Near Death Experiences (NDEs) – where people undergo physical death (perhaps through an accident or on the operating table) and experience heaven (or hell) for a short duration, and then return to bodily life – make for popular reading. Some think they should be used in apologetics.

I disagree. I’m very cautious about NDEs and would never use them in apologetics. For one thing, some people have admitted to faking their NDE. Scientific American got in on the act of the popularity of NDEs, publishing an article by a skeptic here. Tim Challies theologically challenges NDEs here in an article entitled “Heaven Tourism”. GotQuestions wisely councels caution here regarding NDEs, advising “It would be too strong to state that all near-death experiences are faked, imagined, or satanic, but there are still serious concerns, biblically, about their validity.”

In Apologetics, we must be careful never to overstate our case, or we lose credibility when someone fact-checks us. For example, the claim that I sometimes hear by well-meaning apologists that we can reproduce the entire New Testament minus 11 verses from quotations by the early chuch fathers, is simply not true. Tnere is an article here by J. Warner Wallace addressing this issue. While the early church fathers do in fact quote most of the New Testament, we cannot reconstruct the NT from their writings. Even Bart Ehrman admits “yes, the church fathers do quote most of the New Testament”. He also correctly concludes “But could we reconstruct the New Testament from their writings?  No, I’m afraid not.”

While some NDEs are captivating and mysterious, I would never use them in apologetics; we simply do not know enough to be sure. And I would never use NDEs as evidence for the veracity of Scripture. The Bible is self-authenticating.