Who Says There is No Proof of Life After Death?

The Christian Diarist ^ | August 9, 2015 | JP

[CHRISTIAN DIARIST]

Ivan Turing is a tech billionaire. Dr. Carolyn Tyler is a cardiothoracic surgeon. Their divine appointment informs the plot of “Proof,” a dramatic series with decidedly religious overtones, which airs on TNT.

Turing, played by the actor Matthew Modine, is terminally ill. He wants to know whether there is life after death. So he recruits Tyler, played by the actress Jennifer Beals, to investigate.

The surgeon reluctantly agrees. But only after the billionaire (who bears a striking similarity to the late Steve Jobs) makes her an offer she can’t refuse – leaving his vast fortune after he dies to the hospital where she practices.

Turing chooses Tyler because he secretly knows the surgeon’s back story. She is one year removed from the accidental death of her teen-aged son. And she herself had a near-death experience (NDE) when traveling abroad on an ocean liner that capsized during a tsunami. During her NDE, Tyler saw her deceased son reaching out his hand to her, welcoming her to the afterlife. But later she attributed what she experienced to hallucination.

That’s how those without a faith life, those skeptical of life after death, explain away evidence of the hereafter. But those of us who are Christ followers know better. For the Scripture tells us that God “has put eternity in (our) hearts.”

And as to skeptics who insist there is absolutely no scientific evidence of life after death, they are dead wrong.

Indeed, scientists at the University of Southampton spent four years examining more than 2,000 patients who suffered cardiac arrests in 15 hospitals in Great Britain, the United States and Austria. It was largest ever medical study of near-death and out of body experiences.

In findings published last year in the journal Resuscitation, the scientists reported that nearly 40 percent of those who survived described some kind of “awareness” during the time they were clinically dead, before doctors restarted their hearts.

One particular patient, a 57-year-old man, recalled leaving his body entirely and watching his resuscitation from the corner of the operating room. Despite being “dead” for three minutes, he recounted the actions of the nursing staff in detail and described the sound of machines in the OR. That cannot be attributed to anything other than life after death, suggested Dr. Sam Parnia, who led the study. “We know,” he said, “the brain can’t function when the heart stops beating,” as it did in the cases of those who suffered cardiac arrest, who lived to attest to their near-death experiences.

The Southampton study corroborates the testimony of Dr. Eben Alexander, the Harvard-trained brain neurosurgeon who authored the 2012 book, “Proof of Heaven,” which topped the New York Times bestsellers list.

Like the fictional Dr. Tyler, the real-life Dr. Alexander was skeptical of near-death and out-of-body experiences, dismissing them as figments of the imagination of medicated patients.

Then, Dr. Alexander contracted a severe case of bacterial meningitis, which put him in a coma for seven days, during which, he said, he experienced the afterlife. Like the “man in Christ,” according to the Apostle Paul, who either “in the body” or “out of the body,” he didn’t exactly know which, was “caught up to the third heaven.”

The third heaven, to which Paul referred on second reference as “Paradise,” sounds very much like the heavenly realm Dr. Alexander visited during his coma. In that realm, wrote the neurosurgeon, “Love is, without a doubt, the basis of everything.”

Indeed, Dr. Alexander continued, “This is the reality of realities, the incomprehensibly glorious truth of truths that lives and breathes at the core of everything that exists or will ever exist, and no remotely accurate understanding of who and what we are can be achieved by anyone who does not know it, and embody it in all of their actions.”

That is what awaits the Christ follower on the other side of the grave. And to one who has faith, no further explanation is necessary. And to one without faith, no plausible explanation is possible.

[Elsie]

John 20:24-29    New Living Translation (NLT)

Jesus Appears to Thomas

²⁴ One of the twelve disciples, Thomas (nicknamed the Twin),^[a] was not with the others when Jesus came. ²⁵ They told him, “We have seen the Lord!”

But he replied, “I won’t believe it unless I see the nail wounds in his hands, put my fingers into them, and place my hand into the wound in his side.”

²⁶ Eight days later the disciples were together again, and this time Thomas was with them. The doors were locked; but suddenly, as before, Jesus was standing among them. “Peace be with you,” he said. ²⁷ Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and look at my hands. Put your hand into the wound in my side. Don’t be faithless any longer. Believe!”

²⁸ “My Lord and my God!” Thomas exclaimed.

²⁹ Then Jesus told him, “You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who believe without seeing me.”

 

Footnotes:

1. 20:24 Greek Thomas, who was called Didymus.

 

 

[Elsie]

LORD; we still have Thomas among us.

You said that where two are three are gathered in your Name; that you'd be with them.

Well; I know that MORE than two or three FReepers, that believe on your name; have gathered in this thread to pray for those who do NOT believe.

Matthew 28:17, 20   King James Version (KJV)

 

¹⁷ And when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted. 

²⁰ Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

‎ Isaiah 55:11
So shall my word be that goes forth out of my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent.