What do atheists think about NDEs (Near-Death Experiences)?

Question

The most recent one I heard of is Bob Woodruff's NDE. The ABC reporter was severely injured in Iraq and, quote, "When the IED actually exploded, I don't remember that...But I do remember at that moment I saw my body floating below me and … a whiteness … I just saw something."

The whole article is here: http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=2904214&page=1&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

Answer 1

When the body and/or brain suffers serious trauma, the brain releases chemecals and endorphins to protect itself. These endorphins create a sense of dialated time and induce a dream-like state. "NDEs" have been artificially produced in labs before.

Dr. Karl Jansen has reproduced NDEs with ketamine, a short-acting hallucinogenic, dissociative anaesthetic. According to Dr. Jansen, ketamine can reproduce all the main features of the NDE, including travel through a dark tunnel into the light, the feeling that one is dead, communing with God, hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, strange noises, etc. This does not prove that there is no life after death, but it does prove that an NDE is not proof of an afterlife.

Answer 2

There has been documented cases of people floating above their bodies who later describe with great detail who was coming and going from the room and what people were saying in a different room. I recently read of a child who had a NDE and was able to
describe what was going on in her home several miles away. I am a Christian and have experienced God's prescence so I know that their is a higher realm after this life.

Answer 3

Some ''NDEs'' might be caused by the fact that people who ar near to death might have had some blood loss, when an alteration in blood pressure occurs you get weird lght-like images on your eyes, my wife suffers from migraines and when it begins she claims she sees weird lights blocking her view, she's been to a neurologist and he explained that it's called ''aura'' and it's a vision produced by the alterations on the blood vessels in the brain, the same could happen in a severe trauma where blood is lost and produce the same effect on one's vision, the other experience described by supposed ''NDEs'' survivors is a sense of calmness and relaxation and a sort of floating out of one's body, it's all effects of the brain's response to pain by releasing opiate-like drugs produced by our own bodies, like dopamine and serotonin, so it does have an explanation don't it..?

Answer 4

I've had an NDE, as it happens, and I am an atheist.

I think they're an interesting neurological side effect of trauma that pushes the brain into abnormal firing patterns, nothing more.

Answer 5

I've read that the brain reproduces certain images (like that of a tunnel of light) when it is starved of oxygen.

Science is beginning to understand this phenomenon. Just because we don't have the whole picture doesn't mean we need to impatiently "jump the gun" and guess that it means it involves angels, god, going to Heaven, or any other idea that just makes us feel good.

Answer 6

Susan Blackmore was convinced of her out-of-body experience for years...so much so that she put her entire academic experience to work trying to prove that it was real.

However, as she described on the podcast "Point of Inquiry," she instead discovered that there are rational explanations for such events, and that they are in fact neurological events that occur in the face of trauma.

If you want to read more about Susan's academic research into her own and others' out-of-body experiences, click here: http://www.pointofinquiry.org/?p=88

So to answer your question directly, I think that it was a horrible experience, and that to endure it would create a number of internal events that allow a person to "de-personalize" in the moment. Women who have been raped describe very similar experiences.

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Answer 7

I was in a car accident once. I regained consciousness in an ambulance, and the medic looked as though he had blue skin for about the first 4 or 5 minutes.
Now, he obviously didn't have blue skin.
I'd suffered a serious trauma and this was one of the temporary effects.

Answer 8

Sheer fantasy. Nothing more.
When we are out cold we dream all kinds of wierd things. Happened to me when I was in a near fatal car accident in 2003. At NO time did I associate any of it with an imaginary sky-pixie.

Answer 9

If they've been "brought back", then they were never truly dead. You can have no heartbeat, and be declared dead, but you're not truly dead until the brain dies. As long as the brain is alive, you can dream, process information, and hallucinate. If the brain dies, then that's it. They can't bring you back. It’s misleading to say that someone "died" if they've been brought back, because they were never really dead. I don't think what they "saw" was anything more than a dream or hallucination.

Answer 10

when I was an atheist and had an out of body experienance and I was not dead, so I had a vision with an angel when i was young, experience, I just thought I imagined the whole thing.