Repeatability means the same person can observe the same result again; reproducibility means others can do the same independently. Instruments don’t bypass the mind–they simply extend it. A telescope, thermometer, or detector translates phenomena into a form we can perceive and agree upon.

This is why philosophers like Kant argued that we cannot separate subjectivity from science. Our only access to the world is through consciousness. We have no way of knowing what reality might be like if our consciousness were different–say, if we had alien minds–or what reality is outside of consciousness altogether. There’s no empirical or metaphysical proof of an external world; there’s only a pragmatic decision to treat it as real because doing so works.

Once you see this clearly, the double standard becomes obvious. NDEs involve shared, consistent, and universal perceptions–just like our experience of the physical world. The difference is one of scale, not kind. Around 100 million people have reported NDEs, compared to billions who experience the sun. But if 100 million people can supposedly be hallucinating, why couldn’t 7 billion also be mistaken? A bigger number doesn’t guarantee reliability.

And not every scientific phenomenon is experienced directly by everyone anyway. Take gravitational waves. No ordinary person has seen them. Only specialized teams of scientists detect them through incredibly sensitive instruments. Yet we trust these results, not because we’ve personally verified them, but because the observations are consistent and reproducible across independent experts worldwide.

If we accept this standard for scientific data, why not apply it to NDEs? Tens of Millions of people across cultures report remarkably similar experiences–tunnels, light, life reviews, encounters with the deceased. If shared perceptual consistency is the bedrock of scientific trust, then dismissing NDEs while embracing other shared observations is intellectually inconsistent.

If you only believe what you can verify/experience yourself, then you shouldn't believe in quarks, gravitational waves, or the expansion of the universe. But no one actually does that. We trust the perceptual experiences of scientists because they are consistent, universal, and cross-culturally similar.

And saying NDEs are just hallucinations because scientists can make someone see tunnels or lights by stimulating the brain is a weak argument. Just because you can make the brain produce a certain image does not mean the real thing is fake. You could stimulate someone’s brain at night and make them see a bright sun, but that does not mean the sun is a hallucination. It only proves that the brain is the tool through which we experience reality, not that the thing we see is not real.

And NDEs are not like random drug trips or hallucinations anyway. People’s brains store NDEs the same way they store real experiences, not like dreams or delusions. These experiences are clear, structured, deeply meaningful, and often change people’s lives afterward. Scientists have never been able to fully recreate an actual NDE through brain stimulation. At best they can trigger bits and pieces, but never the whole thing.
https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14740

So the brain stimulation argument does not work. If seeing a fake sun in a lab does not make the real sun fake, then seeing a tunnel through brain stimulation does not make real NDEs fake either. The two are not the same.

Altered brain chemistry ≠ hallucinations.
Altered brain chemistry may be = access to another reality.
How do you know that your brain chemistry now is not altered?
You assume normal waking brain chemistry is the baseline of truth, and anything different is illusory. But how do we know that baseline is reality? Our current brain chemistry is itself just one state, and we have no independent external vantage point to prove it corresponds to reality better than another state. You infer objectivity based on what I said; shared consistent universal cross-culturally similar perceptual experiences regardless of the corresponding brain state.

So altered ≠ unreal by default.
An altered state could be hallucination or it could be a different mode of perceiving some real structure, and the only way to judge is by the consistency, coherence, and cross-checkability of experiences, not by whether they match waking neurochemistry.