The scientific community, which spent decades dismissing near-death experiences as hallucinations or the misfires of an oxygen-deprived brain, is no longer so sure. “These lucid experiences cannot be considered a trick of a disordered or dying brain,” Parnia said. The question at the center of that review, account after account, is the same: how did you love? For Christians, what’s striking isn’t that scientists are finally taking this seriously — it’s what they keep finding when they do. The scientists studying this are increasingly unwilling to say the people who’ve been there are wrong.