Does Heaven Exist?

There was a news story about a neurologist—a doctor—who claims that he saw Heaven.

This doctor had a rare brain infection with E. coli and was in a coma for seven days. He was not expected to live.

However, he survived and awoke from his coma, and when he awoke he related an experience. He talks of having been guided by a woman with blond hair, and seeing a very bright light.

The bright light thing is common to near-death experiences and has been explained as being a result of the brain's actions in the near-death condition.

However, the blond woman turns out to have been his sister whom he had never met or even seen before his coma because they were both adopted at birth.

Also, he says that brain scans made while he was in the coma showed no brain activity. Therefore, his experience could not have been generated in his brain and been the result of any normal brain activity.

Creepy. Definitely very creepy.

As to the lack of brain activity, I think a possible explanation might be that the man's brain was indeed active but was generating brain waves of a type that is not picked up on the kind of brain scan that was administered.

I have a problem with the idea of Heaven (or of an afterlife, or of a soul) which I'd say is the result of simple logic.

If you accept the idea of human evolution and a belief in Heaven at the same time, then you must raise the question, At which point in the course of evolution did there appear a creature with a soul and who could be admitted to Heaven. In other words, did Homo erectus have a soul and the possibility of entry to Heaven? Did Australopithecus afarensis?*

There was no first human, only creatures very gradually, over hundreds of thousands of years, becoming human. So there was no baby born who was the first Homo sapiens. Evolution was continuous and very gradual, with no sudden leaps. Distinct species are recognizable to us in the fossil record, but only when we are comparing different fossil examples which are hundreds of thousands of years apart. The early evolutionists asserted, Natura non fecit saltam—Nature does not produce leaps, or jumps.

I can't believe that God said, arbitrarily, one day 700,000 (or even 50,000) years ago, "Okay, as of June 30th of this year, I declare that humanoid creatures will be born with souls and can be admitted to Heaven."
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*Australopithecus afarensis is the fossil species to which the famous "Lucy" fossil--a girl only about three feet tall--belongs. And Australopithecus is the hominid fossil genus that preceded the genus Homo.
© 2012 by Richard Stein