Are we allowing dreams into evidence now? As real as your father's experience may have been, it is still subjective, and thus really doesn't have any bearing on the rest of us. For instance, say I had a very exciting dream involving myself, Keira Knightley, and few clothes. A rational response would be to write it off as a very good dream. An irrational response would be to become convinced that Ms. Knightley was infatuated with me and start writing her creepy letters. Likewise, if your father simply wrote this off as a dream, perhaps one whose effects were amplified by his compromised physical state, that would be rational. If that leads him to accept as fact the existence of an afterlife, despite the complete lack of any objective evidence, that would be irrational. The difference here is that your father's dream deals with death and religion, two subjects which cause most people to throw rationality out the window. Had he had the same dream one random night while lying peacefully asleep at home, we wouldn't be having this discussion. My dream wouldn't be any more real if it happened on a hospital bed, why should your father's be?
From my original post:
My reaction is that such experiences are explainable in terms of neural activity, but that doesn't necessarily exclude the possibility that these are descriptions of experiences of an afterlife. I'm not convinced by them, but I do consider it to be possible.
One possible explanation of your dream is that we live in a world in which people's minds which are perfect for each other enter the dreamworld and find each other. We don't believe that because the world doesn't seem to work that way.
But what if you saw on the news a spe...
I was on Reddit today, and I came across (this link)[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/eyiat/for_those_of_you_who_have_died_and_been/]. One of the things I've seen on this site that's bothered me is the exclusion of personal experiences in deciding what a person should or should not believe. I know that less wrong is mostly atheist, and I wanted to hear less wrong's reaction to descriptions of experiences like these.
For example, my dad was in the hospital 5 or 6 years ago when a truck came across an icy road and hit him head-on. His most vivid memory from this is a dream he had when he was in the hospital. He was in a pool of water with my mom, and they were both naked (they were underwater, but didn't need to breathe). He remembers that at the end of this pool, there was a bright light that he wanted to head towards. He began to swim that way...and here, I don't remember what happened, but he was unable to reach the light for some reason.
Such stories seem to be common for people who come close to death, and for a community based around rationality which seems to consider the likelihood of life after death as slim, I just wondered what your reactions are. My reaction is that such experiences are explainable in terms of neural activity, but that doesn't necessarily exclude the possibility that these are descriptions of experiences of an afterlife. I'm not convinced by them, but I do consider it to be possible.