Illusory Proof of Christianity

How Science Supersedes the Divine 

A middle-aged man is pronounced dead at the scene after his vehicle was smashed by an 18-wheeler. A little boy flickers in and out of life as he undergoes emergency surgery. And another man spends just 23 life-changing minutes behind the gates of hell.

The commonality in these anecdotes is that each of them represents a different best-selling Christian novel, which Abrahamic readers gobble up as proof that heaven and their God exist! So let’s jump back to the first story…

In 1989, Don Piper was crushed by the roof of his car when a semi-truck struck him on his drive home. The paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene, only for him to return from his heavenly journey 90 minutes later in a hospital bed. Convinced that God had sent him back to Earth to fulfill His divine will, Piper published 90 Minutes in Heaven.

The next novel, Heaven is for Real, was written by Todd Burpo on behalf of his four year-old son, Colton. Colton nearly died during surgery, but lived to tell the story of what he saw: images of the Virgin Mary beside Jesus, and his own self sitting comfortably on God’s lap.

Bill Wiese is the subject of the third anecdote. His story begins when his wife wakes in the middle of the night to her husband screaming from the living room. She explains that she had never seen him as she did that night: tormented, afraid. As Wiese returns to his normative state, he explains that he had spent the last 23 Minutes in Hell. He returns from his trip to the underworld with a fire in his belly, and God’s words “Tell them I am coming very, very soon” burned into his memory.

Piper, Burpo, and Weise all believe their stories are fact; but the three authors are somewhat blinded by the closed-mindedness of religion. Individuals who look up to a Divinity may fail to realize how divine their own mind is, and therefore forget just how much the human brain is capable of. The majority of the population cannot (or choose not to) recognize altered states of consciousness. It is not a matter of being unintelligent or simpleminded, it is just typical. Most people cannot distinguish between dreams and reality whilst in the middle of a dream.

In the first season of House, Dr. House relates the story of his own surgery and near death experience as though he were an anonymous patient. When describing the delusions he experienced, House states, “the white-light people sometimes see, visions this patient saw. They're all just chemical reactions that take place when the brain shuts down”. This is exactly what really took place in the three stories above.

The brain shuts down in part while we dream, and completely when we die. In both of these cases, a hallucinogenic chemical known as dimethyltryptamine is released to ease the individual into their unconscious (or potentially un-alive) state. The more adventurous of the living have recreationally experienced this chemical, known more colloquially as “DMT”. DMT produces powerful, other-worldly hallucinations that differ based on the individual. Just like any other substance, not everyone experiences it the same way.

As a devout Christian, it is no surprise that the release of DMT in Piper’s brain manifested as his ascension into heaven. When his body was brought back to life, his hallucination could have easily seemed real. The documentary DMT: The Spirit Molecule, presents the DMT molecule as an explanation for heavenly near-death experiences as well as alien abduction stories. It’s interesting how people who report being abducted by Tralfmadorians and the like (as in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five) are immediately outcast as crackpots. However, devout Christians who report visiting God and the heavens (under the influence of the same chemical DMT) are regarded as heroes, messengers of God sent back to enlighten fellow believers.

But I digress. The fact of the matter is that all of this “proof” from people who have been to heaven/hell and back, is simply the powerful dreams of individuals who hope, wish, pray, and actually do believe that their experience was real. Take Bill Weise, his wife found him out of bed around 3am right after he allegedly escaped from the bowels of Hell. Sounds like some sleepwalking and a nightmare. But Wiese has used this bad dream to acquire disciples, and now travels to spread his story. In many of my own dreams I’ve visited places both real and fictional, and sometimes these dreams feel very real. But after a warm shower and cup of coffee my head is clear enough to logically conclude that I had not actually visited Mordor for 23 minutes last night. 

The last novel to address is the story of a four year-old boy’s journey to heaven. My explanation is nearly identical to Piper’s situation, but the difference in age poses something interesting. James Fowler’s theory of religious development states that in the preschool years, children’s concept of God is very concrete; toddlers tend to view God as a father figure (with a long white beard and robes, naturally). Colton Burpo’s story is compatible with this notion; he says he sat on Jesus’s lap while Angels sang to him. Sounds a bit like a bedtime routine.

-Mendelssohn