At Viral Chatter, Nancy Maffia discusses some of the major changes we’ve seen recently in our understanding of what happens at the time of death — changes that are not confirming a materialist view of human life:

Traditionally, death has been defined as the irreversible cessation of heart function, known as death by cardiopulmonary criteria. However, advances in intensive care medicine have allowed doctors to artificially maintain a patient’s heartbeat, even when the brain has suffered irreversible damage.

This has led to the concept of brain death, where the brain has died, but the heart continues to beat with medical intervention.

Dr. [Sam] Parnia’s research reveals that death is not an instantaneous event, but rather a process that unfolds over time. After a person’s heart stops, the cells in their body, including the brain, begin their own gradual death process. 

“Beyond the Final Breath: How Consciousness Persists During Death,” September 13, 2024

In other words, it takes days for the brain to die and consciousness may continue. ER specialist Sam Parnia, author of Lucid Dying (Hachette 2024), has done a good deal of research in this area. He has found that the mind can be quite active during this period:

One in five people who survive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) after cardiac arrest may describe lucid experiences of death that occurred while they were seemingly unconscious and on the brink of death, a new study shows.

Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and elsewhere, the study involved 567 men and women whose hearts stopped beating while hospitalized and who received CPR between May 2017 and March 2020 in the United States and United Kingdom. Despite immediate treatment, fewer than 10 percent recovered sufficiently to be discharged from the hospital.

Survivors reported having unique lucid experiences, including a perception of separation from the body, observing events without pain or distress, and a meaningful evaluation of life, including of their actions, intentions, and thoughts toward others. The researchers found these experiences of death to be different from hallucinations, delusions, illusions, dreams, or CPR-induced consciousness.

“Lucid Dying: Patients Recall Death Experiences During CPR,” NYU Langone Health, November 7, 2022

Parnia: Consciousness Does Not Die

Dr. Parnia does not believe that the human mind is annihilated at death. Rather, he says of consciousness: “That entity continues. And it continues even when the brain does not seem to be functioning. Which raises the question that consciousness maybe a separate entity from the brain. It’s not magical. It’s just not discovered yet. But it doesn’t die.”

Like psychiatrist Bruce Greyson, author of After (MacMillan 2021) on near-death experiences, Parnia is not religious. He is looking at what recent evidence in his field suggests.

A Different Picture

This is a very different picture from what many of us have been told that science would show. But the science world seems to be changing in certain ways. The recent death of atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) may have signaled the end of an era. Dennett sought to prove that human consciousness was merely a user illusion but that seems to have been a dead end. On the contrary, consciousness seems to be much less tethered even to brain function than we used to think. Thus even atheists are finding reasons, based on human consciousness, to accept the possibility of life after death.

It’s got to the point where the laughter has died down and near-death experiences are becoming subjects of scientific study.

A Sign of Changing Times

In 2011, cosmologist Sean Carroll wrote a guest blog at Scientific American claiming that the laws of physics do not allow for life after death: “Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die.”

But in 2022, an item at Science Daily on Parnia’s studies says,

So far, the researchers say, evidence suggests that neither physiological nor cognitive processes end with death and that although systematic studies have not been able to absolutely prove the reality or meaning of patients’ experiences and claims of awareness in relation to death, it has been impossible to disclaim them either. 

NYU Langone Health / NYU Grossman School of Medicine. “Recalled experiences surrounding death: More than hallucinations?” Science Daily, 12 April 2022

Note the gap between “no way” and “impossible to disclaim.” That gap is probably going to get bigger rather than smaller.

We should, of course, keep in mind that the persistence of the mind after bodily death does not prove that the human soul is immortal in principle; only that it can exist independently of the body. As neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and I will show in The Immortal Mind (Worthy Hachette, June 3, 2025), the argument for the immortality of the human soul in principle must be — and can be — made on logical and philosophical grounds.