John Burke, an agnostic-turned-Christian author, examines 1,000+ near-death experiences (NDEs), revealing 40 shared elements—like time distortions and life reviews—that align with biblical accounts. Studies in The Lancet confirm NDEs’ accuracy, including blind patients describing unseen light or resuscitation details impossible to hallucinate, with 96% precision in verified cases. Burke dismisses chemical explanations, citing a Dutch man’s correct dentures description post-resuscitation, and notes 23% of NDEs include hellish encounters ending only with prayer. His new book, Imagine the God of Heaven (Nov. 7), argues these experiences prove an afterlife—and a God matching Christian teachings—despite skeptics like a far-left atheist teacher whose NDE left her materialism intact. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, it's Andrew Claven with this week's interview.
I'm really looking forward to this.
One of the most interesting conversations I ever had was with a woman who died.
She was a young, very attractive woman, worked at a school that my son went to.
She was also a very far-left teacher.
She was always making me kind of grumble about the sort of thing she was bringing to school, but she was an atheist.
And young as she was, she had a heart attack and she died.
And she came back.
They brought her back to life.
And I met her quite soon after that at a party and, of course, said to her, oh, I heard you were ill and I'm so sorry.
And she was quite willing to talk about it.
And I said, well, I have to ask you, did you see anything when you were dead?
And she said, oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
I had an after a near-death experience.
And I said, well, what was it like?
And she described kind of what you would think of, but it was very convincing.
She was certainly a very down-to-earth person.
Like I said, a total atheist, complete materialist, and a leftist.
And she said she felt herself rise up out of her body.
She could see the doctors standing over her.
She could hear what they were talking about.
She felt herself moving in a direction away from her body.
And then she was basically informed that, no, this was not her time.
And she went back into her body.
So I said to her, you know, we're making, this is really at a cocktail party.
We're making conversation.
And I said to her, so has that changed the way you think about whether there's a God or not?
No.
I just, I had to laugh.
I thought, well, that's pretty, that's pretty interesting.
That would put a, you know, certainly put a big question mark on my, you know, one of those super Mario question marks on my little box, because I think that that is an amazing thing to have seen and to come back and not have any, have no effect on you.
And so I've been really interested in this subject ever since.
It is a fascinating subject.
Fascinating things happen to people who come close to death.
You know that it's about 1959.
It's only been since 1959 that they had CPR, which would bring people back.
And ever since then, we have been getting these stories of people who see things after they're supposedly dead.
And more than that, along with that, there's something very interesting, what they call pre-death lucidity, where people who, for instance, have vanished into Alzheimer's so that they're not really there anymore suddenly come back, which raises all these questions about the fact that maybe you never really disappear.
The machine that is our body can sometimes stop communicating, but somehow that seems that you survive it.
So I've invited on John Burke.
He's the author of the New York Times bestseller, Imagine Heaven, as well as his newest book, Imagine the God of Heaven, which I think is forthcoming.
I don't think that's out yet.
And he has spoken to many, many people who have had these experiences.
John, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
No, thanks for having me on.
I'm excited to be here.
So let's start with you.
You went into this.
You are now a believing Christian and a Bible-based Christian, as they say, but you didn't go into this necessarily full of belief.
No, I was actually an agnostic.
I didn't believe.
I thought Jesus was, you know, a man-made legend and myth.
I wasn't sure there was a God at all, didn't really care.
And my dad was dying of cancer, and someone gave him the very first research that coined the term near-death experience.
And I saw it on his bedstand.
I picked it up.
I started thumbing through it and I couldn't stop reading it.
And by the end of it, I said, wow, could this actually be evidence that some of this God stuff is real and that there really is something beyond this?
So it opened my mind to it.
I studied engineering.
I worked as an engineer.
So I've always had a very analytical mind.
The idea of blind faith, like, you know, you just take a leap, that didn't ever work for me.
I don't actually think that's what is required.
But this opened my mind and I began researching.
And I have, over the last 30 plus years, I've studied well over a thousand of these near-death experiences.
I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people personally.
And yes, I have become convinced that this is scientific evidence that if you're open, and again, you know, you can make evidence say anything, but I find this incredibly strong evidence.
And that's what I'm trying to show in both Imagine Heaven and Imagine the God of Heaven.
That this is not only evidence of a life to come, it's evidence of a God and even who this God is, and incredibly hopeful for all people.
How did you pick the people that you talked to?
Did you talk to anybody who'd had one of these experiences, or did you say, like, I only want a certain kind of person?
No, I mean, it took me 30 years to write Imagine Heaven because I didn't understand it all.
And they didn't all fit together.
So I did come across, for instance, atheists like you talked about who had one of these experiences.
And then their interpretation of the experience they had didn't match within the interpretation that others had.
And it took me a while to realize that what people are commonly reporting, and by the way, we're not talking about a small number of people.
You know, the Gallup poll did a survey of Americans and found that one out of 25, so we're talking millions of Americans have had a near-death experience.
Or more recently, a study of 35 countries found a similar number of people who, when clinically dead, claim they had a near-death experience.
So we're talking about millions of people and all over the globe.
So it's not there.
And I write in Imagine Heaven, chapter two is called Skeptical Doctors in the Afterlife.
And in there, I'm putting up front what not only convinced me as an analytical skeptical engineer, but what's convinced many cardiologists, oncologists, who, when they start asking the open question like you did, and their patients actually start talking, they realize, wow, there is actual corroborative evidence here.
So when you talk to people, do their stories sound similar or do different people have different kinds of experience?
Well, there are commonalities, and that's what I'm showing.
In Imagine Heaven, I'm actually showing how these commonalities of what people report all around the world align with the expectation of what it says in the Hebrew Christian scriptures.
I mean, it's amazing.
In what way?
And that's, oh, well, I mean, in about 40 ways.
And I show how what these people are commonly reporting is exactly the expectation you would have expected.
I'll give you some examples.
So, one commonality is people say, like you did, when they died, they left their body, but they still had a body.
They were still themselves.
In fact, more themselves than they've ever been.
They said, I didn't have five senses.
It was more like I had 50 senses.
I felt wonderful.
But interestingly, they were still there in the room above their body many times, and they could watch their resuscitation.
Now, this was the key, one of the keys for me, that there's something that we need to pay attention to here.
And it can't just be explained by hallucination or the use of drugs.
I've heard all the, in my new book, I go through the 10 points of evidence that every supposed alternate theory has to take into account because there are about 30 alternate theories, but they don't take into account all the evidence.
And so, for instance, one cardiologist that I interviewed, Dr. Michael Sabum, when all this first came out, he heard about it and said that I've never heard any of my patients say that.
But he started asking them.
And when he started asking them, then they did start talking about these common points, leaving their body, a new body, heightened senses, travel to a place of exquisite beauty.
In some cases, hellish experiences, seeing this God of light and love, who they never wanted to leave his presence, brighter than the sun, but easy to look at, a welcoming committee of friends and relatives who have passed on before, all these things.
Leaving the Body, Entering Dimensions00:08:28
And I'm showing how, like I said, about 40 of them, how they align with what we would expect from the scriptures.
What do they see when they go into a place of beauty?
Does that look like something that we would recognize, or does it look like something they've never seen before?
Yeah, it's not unlike Earth.
I mean, mountains and trees and flowers and valleys and birds and animals and people.
It's like Earth, except in new dimensions of space and of time.
And again, these are the things that, so for instance, they talk about time works differently on the other side.
Well, this is exactly what Peter said in 2 Peter 3.8.
He said to the Lord, a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day.
Well, they've said almost the same thing to me.
Some of them have said, you know, I don't know if it was a minute or hours because time didn't work the same way.
Or some say there was no time.
Space in the same way, spatial dimensions.
Here's the way I explain it after interviewing many of these people.
Imagine if we're living this three-dimensional experience of life, but we're actually living it on a flat black and white painting in your room.
Okay.
And death means separation.
So when we die, our soul separates from our body.
So at death, your two-dimensional image is peeled off that flat black and white world, and you're brought into this three-dimensional world that was always around you.
And you experience a new dimension of life.
This is not less than your flat life.
This is more than your flat life and color.
And then you are resuscitated.
You're pressed back into that flat black and white world.
And now you have to describe three dimensions of color in two-dimensional black and white terms.
What do you think?
How would you do it?
And this is exactly what these people say.
What do people see when they see bad experiences, hellish experiences?
Yeah.
A friend of mine now, I was just talking to him yesterday.
He was an atheist college professor.
He, you know, he ridiculed God and Jesus.
And he was in Paris.
He was a tenured college professor, and that's important to remember, right?
And you don't leave a tenureship.
But he had his lower duodom rupture while he was in Paris, went in on a Saturday, tried to find a surgeon, couldn't get a surgeon.
He died.
Now, he thought death was unplug the computer, screen goes blank, nothing.
And so when he died, he actually didn't realize he was dead because suddenly he feels good.
He's standing there in the room.
He's confused because he sees someone in the bed he was just in.
But he's confused because he said he felt wonderful, like Superman.
And then another commonality, like I said, is a welcoming committee of people who have passed on usually.
He has this group of people who are out in the hallway of the hospital saying, Howard, come with us.
And he thinks it's the hospital staff.
And he said, I need surgery.
I've been waiting for a surgeon.
We know.
We know all about you.
Come with us.
We're going to help you.
Don't you want to get better?
Come with us.
He starts to follow them.
Now, the reason this was an interpretive key for me is that just like your atheist friend, if Howard had been resuscitated right then, he would have said, it's all good.
They're atheists, Christians, it doesn't matter what you believe or what you think.
It doesn't matter.
Life goes on and it's great.
It's wonderful.
There is no hell.
There's no none of that, which people have.
They have interpreted their experience in a global way that goes way beyond all the data.
And I'm trying to show the commonalities of all the data, not individual interpretations of their one experience.
That's what I'm trying to show in Imagine Heaven.
So anyway, Howard begins to follow them.
And long story short, again, time doesn't work the same way.
Spatial dimensions doesn't.
He starts to realize that they are deceiving him.
And they end up leading him into a place of blackest darkness, like the outer darkness Jesus talked about.
And they maul him.
It's like the worst prison scene you can imagine.
And in that, though, he hears a voice inside saying, pray to God.
Pray to God.
And he, even in this horrible place, which he's now realizing, you know, something's going on here.
This is bizarre.
And he's realizing, you know, this is the life he lived.
And these people are like kindred spirits.
And that's who he's going to become if he stays there.
But he's still arguing with himself.
I don't believe in God.
I don't pray.
How do I, I wouldn't even know how to pray.
And he's arguing.
And inside, he keeps hearing, pray to God.
And he starts to just say the name of God.
And they start cussing at him and attacking him even more, but they're backing off.
They're threatening him, not attacking him.
They're backing off.
And then he remembers a song from childhood, Jesus Loves Me.
It's all he could remember.
And in desperation, he cries out, Jesus, save me.
And into this darkness comes this pinpoint of light getting brighter and brighter till it's brighter than the sun.
But again, not hard to look at, common how they describe the same God all over the world.
Arms reach out, take him out of there.
And in the presence of Jesus, he gets a life review.
Now, a life review is another commonality of people all over the globe.
And again, because time doesn't work the same way, they relive their lives, but from the perspective of watching themselves, but remembering every thought, every feeling, but not just from their perspective, from the perspective of the people they interacted with.
And what they commonly come back saying is two things that they know for sure: God is love and how we treat one another or love one another is what matters most to God.
So Howard comes back.
Howard comes back and two years later leaves his tenured professorship to become a Christian pastor because he reads the Bible and realizes this is exactly what I experienced.
Wow.
And his wife leaves him because she's still an atheist.
Now, hellish experiences in studies done, which, by the way, there have been about 900 scholarly studies of these near-death experiences reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, Europe's most prestigious journal, psychiatry, psychology.
I mean, this has been widely studied and documented.
And about 23% of people who come forward talking about near-death experiences do talk about negative to hellish ones.
So we can't take the good ones, which are incredible, without also making sense of the negative ones.
Yeah, no, I'm taking notes, John.
Don't make fun of Jesus as like, I'm writing it down.
But again, you know, I mean, this is the incredible thing is that people who cry out to God in the most desperate and have, you know, no reason for him to lovingly rescue them, he does.
Well, I know that.
I know that in my own life, and that's absolutely, absolutely true in life, as well as afterlife.
Now, whenever you read about this in secular journals, the New York Times or something, they always come up as you can with anything, with reasonable, quote-unquote, reasonable explanations.
And the usual one is that when you die, some chemical is released in your brain that basically pacifies you or sedates you by showing you this vision.
What convinced you?
You're an engineer, you're a man of evidence, what convinced you that that doesn't play, that that explanation doesn't work?
Observational Evidence of the Afterlife00:07:11
Well, like I said, there are about 10 points of evidence that I give in Imagine the God of Heaven, the new book coming out, but I'll just say a few.
First, the verifiable evidence, the verifiable observations.
So for instance, Dr. Pem Van Lommel is a cardiologist.
He set out to study these as well, tried to disprove them.
And yet, what he saw as other cardiologists is these people described resuscitation in such accuracy, like Dr. Sabum said, I could have used the tape to teach other physicians.
So for instance, in The Lancet, Europe's prestigious medical journal, they report of a guy coming from in Holland, coming into the hospital.
They found him dead in a park, didn't know how long his heart had been stopped.
They went to shock him, but they had to intubate him.
The nurse saw he had dentures, took the dentures out, put it in the lower drawer of the crash cart.
They shocked him, get his heart going, but he never became conscious in the ER.
So he was unconscious the whole time, never knew the room or anything.
They put him in another room.
A week later, he comes out of coma.
They couldn't find his dentures.
He sees the nurse and says, that nurse knows where my dentures are.
And then he explains, I was up above my body in that room.
He describes all the medical personnel, conversations they had, and how the nurse took his dentures and put him in the lower drawer of the cart with all the bottles on it.
And that's where they found his dentures.
This lady that I, when I was introducing you, this lady that I talked to had exactly the same kind of experience where she described all this stuff and still was not convinced.
The people that you talk to, how many of them, you know, the one about the professor, the story you told about the professor, is very dramatic.
How many of the people that you talk to say, yeah, I saw these things, but I just don't buy it.
Most of them are changed.
Are changed.
Yeah.
I would think so.
Most of them are changed.
But I'll tell you, Andrew, I am just as shocked.
And it was one of the things that perplexed me for years.
Like, you know, how could you experience this and say that?
And then I had the realization that, you know, there were people who watched Jesus do miraculous things, even claim to raise people from the dead.
And some claimed he was the Messiah and some claimed he was demonic.
He was doing it because he was demonically possessed.
You know, one of the lines in the Bible that always gets me because it's so human is when they see the ascension, they watch go into heaven.
And he says, and some of them doubt it.
And you go like, well, yeah, I know those guys.
I've gone to work with those guys.
This is really fun.
Let me say another.
So studies done of these observations.
Dr. Janice Holden did a study of people who had had cardiac arrest and claimed to have NDEs, near-death experiences, and made observations that could be checked out.
And she went and checked, you know, these and found that 96% of the observations that this group made, 96% were 100% accurate.
6% had some discrepancy in detail.
Only one person of the 93 that she interviewed, it was just completely a guess.
And then she sat against a control group of cardiac arrest patients who did not claim to have a near-death experience and just ask them, what do you think happened in your resuscitation?
And it was just like what they'd seen on ER.
And that was, you know, it wasn't even close.
Actually, so there's observational evidence.
But another thing is you have people who had, you know, hallucinogenic drugs who had it and those who didn't have hallucinogenic drugs who had it.
It is a more vivid experience.
It's not like where you have confused sensorium, like with a dream or DMT or LSD or different psychedelic drugs.
Not like that at all.
And how do you get people all around the globe from different cultures saying the same commonalities, reporting the same commonalities of a logical order of experience, but they're not saying exactly the same story?
So for instance, if you have a court of law and you have 10 people who say the exact same story, that would be collusion.
They talked, right?
And that's bad testimony.
But if you have 10 people who say a little bit different stories, but they have overlapping things that they say, you're getting a picture from then multi different perspectives.
And that's super strong testimony.
That's what you have with NDEs.
Plus, when people blind from birth have an NDE, they can see in their near-death experience and they see the same thing.
Wow.
Wow.
That's interesting.
So I report on, in Imagine Heaven, I report on three blind people and show how what they are claiming they see, they should not have seen.
I'll give you an example.
Vicki, who is a blind person, she saw the same thing.
She sees them working on her body.
She's confused because she's never had a sense of sight, but she recognizes her long hair and a ring.
And then she travels through this tunnel to a place of great beauty.
She sees this group of people coming toward her.
And in the group are two of her friends who died at age nine and 11.
But she said they're in their prime and they're healthy.
They too were blind and had other physical challenges, but it wasn't like that when she saw them in this heavenly experience.
Now, here's the thing.
She said that the light there was coming out of everything.
The light was coming out of the grass, coming out of the trees, coming out of the birds, and even out of the people.
And the light was palpable.
It wasn't just light.
It was love and it was life.
And she said, I could never imagine what light was like.
And it's just overwhelming even to think about it.
Now, think about this.
So what the blind say is that light in heaven comes out of everything, right?
But they would not have heard that on earth.
And when she came back to earth, she was still blind.
But they would have heard light shines on things, not out of everything, right?
Right.
But interestingly, the prophet Daniel, Jewish prophet Daniel, writes how the angels said to him that in the last days there will be a resurrection and some to everlasting disgrace, some to everlasting life, and the righteous will shine like the stars forever.
Jesus in Matthew 13, then the righteous will shine like the stars in their kingdom's father, in their father's kingdom forever.
Isaiah's Heavenly Vision00:00:52
And then you have Isaiah chapter 60.
Isaiah says in heaven, there is no sun or moon.
God is its light.
Revelation chapter 21, John, who claims he was taken to heaven, says there is no sun or moon, for the glory of God is its light, and the Lamb, referring to Jesus, is its lamp, and the nations will walk in that light.
You know, I've got to stop there.
Really interesting.
When does the new book come out?
Imagine the God of Heaven.
November 7th.
It's out there for pre-order on Amazon already, but it comes out officially November 7th.
Really interesting conversation.
Very exciting to hear about.
Thank you, John, for coming on.
I appreciate it.
John Burke.
Thanks so much.
All right.
We will be back on Friday with the Andrew Clavin Show.