The Resurrection of Jesus Examined with Mike Licona

The Purpose of the Conversation and the Value of Resurrection Evidence

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and today I have Dr. Michael Lycona on to discuss evidence for the resurrection, right? Believe it or not, the central feature of the Christian faith has evidence for it, okay?

And so I really want this discussion to be useful for people who may not be aware of the evidence for the resurrection. And for those who are well-seasoned apologists, it is a good thing to review some of those evidences and to contextualize it with respect to where God has placed you in your walk.

You know, maybe you're, you know, having lunch with an unbelieving friend or at the dinner table and you're speaking with family members and these issues come up. I'd like you guys to have some of this information at your fingertips, you know, as you review this video, pick up Dr. Michael Lycona's books to get more detail.

So hopefully this discussion will be helpful to that end. I do want to make a quick announcement. And again, I'm wearing a tie. Now this is very not normal for me. I'm usually wearing my super cool short sleeve collared shirts.

And you might be thinking I'm wearing a tie because we have a very special guest today. But actually I was rushing home from work. And I just happened to not have time to get changed into something more comfortable.

But at any rate, that's why I look super formal. At any rate, later this week, I'm also going to be having another guest on that is, I'm looking forward to that discussion. It's a woman who is a believer.

She wrote an interesting article about how she came into apologetics that I think that discussion is going to really be helpful and encouraging to folks. So looking forward to doing that. But let's jump right in.

I want to invite Dr. Michael Lycona on the screen with me and he can share a little bit about himself, some more background information. I'm sure if you're into apologetics, you're going to already know who Dr. Michael Lycona is.

But let's invite him on right now. How's it going? What would you like me to call you? Dr. Lycona, Michael, Mike, Mikey? Mike's fine. Okay. All right, Mike, how are you doing?

And why don't you share a little bit of some background information? I'm doing well, Eli, and thanks for having me on. So yeah, I'm, well, this July, God willing, I'll turn 60. And I became a Christian at the age of 10.

So almost for half a century being a follower of Jesus. I got real serious about my faith when I went off to college. I went to a Christian university and just really grew in my faith. And when I went to grad school, I focused on New Testament studies.

And right toward the end, I just started questioning my faith. It wasn't anything that I had learned in my graduate work. It was just a matter of reflecting and thinking, you know what, Christianity is all I've ever studied.

And yep, I spend a lot of time in prayer and Bible study. And I sensed that I have this personal relationship with God, but then I reflected and thought, Mormons feel they've got a personal relationship with God.

They talk about the burning of the bosom. That's evidence to that. You've got people of other religious beliefs that are in conflict with the Christian beliefs and they believe they've got a relationship with God or the divine.

And so how do I know that what I believe is true rather than I've just deceived myself and brainwashed myself into thinking this? And so I never had Gary Habermas for a course because I was in New Testament.

He was in philosophy and apologetics, but one of my roommates was in the apologetics program. And he recommended that I go pay Gary Habermas a visit. So I did. And he pointed me to the resurrection of Jesus and the evidence for it.

And that satisfied me from that moment. But after finishing my coursework in grad school and getting out in the real world and sharing my faith with others, I'd start to come across objections for which I wasn't prepared.

And so back then there was no email. I'd call Gary and talk to him and wrestle through some things. And gosh, if it had not been for Gary, I may not be a Christian today because of apologetics and the evidence that he shared with me or led me to sources where I could learn some of the data.

I'm a Christian. So I remained a Christian. So that's now, I never thought I would go on for a doctorate. I just wasn't interested in academic things, but my passion to find answers led me and I completed a PhD back in 2008.

And I never thought I'd teach. I had no desire to teach, but God just leads in different ways. And now I'm a very happy faculty member at Houston Baptist University, where I think we've got one of, if not the finest master of arts programs in Christian apologetics and just wonderful.

We've got William Lane Craig and Nancy Piercy and Mary Jo Sharpen, just so many on faculty in our programs. It's just, it's really cool. Michael Ward, the leading CS Lewis scholar in the world. I mean, I just could go through so many faculty members and our programs can be completed all in class or via distance learning.

I've got students, right now I've got a student in New Zealand. In the previous class, I had it in New Zealand and Germany and I've had them all over the world and they just pipe in. It's just really convenient.

Most of them are adults and involved in their profession. So it's really cool. I just love what I do. That plus our ministry, Risen Jesus, do a lot of traveling and not recent, of course, because of COVID.

Research and writing, speaking and debating and work on global reach through our videos and social media.

How to Study Apologetics Without Going to Seminary

Now, you've had the benefit of going to seminary. I've had the benefit of going to seminary. Not everyone's gonna be going to seminary. It can be very expensive. It can be very time consuming. What would you say to someone who doesn't have the money to go to seminary, but really wants to get into some of the details of the foundation of the faith, the evidence and just knowing all of the things that you study and the things that help build up your own personal faith, where would you point that person to?

Well, of course they can get books, right? So if they wanna learn a lot about the resurrection and they wanna get deep into it, they could always buy my large book on the resurrection, The Resurrection of Jesus, A New Historiographical Approach.

That's the book I use in our class. One of the textbooks I use for the philosophy of history and resurrection at Houston Baptist University. If they wanna learn about the gospels, or the New Testament literature, you can get some introductions to the New Testament.

I've got a whole shelf of introductions to the New Testament. It sounds like just a basic book, but it's really not. It deals with a lot of critical issues, such as who wrote the New Testament literature?

When was it written? To whom was it written? What was their sources? What's the main themes behind it? So it's a whole lot deeper than let's say a New Testament survey course. So there's a lot of different books that they can get and read.

If they want a good intro to apologetics, they can get any of Lee Strobel's books. Those are fantastic. William Lane Craig's got a really great introductory book, On Guard. If they wanna go deeper, they can get his other book, Reasonable Faith.

Really good one volume books that they can learn apologetics. And there are others. I'm just naming a few that just come right off the top of my head. I think some people go to YouTube, and we've got a lot of stuff on our YouTube channel.

I had a guy recently comment, said that he feels like he's getting a pre-seminary education with some of the videos we've got on my channel. That's right. There's some really great stuff.

I mean, YouTube's a funny thing. You can get solid biblical educational content, and then you can watch cat videos. I mean, it's a very interesting place, YouTube. But definitely, I mean, I'm big on audio learning, so I learn a lot from YouTube and things like that.

But you mentioned a couple of books, especially your own. I think something that can be very intimidating to folks, especially young people, maybe like teenagers, kids, students in high school, it's like, well, I'm already reading a bunch of stuff.

And when I look in the bookstore, or if I'm on Amazon, like these books look pretty thick. I mean, your book is not, it's not a thin line. It's not like a thin book, it's thick. Are these books meant to be read in chronological order?

I mean, should the size of these books intimidate people who are interested?

I mean, it depends who you are and how far you are into this. I mean, if you're just getting involved in apologetics, then no, I wouldn't, I mean, you could. I mean, I have a friend, Elizabeth Urbanovitz, who is, she's a full-time Christian apologist who writes curriculum, curricula for children.

And she said, my large book on the resurrection was the first apologetics book she read. She had the intellectual capacity to do that. And it worked well for her, and she got hooked on apologetics through it.

But I'd say for most people, they're probably not as intellectually sharp as Elizabeth is. And so you could go with some more basic books, like Strobel's books, The Case for Christ, The Case for Faith, The Case for a Creator in Defense of Jesus.

Or if you, you know, those are easy reads, fairly easy reads, and they're entertaining too. You know, probably a next step would be William Lane Craig's book, On Guard. I mean, they're just, that's a really good, fairly, that's kind of like a basic to intermediate apologetics book.

You know? And then There's pictures. So people, you know, there's a picture book, you know. Yeah, but it's brand new. If you're brand new to apologetics, I wouldn't pick up Reasonable Faith. Right.

That might be a little heavy for you.

Sure, sure, yeah. And what I like about On Guard, and Lee Strobel's A Case for Christ, is that they're not simply fact heavy. They have factual stuff. I mean, On Guard, yes. There's a lot of facts that are packed in there, but in between the chapters, there's these little personal stories there that kind of put some flesh, some real life flesh to the importance of what you're doing.

And that's true for anyone. I mean, people who watch my channel, we tend to come from more presuppositional perspective, but I think it's important to know some of these facts and to use them in various contexts.

I was just listening to a lecture by Greg, the late Greg Bonson, and he was talking about, you know, we don't just walk up to the believer and say, hey, Christianity is true by the impossibility of the contrary.

Now, sometimes people have a question about the resurrection. Like why think, why, are there good reasons to think that Jesus was raised from the dead? And it's appropriate to talk about those things.

And so I think books like Reasonable Faith, if you want to delve that deep, or On Guard, or your book on the resurrection, I think are very helpful in kind of putting some content to the case we want to make, you know, depending on the context of our discussion.

So I think it's very important. Now, I want to read something, and then that's going to launch into my first question, so to speak, of the point of what we're going to be talking about today. Now, I'm going to read a quote from C .S. Lewis in my best British accent possible.

This could be totally cringy, or it can be a classic episode here, okay? All right, let me see here. So, quote, I'm trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him, that's Jesus.

I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who is merely a man, and said the sort of things Jesus said, would not be a great moral teacher.

He would either be a lunatic on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg, or else he would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the son of God, or else a madman, or something worse.

You can shut him up for a fool. You can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.

He has not left that open to us, he did not intend to. Okay, that's my best British accent. That's all you're getting at me. That's all you're getting at me, man. Okay, so we have the famous Lewis trilemma.

Either Lord, lunatic, or liar. Actually, that is a false trichotomy, because there's also legend.

He could be a legend. Once you develop, or you're able to show that Jesus did make claims to be the son of God, then you still, then that's when you've got your three. That's right, that's right.

Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Evidence Against the Jesus Myth

So I wanna jump into the, I'm looking in terms of, if I was a student in high school who's a Christian, I have a relationship with the Lord, I have some unbelieving friends that maybe I'm interacting with on some social media or whatever.

We know, Mike, that in scholarship, it is not very controversial to say that Jesus existed. That's almost universally accepted, okay? However, a teenager, a teenage Christian, is more likely to come into contact with someone who says, we have no evidence that Jesus ever existed.

So before we get into the evidence for the resurrection, how might a teenage Christian student, a young person, interact with some friends who says, well, we don't have evidence that Jesus even existed, so we can't even be sure if all this other stuff is true.

How might you equip a young person who might come up against something like that?

Well, the first thing I would do is I would point out that that is a fringe position that is taken by barely any scholars in the world today. In fact, you could count the number of scholars who question whether Jesus existed, bonafide scholars in the relevant field, on both hands.

Out of those in the whole world. In fact, there are more credentialed scientists with PhD in one of the sciences who hold to a young earth that the earth is 15 ,000 years old or less. There are more credentialed scientists who hold that position far more than those historians, scholars who hold that Jesus never existed.

That is how much a fringe position the Jesus myth is. Now that doesn't mean it's wrong, of course, but it just means that it is an extreme fringe position. And none of the scholars who hold that are highly regarded.

None of them are highly regarded scholars, okay? So that's one thing I would point out. A number of things I would point them to various sources. So for example, just non-Christian sources, I would point to Josephus, the Jewish historian from the first century, Tacitus, the Roman historian, perhaps the greatest Roman historian.

And he wrote at the very beginning of the second century, Lucian who wrote a Greek satirist who wrote in the middle of the second century. And Lucian was anti-Christian, Tacitus was anti-Christian. You've got Mara Barth Serapion probably writing somewhere in the latter part of the first century to sometime in the second century.

It's hard to narrow it more than that. And Mara Barth Serapion was a prisoner and he was writing, and he mentions the execution of Jesus by the Jews. Okay. So you've got a number of non-Christian sources who mentioned it.

In addition to all the Christian sources, some of who claim to be eyewitnesses. Sure. And if you're gonna discount the gospels because you can say the Christians, their authors were biased, well then are we gonna discount African-American historians who are writing on slavery in the US because they're biased?

Are we gonna write again about, or write off Jewish historians who read on the Holocaust because they're biased and have an ax to grind? Well, of course not. So you're gonna look at this and we've got plenty of evidence for the existence of Jesus.

Paul wasn't writing a gospel. He's writing letters of occasion. And he says he knows James, the brother of Jesus and has spoken with him. Well, it's really difficult to write about, to meet the brother of someone who never existed.

You know? And Paul is living and visiting Jerusalem at the same time Jesus would have been there. How is it that you would have had this major mythical figure who was fighting against the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the high priests, in the very people that Paul knew, in the very city Paul would have been.

And Paul never even knew that this was a mythical character. I mean, such a position is just absurd. And that's why hardly any scholars in the entire universe hold such a ridiculous, crazy position.

Why Gospel Authorship Matters for the Resurrection

Now, okay. So let's say the skeptic will say, fine, I know these writers mention someone named Jesus, but how do we know that Jesus is, he's not a mythical character that early Christians believed in.

And so these secular historians are just recording what these people said about Jesus. So for all we know, it can still be legendary. It's just, this is what early Christians believe. And these authors are, these secular historians are just recording what early Christians believe.

How would you respond to something like that? Well, I would say that such a scenario doesn't take into consideration the continuing role of the eyewitnesses as Vincent Taylor pointed out nearly a century ago.

He said, this would require that shortly after Jesus's death, the disciples were raptured into heaven and were never heard from again. But Paul's undisputed letters in the book of Acts discredits such a view because these talk about how the apostles, those who had followed Jesus played a continuing role of being out there publicly, discussing the message and person of Jesus for several decades.

And that takes us all the way up to the very doorstep of when the first gospel of Mark was written. I'd point out that the evidence suggests that the traditional authorship of several of the gospels, at least, if not all of them, but at least several of them is correct.

Just for example, take the gospel of Mark. The majority of critical scholars writing in English since 1965 think that the traditional authorship of Mark is correct. That Mark knew Peter, that he was reporting what Peter had said, and that he's writing somewhere between the years 50 and 70, more specifically between 65 and 70.

If Mark is writing down what Peter said, that's pretty strong. Then you've got the majority of modern scholars. With John, they reject the traditional authorship of John, namely that John was the son of Zebedee, who was the author.

They reject that, the majority of critical scholars today, but they do think that whoever the author of John's gospel was, he used the disciple of Jesus and eyewitness as his primary source. So it's still pretty good.

And then you've got Matthew and Luke who use Mark extensively. So even if you reject the traditional authorship of Matthew and Luke, which I don't, if you reject the traditional authorship of Matthew and Luke, they're using 90 of Mark and they use him with great integrity.

And so you got to look at the rest of the stories that aren't in Mark and figure they're probably using those with great integrity. And especially when we can compare how Matthew, some of these stories that appear in Matthew and in Luke, but are not in Mark, we see that they're very, very similar.

So there's really no good reasons to think that the gospel authors are just inventing all of this stuff.

Sure, now one more question on this issue and then we'll jump into some of the evidence of the resurrection, because that's really where the meat is since this is a fringe position, although a very popular one on the interwebs, okay?

So let me see. Oh my goodness. I think I might've lost it. Okay. Ah, okay. So here's what I was gonna ask. So when you say Matthew wrote this and Mark wrote that, well, that assumes that Matthew and Mark are in fact the authors of those gospels.

And so a somewhat informed skeptic, perhaps some teenager who's been on some atheist websites or Muslim website or whatever, they go, wait a minute, we don't really know who wrote the gospels. And so every time you say, well, Mark said this, and this is why we should think this is reasonable to believe A, B, or C, we don't even know who wrote these gospels.

So how would you give some ammo for the Christian? Well, how could they respond to that sort of objection? Because many people just take for granted Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Yeah. Well, first I would discuss some of the evidence that you probably don't have time to go through all four. So I would focus on one, Mark, the first gospel to be written probably.

And we do have evidence that Mark wrote that gospel. For example, Papias, a man who wrote in the early second century is the first to report that Mark wrote what he remembered Peter saying. And Papias says that he got this information from, his language is a little ambiguous.

He's either referring to the apostle John or an associate of the apostle John. And it would have been while John was still preaching. So whenever Papias wrote and scholars debate on the dates from the early to the mid second century, whenever Papias relayed this information, he received it in the latter part of the first century from either one of Jesus' disciples who had walked with him or someone who was an associate of that disciple.

So that's pretty good. And you've got other evidence as well. I'm just saying Papias is your earliest one and it's unanimous. Nobody questions, everybody who commented on it and there were multiple people, they all agreed that Mark wrote down and he wrote what Peter had said, what he remembered Peter saying.

Now, if you're gonna call into question, say the traditional authorship of Mark, you better be prepared to call on the traditional authorship of virtually every other piece of ancient literature. Plutarch is regarded as the greatest of all ancient biographers.

He wrote on the heels of the gospel of John, late 90s, all the way up to around the year 120, perhaps just a couple of years after that. And the earliest and best source we have that attests to the authorship of Plutarch's lives, he wrote over 60 biographies, they're called lives, wrote over 60 of them of which 48 have survived.

The earliest source attesting to that, the best source is what's called the Lampreus catalog and scholars don't know exactly when that was composed, but they think it was somewhere between 100 years to 200 years or even longer after Plutarch wrote.

And it's falsely, falsely attributed to Plutarch's son and it contains literature that classicists believe are falsely attributed to Plutarch. So it's not an unimpeachable source and yet it's the best source.

And according to the foremost expert in the world on Plutarch, he's not aware of a single classicist who questions whether Plutarch wrote those 48 biographies that have survived. So if you're gonna accept that for Plutarch, then why wouldn't you accept, say, the traditional authorship for the Gospel of Mark for which we have far superior evidence?

I could go on and talk about the authorship of Suetonius's lives of the 12 Caesars or Sallust's histories, his war with Catiline, war with Ugartha, things like that. The traditional authorship of the Gospels, the evidence for it is not unimpeachable,.

But it's still pretty good. Sure, I would imagine, and this is a good segue to talk about the main gist of what we wanna get to here, which is the resurrection. I would imagine that the reason why there's a double standard in that regard that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, well, we can't trust them, is not simply because they just wanna doubt the generic historical events.

It's the issue of miracles. Okay, because Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is not just any old set of historical documents. They record things that are miraculous, and they record things that, if true, have a huge impact upon our worldviews.

So there's a lot on the line. And so we can see there one of the main reasons why people, even though there's evidence for these things, they tend to be much more suspect because of the implications of believing these things to be true.

So let's move into the issue of the resurrection then. I mean

Hold on, so let me just say something about that. I agree with you wholeheartedly, Eli. So the thing is, what we should point out at that thing is the objection really isn't authorship then. Yes. The objection is you don't like miracles.

You can't stomach miracles, or you can't stomach the Christian worldview. So let's just be honest about that. It's not the issue of authorship. That's just window dressing.

In many cases, not in all cases, but it's window dressing in the sense that it just gives the impression that you are interested in some of the historical facts. Well, we really need to think about these things.

And sometimes that kind of, that attitude of, well, what about this? But have you considered, if it's not coming from a genuine place of honesty, oftentimes it is masking the deeper philosophical bias of you don't believe in miracles.

It's as simple as that. So, and you want to, as an apologist, people want to recognize when a question is coming from a place of honesty and curiosity with respect to the facts, and whether it's coming from a philosophical bias that's undergirding, you know, what's going on there.

So, all right. So the resurrection of Jesus. Okay. Come on, Michael. You're talking to me that you're trying to tell me you believe that a historical event occurred in which a man was dead and came back to life.

Number one, how do we know that's even possible? And number two, how can you base your faith in this whole Christian story on a historical event? You know how, you know, foggy the past can be. I mean, surely it's not reasonable to think that we can know that Jesus raised from the dead by historical considerations.

So why don't you lay it out? See, I'm your random friend that you happen to meet up with, right? We're at a coffee spot right now. And it says, listen, I don't know if it's even a reasonable thing to believe in the resurrection.

I mean, you got to convince me, man. What's going on?

What would you do? How would you approach me? Well, I'd say, first of all, you know, let's look at the data. If you're saying, you know, it's impossible for a person to come back from the dead, I would agree with you that it's impossible by natural causes.

But if God exists and wanted to raise Jesus, well, then it's 100 possible, probable that he'd be, that Jesus actually was raised from the dead. So I say, let's look at the evidence from as much as possible, a worldview neutral position.

Neither a priori assuming God's existence or a priori excluding it. Let's just come to it looking at the knowable facts and let them speak for themselves as much as possible. Otherwise we invite our worldview to umpire rather than the data and the danger that is manifest.

Bad philosophy corrupts good history. So let's look at a historical investigation while isolating any kind of presuppositions or metaphysical biases or positions we might have. So now I'd come to the data and say, well, what's the data that we have that is so strong?

The data is so strong that it's accepted by virtually every scholar who studies the subject including, you know, skeptics. So it'd be a heterogeneous consensus of scholars, be it Christian, liberals or progressive theologians, atheists, agnostics, Jewish historians.

Let's look and see what are they persuaded? What kind of evidence is so strong? The data is so strong that virtually all are persuaded by that we can agree on these things. And we'd say, all right, number one, Jesus died by crucifixion.

Virtually everyone agrees on that. Number two, and I'm not going through the evidence for this right now. If you want to unpack we can, but I'm just talking about what everybody seems to accept. But Jesus died by crucifixion.

That shortly after his death, a number of his followers had experiences that they interpreted as appearances of the risen Jesus to them. And it radically transformed their lives. Third, you've got the apostle Paul.

He was Saul who was out persecuting the church. He was like a terrorist to the earliest Christians. He's persecuting the church, arresting Christians, sending them into prison and consenting to their executions for being Christians.

And then he becomes one because he has an experience that he is persuaded. He interprets as an appearance of the risen Jesus to him. And it radically transforms his life as well from a persecutor of the church to one of its most able defenders.

So now how are you going to explain those? How are you going to explain it? Now, virtually 100 of scholars grant them. And then if you want to go somewhere between 75 to 85%, they grant that these experiences were seen by groups in group settings.

So now you've got to be able to explain these kinds of things. What was the nature of these experiences that led Christian and non-Christian, friend and foe in individual and group settings to accept, to interpret, to sincerely believe that the risen Jesus had appeared to them?

And that's when you formulate hypotheses and then you compare those hypotheses for their ability to account for the knowable facts. And when you do that, the resurrection hypothesis is the only one, the only explanation that can adequately account for all of those facts.

Why the Resurrection Is the Best Explanation of the Facts

Okay, so what's, okay, let me give a little pushback then. So what happens when someone just says, well, you know, he's like, well, what best explains these facts? If the unbeliever granted you these facts, you know, maybe there was an empty tomb, you know, throughout history, there have been empty tombs.

I mean, it's not impossible for a tomb to be empty. It's not impossible for people to claim to have witnessed someone, you know, they were dead and now they're alive. But based upon what we do know about the world, why think that the conclusion or the best explanation is a resurrection?

I'm being devil's advocate. I don't see how that follows at all. For all we know, I can just be like, I don't know how it happened, but that doesn't mean your explanation as a Christian is more likely because I've never seen anyone.

I mean, have you ever seen someone be raised from the dead? So I think you, Mr. Christian, you're jumping to conclusions too quickly. That's what someone would say.

I'd say, have you ever seen dinosaurs? No, well, why do you believe that they exist? Because we've got evidence for them. Have you ever seen the big bang? No, why do you believe the big bang occurred?

Something came, everything came out of nothing. Well, because we've got evidence for it. You've never experienced it though. Why do you believe that there are black holes? Black holes have never been seen.

Black holes are theoretical entities posited to explain observable phenomena and they do a real good job of doing it. The late John Polkinghorne, a Templeton laureate, says that no one has ever seen a black hole.

They probably never will, just due to the nature of what a black hole is. So again, you've got these theoretical entities like black holes, subatomic particles like quarks, strings, gluons, and these are theoretical entities posited to explain observable phenomena.

With historical hypotheses, we posit the hypothesis is, it's a hypothesis posited to explain data. So that's exactly what we're doing here. You say, well, yeah, but, you know, these other things like black holes, they'll be natural entities.

We know that the natural exists. What about the supernatural? Well, I think we can know that supernatural things exist. There are things such as well-evidenced near-death experiences in which there is data that can be corroborated, where a person, while claiming to have an out-of-body experience while being clinically dead, get some information, obtain some information they could not, could not have otherwise known.

And it's only explainable.

Like what? So why don't you unpack that a little bit? Because I can see, when we take a look at quarks, we take a look at black holes and these theoretical entities, it seems to me that people who use that think it's appropriate because they can produce predictions.

We can make predictions based upon these entities and actually come to knowledge about the physical world. Whereas some of these other things, it seems like I can posit something naturalistic and it could, in a way, explain it.

Maybe not better than, quote, the God hypothesis, but, I mean, we don't know. We don't know if God exists, they'll say, right? So how do you compare near-death experiences and the studies that go with that, compare that to, say, these hypothetical entities like black holes, quarks, and things like that?

It would seem as though people in the sciences, at least they'll say there's more predictability value than, say, some of these other explanations that we give that are more of a supernatural bent.

Well, like with the near-death experiences, there are certain things through the sciences, what we understand about the human body and the brain. So there was this, I can't remember her name right off, but it's one of the most famous near-death experiences and the woman died a few years ago, but I'm friends with one of the cardiologists who actually, oh, Pamela Reynolds is her name.

Pamela Reynolds. And I'm friends with a cardiologist, retired cardiologist named Michael Sabom who lives here in the Atlanta area. And he actually interviewed Pamela Reynolds. He went, and I think it was in Texas where this surgery occurred, if I remember correctly.

And it's irrelevant what state it was in, but he went and interviewed the surgeons involved. And basically she had a very complex brain surgery in which they put her to sleep. They stopped her heart intentionally.

They drained the blood out of her heart. They opened up her head to do brain surgery. They put like, what do you call those things? You know, like earplugs in her so she couldn't hear things. And then they put headphones over her so that she could not hear things.

They did this to test to make sure that there was no ability in her senses, that she was truly brain dead. So they're examining, they're keeping track of her through an EEG brain activity. But through the hearing, they're piping in these sounds and they're seeing if it registers and no, it doesn't register.

So she's got no brain activity. She cannot hear, okay? It's not even possible for her to hear. She is clinically dead, no brain activity, no heart activity, flat EEG, flat EKG. They do this complex brain surgery.

After the surgery, she says that she floated out of her body and she watched them do the surgery. She saw behind a curtain, a partition, what the tools were like that they were operating on her. She wasn't able to describe them perfectly, but they were near perfect.

And they were very unique tools that were designed specifically for the surgery. She was able to recount conversations that happened and what one of the assistant surgeons said pertaining to her anatomy, gesting about her anatomy.