Near-death experiences of God

After years of researching near-death experiences, radiation oncologist Jeffrey Long is convinced that conscious human experience transcends brain death. Long writes that in 1998: ”I started the Near Death Experience Research Foundation and its corresponding website, NDERF.org. One of my goals for the site was to collect as many NDEs as I could and to collect them through a questionnaire that would make it easy to separate and study their elements. At NDERF we explored all of the elements in the NDEs of more than one thousand people, examining consistency among the accounts. In reaching conclusions about these accounts, we followed a basic scientific principle: What is real is consistently seen among many different observations.”

Jeffrey Long, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (2011), 1 and 3.

Long intended the God Study “to be an objective view of the powerful experiences with God that many people report when they are at death’s door.” He analyzed responses by NDE survivors to multiple-choice questions and reviewed their responses to open-ended questions. The study considered all the responses to the NDERF questionnaire from November 11, 2011, to November 7, 2014.” In this material, the narratives clearly verify: “NDErs were usually highly confident that it really was God in their NDE.”

Before their NDE, 39 percent of the respondents believed that ‘God definitely exists.’ “At the time they shared their NDEs with NDERF, an average of twenty-two years later, 72.6 percent of the NDErs believed ‘God definitely exists.’ To put this another way, there was an 86 percent increase in those who believe God definitely exists after their NDEs.” Combining the “NDErs who currently believe that ‘God definitely exists’ with those who currently believe ‘God probably exists,’ you find that this is the belief of a whopping 81.9 percent of NDErs — compared to 64 percent for the combined group before the NDE.”

Jeffrey Long, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (2016), 35-36, and 39).