In the summer of 2011, Strobel had a brush with death that prompted him to look into this topic. “Suddenly,” he writes in his book, “it wasn’t enough to have a few inchoate suppositions about the world to come. It was insufficient to cling to some antiseptic-sounding doctrines that had never been adequately examined. I needed to know for sure what happens when I close my eyes for the final time in this world.”
In addition to exploring what science, philosophy, and other disciplines can tell us about the afterlife, Strobel’s book explores the Christian teachings on heaven and hell, and also addresses reincarnation.
Strobel told LIFE Today he was only willing to believe stories about NDEs if there were evidence they were true. “There have been people who have made up stories and published books about things that they later admitted weren’t true,” he said, “so unless I can corroborate it, I’m not interested.” But what he found was, “There are many cases that are corroborated,” as he relates in “The Case for Heaven.”
The detail in some of these accounts is striking. For example, a woman named Maria reports having an NDE where, after having heart attack, she floated above the hospital where she was a patient and saw a shoe on the ledge of a third-story hospital window. After returning to her body, she described the shoe in detail. Not only did the shoe exist but it also matched Maria’s description. Said Strobel, “You can’t deny that something is going on there.”
