Atheists believe the universe is made up of only physical material. Souls, spirits, divinity, the afterlife — it’s all fiction.

But how do they reckon with phenomena — those hair-raising moments that shatter physics and turn our brains inside out? How do they make sense of miracles, like the terminal cancer patient who’s healed after prayer or the clinically dead person who wakes up with knowledge impossible for him to have?

The hardened skeptics will clutch their materialist beliefs even tighter, insisting there must be some scientific explanation. The more curious ones who allow themselves to venture down mystical rabbit holes, however, often find themselves in the position where disavowing the supernatural takes more effort than acknowledging its existence.

That was Lee Strobel — famous Christian apologist and author of the beloved book “The Case for Christ.” He set out to debunk Christianity, but his rigorous investigation into miracles and the veracity of biblical claims shattered his atheist beliefs and led him to the feet of Jesus.

In this fascinating interview with Glenn Beck, Lee shares several documented cases of miracles and wild stories that will challenge even the most committed atheist.

Proof of the soul

“There are 900 scholarly articles published in peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals over the last 40 years on the topic of near-death experiences. These are cases where a person is clinically dead — generally, no brain waves, no respiration, no heartbeat. Some of them have been on the way to the morgue. ... But then they’re revived,” Lee says.

“And when they come back, they say, ‘I was conscious the whole time. I was watching them try to resuscitate my body in the hospital.”’

Glenn and Lee revisit the spine-chilling story of a Hispanic woman named Maria, who suffered a severe heart attack in the 1970s and was resuscitated at a hospital in Seattle. When she regained consciousness, Maria reported having an out-of-body experience, claiming her spirit floated around the emergency room while she was being operated on.

Skeptics dismissed her initially, but then Maria told them there was a sticker on the top of the ceiling fan blade in her hospital room — a detail invisible from the ground. Hospital staff brought in a ladder and beheld the sticker exactly as Maria had described it.

Lee shares another story of a young girl who drowned in a YMCA swimming pool.

“[The doctors] just were keeping her body basically alive until they figured out what to do,” he says.

But three days later, she was miraculously revived. She told hospital staff that she was “conscious the whole time,” Lee recounts. But they scoffed at the girl until she began sharing confirmed details about what her parents were doing at home while she was clinically dead in the hospital.

The girl knew that her mother made chicken and rice for dinner; she knew what specific clothes her family was wearing and that her little brother had played with his G.I. Joe toys while alone in his room — “things she could not have known unless her body, unless her spirit really did follow them home.”

Documented miracles

In his recent book “Seeing the Supernatural,” Lee shares the story of a woman who was blind from birth due to an incurable condition.

“She married a pastor. And one night they’re getting ready to go to bed, and he comes over. ... He puts his hand on her shoulder, and he begins to cry and begins to pray, and he says, ‘God, I know you can heal my wife. I know you can do it, and I pray you do it tonight.’ And with that, she opened her eyes with perfect eyesight,” Lee says, adding that her vision was perfect for the remainder of her life.

“How do you explain that?” he asks.

He then shares another “well-documented case” of a woman named Doris, who had a deathbed vision.

“She sees the heavens open up, and she sees angelic beings, and she sees her father, who had died a couple years earlier. ... And then she gets this puzzled look on her face, and she said, ‘Wait a minute. What’s Vita doing there?”’ Lee recounts.

Vita was Doris’ sister, who had died a couple of weeks earlier. However, Doris’ family hadn’t told her the news for fear that it would worsen her waning condition.

Doris is one of many documented cases of people who “see something in the realm to come that they could not have known about.”

Radical redemption

Evel Knievel — the American daredevil and stunt performer famous for his death-defying motorcycle jumps in the 1960s and 1970s — radically encountered God at the very end of his life.

“He was a drunk. He was a womanizer and once beat up a business associate with a baseball bat and went to jail for assault,” Lee says, retelling the icon’s incredible conversion story.

Just a few months before his death, Knievel was “on the beach in Florida, and God spoke to him and said, ‘Robert ... I’ve saved you more times than you’ll ever know. Now, you need to come to me through my son, Jesus.”’

Freaked out by this profound spiritual encounter, Knievel called Frank Gifford, a renowned sportscaster and Christian, to ask about Jesus and Christianity. Gifford pointed him to Lee’s famous book “The Case for Christ,” and he came to faith in Jesus after reading it.

Knievel had a “180-degree change — more than anybody I’d ever seen in my life,” Lee says, noting that he and Knievel became friends as a result.

He was baptized in California’s Crystal Cathedral, and after he gave his powerful testimony, roughly 700 people spontaneously came forward to be baptized during the same service.

Angelic and demonic encounters

Well-known psychiatrist Dr. Richard Gallagher, who’s also a professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College and a psychoanalyst on the faculty of Columbia University, has a hair-raising story about his first demon encounter that set him on a 25-year journey of studying the demonic.

He and his wife had two cats, who had never had an issue getting along with one another. One night, however, they randomly began to savagely attack each other, shocking Gallagher and his wife, who had to put the cats in separate rooms to stop the fighting.

The very next morning, Dr. Gallagher had an appointment to psychiatrically examine a woman named Julia, who claimed to be the high priestess of a satanic cult.

“She looks up at him, and she sneers, and she says, ‘How’d you like those cats last night?’” Lee says.

Later that day, Dr. Gallagher was speaking to a Catholic priest about Julia on the phone, and during their call, a “satanic voice” interrupted and said, “You let her go. She’s ours.”

After years of studying the demonic, Dr. Gallagher has accumulated many terrifying stories of demon possession. He’s documented a case where “a petite woman ... picked up a 217-pound Lutheran deacon and threw him across a room” and a case where “eight eyewitnesses saw a demon-possessed person levitate off a bed for half an hour.”

But there are just as many stories of angelic encounters too. One, which was documented in a doctoral dissertation, tells the story of a young girl in the hospital asking her mother if she could see the angels. “They’re so beautiful. Listen to their singing,” she told her mother, who was skeptical but played along.

“Oh, yeah, yeah, I see them. Look at their big wings,” she told her daughter, who confusedly responded, “Oh Mommy, you don’t have to lie. They don’t have big wings.”

“She went on to describe these angels in great detail. You would think if this was just something coming from the subconscious mind of a little kid, they would imagine what an angel would look like to them from a cartoon,” Lee says, but “that’s not what they see.”

To hear more documented cases of miraculous occurrences, as well as Glenn and Lee’s personal experiences with the supernatural, watch the interview above.

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