Transcript of Interview with Dale Allison on Miracles

An interview with Dale Allison on Miracles

0. Introduction

Johnathan Bi: The supernatural is real. Levitation, reincarnation, near death experiences, remote viewing; not only do these events happen, they are well documented. Not only that, but they are well documented by secular, serious scholars and scientists. There are entire labs out of Duke, Stanford, Princeton, UVA, that have come up with compelling evidence of the supernatural that cannot be absorbed into a materialist frame. This is the claim of my guest Dale Allison, who himself is a Princeton historian and a highly respected scholar. So why haven’t we heard any of this? When I read Allison’s impressive survey, my first reaction was not just shock, but anger. Why haven’t I, in my 20-plus years of education, ever been told any of this, of this radical data and the Copernican shift it seems to suggest? My guest Dale’s answer is that all of this has been systematically suppressed by not just atheists, but the religious as well. This data is threatening not just for the materialist worldview, but most religious traditions as well. In fact, you’re going to learn how atheism itself is an outgrowth of certain sects of Christianity. In this interview, you’re going to hear about all the mind-blowing empirical data for the supernatural, and what this means for the world you and I live in.

Johnathan Bi: You wrote a book called, ‘Encountering Mystery,’ about... It’s a survey, really, of the different metanormal experiences across traditions and across cultures. Let’s say you were talking to a die-hard materialist right now, what examples of the metanormal would you give that you think is the least likely to be absorbed into a purely materialist frame?

Dale Allison: Okay. Well, the first thing I would do would be to refer to two books. The first book I would refer to is a book called,’Irreducible Mind: Towards a Psychology for the 21st Century,’ edited by Edward Kelly, which is an empirical refutation of materialism. And the second book is by a man named David Bentley Hart, which is called, ‘All Things Are Full of Gods.’ One of those books takes an empirical approach, and the other takes a philosophical approach. I would simply say, go read those two books and if you’re still a materialist, I can’t help you. But if you’re going to ask me for experiences from my book, one thing I do talk about, is near death experiences which have veridical elements... Or apparently veridical elements. This is when a patient is out of it, let’s say, being operated on, and then they wake up, and then they talk to the doctor and they say, “By the way, I noticed that you had red tennis shoes on.” And the doctor is very puzzled and says, “Well, yeah, there’s no way you could know that.” There are quite a few stories now, from doctors and nurses, who say so-and-so told me something that he or she could not have known, should not have known, but did, because the person was out when what they saw happened.