#79: Are Miracles Being Suppressed? Dale Allison on NDEs, ESP & the Supernatural

Are miracles real — and if they are, why do so many people refuse to take the evidence seriously?

In this episode of The Prometheans, I sit down with Dale C. Allison Jr., Richard J. Dearborn Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary and author of Encountering Mystery: Religious Experience in a Secular Age. Allison has spent decades studying the historical Jesus, early Christianity, the resurrection and Second Temple Judaism. But in Encountering Mystery, he turns to a very different question: what should we make of extraordinary religious and paranormal experiences that modern culture often dismisses?

We discuss: • Near-death experiences and apparently veridical perceptions • Terminal lucidity and what it might tell us about consciousness • Apparitions and encounters with the dead • ESP, telepathy and parapsychological research • Miracles and the problem of materialism • Whether religious and secular authorities suppress anomalous experiences • Protestant cessationism and the historical origins of modern skepticism • David Hume, miracles and the Enlightenment • Jinn, Sufism and Islamic conceptions of the unseen • Mystical experiences across religious traditions • Whether unexplained phenomena can provide evidence for a reality beyond the physical But beneath all of these questions lies a deeper one: What if reality is stranger than the worldview we have inherited?

Dale Allison is not a paranormalist or a conventional apologist. He is a major historical-Jesus scholar who has spent a lifetime working within the academic study of Christianity — while arguing that extraordinary human experiences deserve to be taken seriously rather than dismissed in advance.

This conversation explores where skepticism ends, where evidence begins, and whether our picture of reality may be too small. 📚 Dale Allison's Encountering Mystery: Religious Experience in a Secular Age 🎙️ The Prometheans — conversations at the intersection of philosophy, literature, theology, psychology, history and culture. Subscribe for more long-form conversations with leading scholars and thinkers.

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