I recently sat with a good friend as she received yet another round of chemo for reoccurring cancer. Our visit was a tender time of connecting and conversing about what really matters. My friend, a longtime spiritual seeker in the Catholic tradition, confessed that she doesn't really know for sure whether there is an afterlife. The notion that her body's molecules will melt into the "great-all" of the universe isn't so very attractive. This idea seems to be an extant theme in contemporary scientific-cosmological explanations about where we've come from and where we are going. From the perspective of pure biology, it seems quite correct.

But it doesn't go far enough for many people, including me.

Enter Dr. Eben Alexander's book Proof of Heaven. The author is a neurosurgeon who in 2008 fell victim to a rare form of bacterial meningitis that landed him in a weeklong coma. After many days of antibiotics failed to yield discernable improvement, Alexander's prospects for making a full recovery with all faculties intact were virtually nil. Yet he inexplicably recovered completely. His book chronicles a near-death experience that, according to prevailing scientific theories, never should have happened.

I have been fascinated by accounts of near-death experiences since graduate school, when my nursing studies focused on Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross' then-revolutionary work with death and dying and Dr. Raymond Moody's work Life after Life. Typically, people report being met and accompanied by deceased loved ones, floating above their bodies while medical personnel tried to revive them, and encountering an ineffable being of light who emanates unconditional love. Some report being offered a choice about whether to return to earthly life or not. Upon recovery, people said they experienced a heightened awareness that love is the most important thing in the world and they no longer feared death.

For the last 50 years, medical science has explained near-death experiences as the result of a gradual shutting down of the cells of the outer layers of the brain, the neocortex, that governs higher cognitive functions such as vision, hearing, memory, emotional responses, and abstract thinking. This is what Alexander himself believed when some of his patients shared stories of deceased loved ones who came to comfort them in their final days.

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Since bacterial meningitis attacks the connective tissue (or meninges), lining the neocortex, Alexander believes the severe intractability of his infection meant his neocortex was completely "offline," making any near-death experience theoretically impossible in his case. While some have criticized Alexander's science, no one disputes that he was all but dead, yet came back to tell about it.

His life was completely changed by the experience: "[It] healed my fragmented soul. It had let me know that I had always been loved, and it also showed me that absolutely everyone else in the universe is loved, too." Alexander now works to bridge the gap between materialist understandings of a soulless, somewhat mechanistic universe and new empirical discoveries in quantum mechanics and the domains of consciousness and spirituality.

His most recent book, The Map of Heaven, explores what science, religion and ancient wisdom from luminaries such as Plato, the Dalai Lama and Carl Jung have to offer.

At the heart of the debate is the nature of human consciousness. Scientific materialists believe human consciousness is the product of physical brain functions. When the brain dies, consciousness (and that which makes us quintessentially human) dies along with it. Other, "post-materialist scientists" believe this construct cannot be proven and ignores abundant empirical evidence to the contrary.

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Will science prove there is a heaven?