Biola philosopher and apologist Sean McDowell recently interviewed Kennesaw State University philosopher of religion J. Steve Miller on the “Top 5 VERIFIED Near-Death Experiences” (February 4, 2025) at YouTube,

Miller is the author of a number of books on philosophy of religion topics, including Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven (2012)

In the interview, Miller takes a somewhat eclectic approach, beginning with the unusual experiences of people who were either skeptical or hostile to religion in general. Here we will look at #5, the skeptics who have been challenged by events that they can neither deny nor explain:

Mark Twain’s evidential experience of his brother’s death #5 [6:46]

(This video is set to play at 6:46.)

The first skeptic Miller profiles is Samuel Clemens (1835–1910) who, under the pen name Mark Twain, wrote the American classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). While Clemens did not have a near-death experience, he had a premonition of the death of his brother that he felt he could not account for by conventional means.

Clemens recounted in his autobiography that his younger brother Henry had reported for work one night in 1858 as a mud clerk on a Mississippi steamer. That night, Samuel had a disturbing dream:

In the morning, when I awoke I had been dreaming, and the dream was so vivid, so like reality, that it deceive me, and I thought it was real. In the dream I had seen Henry a corpse. He lay in a metallic burial case. He was dressed in a suit of my clothing, and on his breast lay a great bouquet of flowers, mainly white roses, with a red rose in the center…I walked to 14th, and to the middle of the block beyond…before it suddenly flashed upon me that there was nothing real about this–it was only a dream.

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1: The Complete and Authoritative Edition (U. of California Press, 2010). 129-133, quoted at “Mark Twain’s premonition,”Triablogue, May 31, 2015.

Sadly, it was not just a dream. A couple of days later, Henry’s ship’s boiler exploded and Henry, badly injured, died a short while later. The curious fact is that the details of Samuel’s dream were then corroborated to a remarkable degree:

The coffins provided for the dead were of unpainted white pine, but in this instance some of the ladies of Memphis had made up a fund of sixty dollars and bought a metallic case, and when I came back and entered the dead-room Henry lay in that open case, and he was dressed in a suit of my clothing. He had borrowed it without my knowledge during our last sojourn in St. Louis; and I recognized instantly that my dream of several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, so far as the details went–and I think I missed one detail; but that one was immediately supplied, for just then an elderly lady entered the place with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the center of it was a red rose, and she laid it on his breast…

When I arrived in St. Louis with the casket it was about eight o’clock in the morning…When I went upstairs there stood the two chairs which I had seen in my dream… Triablogue

While Clemens remained a skeptic in matters of religion and spirituality, he never attempted to explain the dream away. Indeed, he insisted, “I don’t believe that I ever had any doubts whatever concerning the salient points of the dream, for those points are of such a nature that they are pictures, and pictures can be remembered, when they are vivid, much better than one can remember remarks and unconcreted facts.”

Miller relates Clemens’ lucid dream story to accounts of near-death experiences:

They say, years later, people who study them [11:57] will… tell exactly the same story because it’s like a video they can rerun in their minds. So here’s a person who’s not excited about giving any kind of evidence for spiritual things and yet this was a very important thing that happened in his life. And … it doesn’t really talk about God or heaven in a sense but there’s something that seems to not be consistent with naturalism here.

Michael Shermer’s remarkable experience

Clemens is not the only skeptic to have had such an experience. Miller also discusses the experience of well-known science writer Michael Shermer: “He had an article in Scientific American where he admitted to an experience that he would have dismissed or disbelieved had it been reported by someone else.” [14:35]

In Shermer’s own words, “Often I am asked if I have ever encountered something that I could not explain. What my interlocutors have in mind are not bewildering enigmas such as consciousness or U.S. foreign policy but anomalous and mystifying events that suggest the existence of the paranormal or supernatural. My answer is: yes, now I have.”

Briefly, on June 25, 2014, Shermer married Jennifer Graf, who had been raised by her mother in Köln, Germany. Her grandfather, who died when she was 16, was the principal male figure in her life. She still had his 1978 Philips 070 transistor radio but it did not seem to work and Shermer’s repair efforts failed.

Being 9,000 kilometers from family, friends and home, Jennifer was feeling amiss and lonely. She wished her grandfather were there to give her away. She whispered that she wanted to say something to me alone, so we excused ourselves to the back of the house where we could hear music playing in the bedroom. We don’t have a music system there, so we searched for laptops and iPhones and even opened the back door to check if the neighbors were playing music. We followed the sound to the printer on the desk, wondering—absurdly—if this combined printer/scanner/fax machine also included a radio. Nope.

At that moment Jennifer shot me a look I haven’t seen since the supernatural thriller The Exorcist startled audiences. “That can’t be what I think it is, can it?” she said. She opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather’s transistor radio, out of which a romantic love song wafted. We sat in stunned silence for minutes. “My grandfather is here with us,” Jennifer said, tearfully. “I’ not alone.” …

Later that night we fell asleep to the sound of classical music emanating from Walter’s radio. Fittingly, it stopped working the next day and has remained silent ever since.

“Anomalous Events That Can Shake One’s Skepticism to the Core,” October 1, 2014

Shermer warns, “… if we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive or the riddle unsolved, we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious.”

That’s good advice. Too often, well-meaning people — in the name of science — assume that there must be some explanation, — by which they mean an explanation that explains away a phenomenon in a naturalistic way. But some phenomena that are beginning to be more widely studied resist such an explanation.

As we will see, these phenomena include veridical near-death experiences, where the experiencer observes and reports something that should not have been observed by a person who is unconscious and near death. In our forthcoming book, The Immortal Mind, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and I look into veridical near-death experiences in more detail.

Next: 2. #4 When information from a near-death experience is confirmed…