A scientist's experience of heaven

While many see compatibilities between science and religion, many others see conflict. An Oct. 15 article in Newsweek, “My Proof of Heaven” by Eben Alexander, tries to bridge that conflict in a dramatic way.

Alexander is a neurosurgeon who has taught at Harvard Medical School and other universities. He tells of an experience he had four years ago when he awoke with an intense headache. “Within hours,” he writes, “my entire cortex—the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human—had shut down.” Doctors at the local hospital determined that he had contracted a rare bacterial meningitis that had penetrated his cerebrospinal fluid, and the bacteria were eating his brain.

For seven days he lay in a deep coma, and his higher-order brain functions were totally offline. Then, as his doctors weighed whether or not to discontinue treatment, his eyes popped open.

Alexander writes about his experience as a scientist because he knows how stories like his sound to skeptics. He notes that while he considered himself a Christian before this happened, it was “more in name than in actual belief.”

But his experience changed that. He writes: “There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well.” He describes “a larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, precoma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.”

Alexander is not the first to describe such an experience, but he is one of the few who does so as a scientist, and a neurosurgeon at that. And, as far as he knows, no one before him ever traveled to this dimension “(a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation.”

This is important because the chief arguments against near-death experiences “suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient or partial malfunctioning of the cortex.”

His cortex wasn’t malfunctioning; it wasn’t even functioning. “According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind,” Alexander writes, “there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.”

He goes on to describe his experience, with frequent disclaimers about language not being able to adequately capture what happened.

The message that “went through [him] like a wind” had three parts. He summarizes them thus:

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

Regardless of Alexander’s science credentials, most nonbelievers, I imagine, will simply deny the truthfulness of his experience, believing (yes, having faith) that some nondivine explanation will eventually emerge.

Many Christians, I imagine, will also deny his message because it’s too inclusive. It lets people off the hook. It doesn’t punish evildoers.

Alexander writes that the universe he experienced in his coma is “the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their (very) different ways.”

I’ve read (and heard) other accounts like Alexander’s, and each time I feel encouraged. But I also know it comes down belief. While science feeds our knowledge, what we decide about the universe and our place in it comes down to faith.