Posted on 08/09/2015 12:20:13 PM PDT by 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.
There is no “died on the operating table and came back”.
If someone “came back “ they were not dead. Death is that from which you don’t come back.
There is no “near death”. It is binary. dead/not dead.
To date, there is no proof. It is a matter of faith.
“Death is that from which you don’t come back.”
So saith Lazarus.
You’ve defined things in a way that there can never be proof.
I find the subject fascinating. It at least gives a purpose and reason to keep moving forward.
I do believe in life after death.
Look at Megyn Kelly. She’s Pontius Pilate reincarnated.
http://news.discovery.com/human/life/from-the-deepest-coma-new-brain-activity-found-130918.htm
The hippocampus is the gateway for memory. However, we do have souls. That is the issue here.
Then define "dead".
When the heart quits beating? Lots of people have been there, done that, and are still walking around.
When brain activity ceases? How do you measure that? Is that all brain activity, or just higher function?
(arguably, the latter is prevalent among the living).
At any rate, short of decomposition and decay, where do you draw the line?
Way to use a logical argument to dismiss factual evidence!!!
From now on, physicists don’t need to experiment - they can just postulate logical arguments!!
Thanks for the new realm of scientific inquiry!
/s
I say there isn’t proof. The whole concept is faith, not proof. Anyone who says they went somewhere and encountered Jesus, who told them to come back, is either a fraud, or had some kind of dream in a dying brain.
This is just Christian porn and is always bound to disappoint.
In the end, its about faith, nothing else.
Thanks for sharing your faith.
Near death is not death. If it were death, it wouldn’t be near death, it would just be death. But it’s not death, it’s near death.
It is your logic that is fraudulent. The debate continues as to the veracity of reported NEDs, while lack of proof does not translate into fraud. Similarly, you can say that there is no proof of extraterrestrial lifebut that alone does not mean all reports (which i am not affirming) are fraud.
In addition, faith as revealed by Scripture is not blind faith but confidence based upon a degree of evidential warrant. God did not call Israel into covenantal obedience until after He manifested His reality. And those who turn to the Lord Jesus with broken and contrite hearts to save them by His sinless shed blood realize changing in heart and life which correspond to the promises of the risen Savior, and overall go beyond mere naturalistic causes. Thanks be to God.
Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance [pistis] unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead. (Acts 17:31)
Death is a state of existence involving separation.
The first death is the separation of the soul and spirit from the body.
In God’s Plan, if it isn’t time for you to die, you will not suffer the first death.
live...
Jesus' friend Lazarus shudda wrote a book...
Hold that thought; Thomas.
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