Abstract

A small minority of people who undergo the initial stages of the dying process or who come close to death in general report afterward that they extremely lucidly, vividly, coherently, and rationally, etc., experienced a vastly more real reality than this one, that is, an afterlife of some kind that is described as self-evidently real to the experiencer. These experiences are commonly known as near-death experiences (NDEs). Research on NDEs has already established that (1) the overwhelming majority of people who have NDEs end up being personally convinced that it was objectively real and not a brain-generated hallucination because (2) NDEs are often experienced as categorically more real in every relevant way than the experience of this life, and (3) the people who have NDEs are as a sample representative of the population as a whole, and (4) millions if not tens of millions of people have had NDEs. By creating a thought experiment that demonstrates and emphasizes the epistemic relevance of converging and justified testimonies by randomly selected people in large numbers, combined with an investigation into the epistemic, metaphysical, and phenomenological relevance of the realer than real attribute of NDEs, it is argued that these four facts considered together force the conclusion that it is extremely likely that an afterlife exists.