Appendix A

The Three-Dimensional NDE Scoring System

A Practical Framework for Evaluating Near-Death Experience Cases

When I began the doctoral research that became the dissertation behind this book, I quickly ran into a problem. The NDE literature is enormous. Thousands of accounts have been published — in scholarly journals, in popular books, in online databases like the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) and the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS).¹ But these accounts vary wildly in evidential weight. A two-paragraph email submission from an anonymous user — “I almost drowned in 1987 and saw my grandmother” — sits in the same database as Pam Reynolds’s standstill surgery, a case documented by neurosurgeons at the Barrow Neurological Institute with EEG monitoring, evoked-potential recording, and operating-room witnesses. Both are “NDEs.” Neither should bear the same evidential weight.

Existing scoring systems did not solve this problem. Bruce Greyson’s NDE Scale, the field standard since 1983, measures phenomenological richness — how many of the typical NDE features are present.² Kenneth Ring’s Weighted Core Experience Index does something similar.³ Both are useful for what they were built to do. Neither asks the question I needed answered: how strong is the evidential case in this particular report?

So I built a different instrument. The system you are about to read scores three dimensions independently — medical context, veridical quality, and corroboration — each on a zero-to-ten scale. The total runs from zero to thirty. The system is explicitly evidential, not phenomenological. It does not care how many tunnels or beings of light are in the report. It cares whether the case is well-documented, whether the perceived information was inaccessible by ordinary means, and whether independent witnesses or records confirm what the experiencer claims.

This appendix lays the system out so you can use it yourself.

The Three Dimensions, Briefly

Before the rubrics, the logic. A near-death experience that bears evidential weight against physicalism must satisfy three conditions at once. The experiencer must really have been near death (medical context). The experiencer must really have perceived something they could not have perceived through ordinary sensory channels (veridical quality). And the perception must really be confirmed by someone or something other than the experiencer’s own memory (corroboration). Strip out any one of these, and the case loses most of its evidential force. A vivid experience during a fender-bender with no medical crisis is not evidence of anything dualism-relevant. A specific verifiable claim during a documented cardiac arrest with no witness to confirm it is hearsay. A claim confirmed by witnesses, but for events the experiencer could plausibly have inferred or overheard, is interesting but not decisive.

The three dimensions are deliberately separated so weakness in one cannot be hidden by strength in another. A case scoring 9-9-1 is not a strong case, even though its average looks respectable. A case scoring 7-7-7 — solid in all three — is genuinely robust. The shape of the score matters.

Dimension A — Medical Context (0–10)

The medical context score asks one question: how close to death was this person, and how well do we know it? A documented cardiac arrest with continuous EEG, witnessed by trained medical staff, and recorded in a hospital chart is a very different evidential setting than a self-reported “I felt like I was dying” episode at home. The first gives us a measurable window in which conscious experience should, on physicalist assumptions, have been impossible. The second gives us almost nothing.

Two practical notes. First, “clinical death” in this rubric means cessation of cardiac function, not biological death. Most NDEs occur during the window between cardiac arrest and successful resuscitation — typically seconds to a few minutes. Second, EEG monitoring during cardiac arrest is rare. Most resuscitations do not include it. When it is present, the case becomes especially interesting, because the standard physicalist objection — “the brain was still active in some way you didn’t measure” — loses traction.⁴

Dimension B — Veridical Quality (0–10)

The veridical-quality score asks: how specific is the reported perception, and how unlikely is it that the experiencer could have known the information through ordinary channels? “I saw a bright light” is not veridical content. Anyone could report that. “I saw the surgeon use a particular instrument I had never seen, in a way described as unusual by the surgical staff, while my eyes were taped shut and my body temperature was reduced to fifty degrees” is veridical content. The second claim, if accurately reported, makes specific predictions that can fail. The first does not.

Specificity is the key. A claim that resists vagueness, that names details only insiders would know, that is anchored in time and place — that is the kind of claim that can be falsified, and so the kind that, when confirmed, weighs as evidence.

Notice what this dimension does not reward. It does not reward emotional intensity. It does not reward theological richness. It does not reward the presence of typical NDE features. Those things matter for other purposes — pastoral care, theological reflection, phenomenological study — but they are not evidence against physicalism. The veridical-quality score is narrow on purpose.

Dimension C — Corroboration (0–10)

The corroboration score asks: who else confirms what the experiencer reports, and how good is their testimony? An experiencer’s own memory, however vivid, is not external evidence. Memories can be reconstructed, embellished, or filled in over time — sometimes innocently, sometimes not. The case becomes evidentially strong when independent parties — physicians, nurses, family members in another room, hospital records, video recordings — confirm details the experiencer could not have known by ordinary means.

The phrase “before the experiencer could have learned the information through ordinary channels” carries a lot of weight. The strongest corroboration is real-time — the experiencer reports something on regaining consciousness, before any opportunity to read the chart or talk to staff, and the staff confirm it.⁵ Penny Sartori’s prospective cardiac unit study used this protocol.⁶ So did the AWARE study under Sam Parnia at Southampton.⁷ Real-time corroboration is the gold standard, and the rubric is built to honor it.

Combining the Scores: The Threshold Categories

The three dimensions sum to a total between 0 and 30. To make the totals meaningful, I grouped them into five threshold categories. The labels are deliberately plain English, since the categories are meant to be used by pastors and lay readers as well as researchers.

In the dissertation dataset of 5,278 cases, 1,618 cases (30.7%) reached Strong or Exceptional. The cumulative argument of the book rests primarily on these.⁸ The remaining 69.3% are not dismissed — they have value for studying the phenomenology of dying, the cross-cultural patterns, the transformational aftereffects — but they are not what the case for substance dualism stands or falls on. That distinction is essential to the book’s honesty. We are not pretending that every NDE report is strong evidence. We are saying that nearly a third of them, on careful evaluation, are.

Examples at Each Threshold

Concrete cases anchor abstract rubrics. Here is roughly what each threshold looks like in practice.

Exceptional (25–30). Pam Reynolds’s 1991 standstill-surgery case is the textbook example.⁹ Medical context: 10 — surgical hypothermic circulatory arrest with EEG and brainstem evoked-potential monitoring, body temperature reduced to 60°F, eyes taped shut, ears blocked with molded speakers emitting clicks. Veridical quality: 9 — accurate description of the unusual bone saw used, an overheard surgical conversation about femoral arterial access, specific procedural details. Corroboration: 9 — multiple medical-professional witnesses, hospital documentation, and surgeon Robert Spetzler’s own testimony confirming details. Total: 28. Al Sullivan’s coronary bypass NDE (1988), in which Sullivan accurately described his surgeon’s unusual flapping-elbow gesture during surgery, scores comparably.¹⁰

Strong (19–24). Pim van Lommel’s “dentures case” from the 2001 Lancet study sits here. A cardiac-arrest patient, found in a meadow and brought in unconscious, was intubated after his dentures were removed by a coronary care nurse. A week later, on a different ward, the patient recognized the nurse and described the room, the cart his dentures had been placed in, and the resuscitation in detail.¹¹ Medical context: 9. Veridical quality: 8. Corroboration: 6 — single nurse-witness, contemporaneous, but no formal documentation chain. Total: 23. Many of Sartori’s prospective cardiac-arrest cases score in this range, as do several of the AWARE Case A reports.

Moderate (13–18). Many cases in the NDERF database score here. A typical example: a patient describes, after recovering from cardiac arrest, accurate general details about the resuscitation effort — the people present, the use of the defibrillator, the placement of the bed — but no detail specific enough to rule out inference from context. Medical context: 7–8. Veridical quality: 4–5. Corroboration: 3–5. Total: 14–18. These cases are part of the cumulative pattern but not load-bearing on their own.

Minimal (7–12). A patient reports a vivid experience during a serious illness — tunnel, light, presence of a deceased relative — but offers no externally verifiable claims. The medical event is real but not well documented; the family confirms the illness but not the experience’s contents. These cases matter pastorally and phenomenologically. They are not evidence against physicalism.

None (0–6). “I had a really vivid dream once when I was sick.” No medical documentation, no veridical content, no corroboration. The case is what it is — a personal experience, possibly meaningful, but evidentially silent.

How to Use the System

If you want to evaluate a case yourself, work through the three rubrics in order. Do not cheat by averaging or by letting one strong dimension carry a weak one. Score each independently. Write down your reasoning for each score; future you will want to remember why. Then sum the totals and identify the threshold. If the case lands at the boundary between two thresholds, the lower threshold is the safer call. Evidential conservatism serves the long-term credibility of the field.

For pastors and chaplains: this rubric is not a tool for telling a grieving family member their loved one’s experience “does not count.” That is not what it is for. It is for distinguishing what we can and cannot use as public evidence against the claim that consciousness ends at brain death. A Minimal-scoring NDE may still be the most important moment of someone’s life. Pastoral significance and evidential weight are different categories. Honor both.

Limitations of the System

No scoring instrument is perfect, and this one has known weaknesses I want to name plainly. First, the rubrics require some judgment, especially in the middle ranges; two careful researchers may score the same case differently by a point or two. The system is robust at the extremes (Exceptional cases are recognizably Exceptional; None cases are recognizably None) but fuzzier in the middle. Second, the system rewards documentation quality, which means historical cases — including many of the most famous early reports — are systematically penalized for living before the era of EEG, electronic records, and prospective protocols. Third, the system cannot reach inside the experiencer’s honesty. A fabricated case with the right shape could in principle score high. The mitigation here is the corroboration dimension itself: fabrication tends to fail under independent witness scrutiny.

Despite these limits, the system does what it was designed to do. It separates evidentially strong cases from weak ones in a transparent, replicable way. It gives readers and researchers a common language for talking about evidential weight. And it forces the cumulative argument to rest on cases that can carry it.

Closing

The rubric in this appendix is not the last word on NDE evaluation. It is a working instrument, refined through analysis of more than five thousand cases and offered here so others can use, critique, and improve it. What I most hope is that readers will resist two opposite errors: dismissing NDE reports wholesale because some are weak, and accepting them wholesale because some are extraordinary. The evidence is stronger than skeptics admit and weaker than enthusiasts sometimes claim. A careful scoring system holds the middle. From that middle, the case for substance dualism — and for the historic Christian theology of dying that this book defends — can be made honestly.