Is Death a Doorway? The Mounting Evidence

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Editor’s note: For a more detailed description of the afterlife evidence, complete with citations, please see this recent article in Christian Scholar’s Review.

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It’s a metaphysical mystery we’ve yet to solve, though not from lack of effort. In fact, almost every culture throughout history has wrestled with the question: “What happens after we die?”

For the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, one’s deeds were weighed postmortem, yielding reward or punishment. For many Eastern religions, the answer has long been a cycle of reincarnation. Abrahamic faiths anticipate a final destination, glorious or ghastly, determined by grace or works. According to atheists it’s just game over—no next level, no replays.

There are other theories: Wiccan, Universalist, Sikh, Norse, Native American, the list goes on. Postulating eternity has always been part of the human condition.

But there’s a “fatal flaw” in all this life-after-death speculation, skeptics snicker. This side of the Enlightenment we prefer data to dogma, and there’s not a jot or tittle of real data to support any of these ornate theories. So the afterlife issue, they claim, remains in the conjectural realm of theology and philosophy, rather than the demonstrable realm of science.

Well, what if we did have some “real data” about the afterlife — credible evidence that some part of us survives physical death? After all these centuries of supposition, how extraordinary would it be to finally have an evidence-based theory of life after death?

We may be closer than you think.

The year 2025 will mark 50 years of researchers publishing accounts of what people experience when their heart stops and their brainwaves flatten. Beginning with the seminal 1975 study of 150 people who reported that their consciousness survived the temporary death of their body, there are now thousands of similar, documented reports. Collectively these reports are breathing new life into the eternity question, demystify it through data.

Now, I get it, you already may be formulating objections based on some preconceived notion of “near-death experiences,” but hear me out on this. As a social scientist, I was pretty skeptical myself until I reviewed the evidence. Let me share some of it with you, three specific lines of evidence. Then decide for yourself whether to dig deeper through this recent, peer-reviewed article on the topic. Here’s what we know from the research.

An Evidence-Based Theory of Life after Death

First, thousands of people all over the world have reported taking some sort of out-of-body journey when they went into cardiac arrest — during a medical operation or after a car accident or while they were drowning, any number of contexts. And the curious thing about those journey reports isn’t just how numerous they are or how global, but how consistent they are. Many of the stories feature the same core elements, and you’ve likely heard of these: seeing their body from above, moving through a tunnel, encountering a being of light, the feeling of perfect peace and unconditional love, meeting angels or deceased loved ones, being escorted through a place of indescribable beauty, reaching a boundary, and then returning to their body, often involuntarily.

No two of these reports are exactly the same, but consider this: How likely is it that so many of these experiences would unfold with similar elements in a similar order if they were mere dreams or hallucinations? Instead, the prevalence and consistent pattern of these reports invites us to delve further into whether our consciousness actually survives our body.

That’s one line of evidence, the prevalence and consistent pattern of these near-death experience reports.

The second is that people who go through these experiences usually come back changed. Most of them no longer fear death because they’re confident they know what’s next. Many also no longer fear life. They begin taking more risks and they start enjoying life to the fullest. Plus, there are myriad stories of people whose lives turned around completely after their experience. They become better people. They love those around them more. Some become pastors or other faith leaders. And the ones who had a distressing or “hellish” experience — researchers estimate that at about 15 to 20 percent of these events — are even more likely to turn their lives around.

Yes, if you’re thinking that “changed lives” aren’t really proof of anything, you’re surely correct, but this second line of evidence simply shows that whatever these experiences are, they’re real enough to create significant transformation in people’s lives, which is what we’d expect if the experiences do indeed reflect reality.

So the plot thickens. There’s the prevalence and consistent pattern of these reports, and there are the changed lives afterward. That’s all what we might call “preliminary” or “prima facie” evidence. But a third line of evidence get us much closer to what we’d call proof. It’s the “corroborated” evidence for life-after-death experiences, meaning the claims these people made about the experience were verified by others as accurate.

Um, “verified by others”? How can that be?

Sometimes it’s an accurate report from this person about what happened in the operating room during their surgery while they were incapacitated. Other times it’s an accurate report about events farther away from where the person was dying — events somewhere else in the hospital or outside of it or even miles away. And occasionally the verification comes in the form of receiving previously-unknown information from someone they allegedly met in the afterlife.

Again, the difference in these accounts, and what makes researchers take these accounts seriously, is that there’s corroboration of the claims, just like in a court of law when some witness’s story checks out as true.

Corroborated Crossings

Some examples will help clarify this, so let me share a few, at least in their abbreviated form. Recognize, though, there are now hundreds of reports that have been corroborated, making them increasingly difficult to ignore.

In one story out of Seattle, a woman who was resuscitated after a heart-attack insisted that she saw a sneaker on a third story window ledge of the hospital as her consciousness floated upward. And she got very detailed about it. She described it as a man’s left sneaker, dark blue with a wear mark over the little toe region, and a shoelace tucked under the heel. As it turns out, she was exactly right. The nurse who eventually found the sneaker said: “The only way she could have had such a perspective was if she had been floating right outside and at very close range to the tennis shoe. I retrieved the shoe and brought it back.”

Here’s another peculiar account. A woman was pronounced dead-on-arrival at the hospital, but the medical team was able to restore her heartbeat. She later awoke from her coma claiming to have floated over her body while the staff revived her. The nurses privately rolled their eyes. Apparently, they always dismissed such stories as dreams or drug reactions. But this patient had a habit of memorizing numbers because of her obsessive-compulsive disorder and recalled seeing, during her out-of-body-experience, a 12-digit serial number atop the respirator. The nurses indulged her and wrote down the number she gave them.

Now, imagine being in the room for a minute. The respirator machine is seven feet high, so the nurse calls for a maintenance man to check on top of it. The guy shows up with a ladder and they ask him: “Is there a number on top of the machine?” “Uh, yeah, there is.” It happened to be the exact 12-digit number the patient had given to the nurses.

Then there was this account published in The Lancet, which is a top medical journal in Europe. The journal reported that a patient in cardiac arrest was brought into a Dutch hospital, unresponsive and not breathing. The medical staff removed his dentures to insert a ventilation tube, putting the dentures in the drawer of a nearby crash-cart. A few days later the man regained consciousness and was told that his dentures were lost in the chaos of the moment, but the patient, claiming to have seen all these events from above, knew precisely where the dentures were and even identified the nurse who put them in the cart. The article further reported that the patient “was also able to describe correctly and in detail the small room in which he had been resuscitated, as well as the appearance of those present,” despite having been “in a deep coma and in the process of CPR” at the time.

Notice something: In each of these cases, the person returned with accurate information they should not have known.

The same has happened with young kids who come back talking about siblings they never knew they had—siblings who had passed away. How did they know that? No one ever told them because they were too young, but somehow, they came back knowing their deceased sister? There are even documented accounts of the blind seeing for the first time during these near-death experiences and returning with accurate, specific descriptions of their earthly surroundings.

Is Death a Doorway?

For the sake of integrity, it’s important not to overstate the case, so let me be clear: We are nowhere near the threshold of “beyond a reasonable doubt” with these accounts. What we can say with confidence, though, is the mounting, corroborated evidence, along with the prima facie evidence we highlighted earlier — the prevalence and consistent pattern of these reports, and the changed lives afterward — is making it “more likely than not” that at least some of these experiences do indeed reflect reality. Stated differently, we now have a half-century of data about what may happen after we die.

Bottom line, no matter your worldview, no matter your theology, it may be wise to graft in the emerging science of life-after-death. A growing dataset strongly implies continuity of consciousness. Seemingly, part of us survives our physical body, maybe the real essence of us, what historically has been called “the soul.” Plus, this dataset is becoming more robust with every decade and with every life-saving advance that brings more people back from the brink of eternity.

In plainer English, increasingly we have evidence that death is a doorway.

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For a more detailed description of the afterlife evidence, complete with citations, please see this recent article in Christian Scholar’s Review.

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Michael Zigarelli is a professor at Messiah University in Pennsylvania and the author of several books. You can reach him at mzigarelli@messiah.edu