Question from Josh:
“A young boy emerges from life-saving surgery with remarkable stories of his visit to heaven.” I don’t buy this for one minute, but some of my religious friends hound me for an explanation. How would you explain this? I tell them it is a shame.
Answer by SmartLX:
It is rather a shame. Thanks to Heaven Is For Real, for the rest of Colton Burpo’s life people may well want to talk to him about something he barely remembers more than anything he achieves afterwards.
What Colton Burpo didn’t already know about what was going on in the real world while he was unconscious, he could have guessed (for instance that his extremely religious parents were praying). If any of the real-world revelations still seem too unlikely, the father and author Todd Burpo admits a period at the beginning of the poor kid’s interrogation when Todd hadn’t thought not to ask leading questions. There’s no telling what he fed Colton.
As for Colton’s descriptions of heaven, he could have picked up any amount of theological geography from his father before the event. Despite this, he recounted a great deal of detail which doesn’t match the Bible at all. Some believers have rejected the whole thing on this basis, but there are many others who simply ignore what Colton got “wrong” even as they proclaim what he got “right”.
There’s a decent critique of the book and the kid’s story here, written by a Christian apologist academic of all people. He’s one of those for whom the “wrong” theology is a dealbreaker. So you see, even many of the faithful aren’t happy with Colton’s testimony.