TY - JOUR
T1 - Near-Death Experiences and Religious Experience
T2 - An Exploration of Spirituality in Medicine
AU - Kopel, Jonathan
AU - Webb, Mark
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
PY - 2022/2
Y1 - 2022/2
N2 - There has been a continuous discussion of religious experience since William James, culminating in a rich and varied literature on the epistemology of religious experience in the late twentieth century. There has also been a burgeoning literature on near-death experiences (NDEs), largely on neurology and physiology and sometimes as possible counterevidence to naturalism. One important subject is largely missing, and that is a discussion of NDEs as religious experiences, and what light that might shed on their epistemic status. This paper is an attempt to fill that gap. In part one, we will delineate the topic of NDEs and what medical science has to say about them. In part two, we will lay out a general view of the epistemology of religious experience. In part three, we will apply that understanding of religious experience to NDEs and draw what lessons we may.
AB - There has been a continuous discussion of religious experience since William James, culminating in a rich and varied literature on the epistemology of religious experience in the late twentieth century. There has also been a burgeoning literature on near-death experiences (NDEs), largely on neurology and physiology and sometimes as possible counterevidence to naturalism. One important subject is largely missing, and that is a discussion of NDEs as religious experiences, and what light that might shed on their epistemic status. This paper is an attempt to fill that gap. In part one, we will delineate the topic of NDEs and what medical science has to say about them. In part two, we will lay out a general view of the epistemology of religious experience. In part three, we will apply that understanding of religious experience to NDEs and draw what lessons we may.
KW - Experience
KW - Framework
KW - Near-death experiences (NDE)
KW - Religious experience
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85124652940&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3390/rel13020156
DO - 10.3390/rel13020156
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85124652940
VL - 13
JO - Religions
JF - Religions
SN - 2077-1444
IS - 2
M1 - 156
ER -