DR. MICHAEL EGNOR - The Brain, the Mind, and the Soul: A Neurosurgeon's Journey from Atheism to Faith - The Will Spencer Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Foreign.

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Hello and welcome to the WillSpencer Podcast.
This is a weekly interviewshow where I sit down and talk with
authors, thought leaders, andinfluencers who help us understand
our changing world.
New episodes release every week.
My guest this week is Dr.Michael Egnor.
Dr. Michael Egner is theprofessor of neurosurgery and pediatrics
and neurosurgery residencydirector at Renaissance School of

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Medicine in Stony Brook, New York.
He attended medical school atthe Columbia College of Physicians
and Surgeons and completedresidency training in neurosurgery
at the University of Miami.
He has been on faculty atStony brook University since 1991.
He is a senior fellow at theDiscovery Institute center for Natural
and Artificial and is coauthor, with Denise o', Leary, of

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the new book, the Immortal ANeurosurgeon's Case for the Existence
of the Soul, published byworthy books.
Dr. Egnor, thanks so much forjoining me on the Will Spencer Podcast.
Thank you, Will.
It's a privilege to be here.
Thank you.
So I have your book here, theImmortal Mind, and I have to say
I greatly enjoyed this book.
I found it to be a movingoverview of a very important subject,

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a personal story as well, andalso very informative and accessible.
You and Ms. O' Leary did awonderful job with this.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
So from the beginning, let'sjust start.
What inspired the book?
What inspired you to startputting it together?
Well, I had started out mylife as an atheist, and I grew up

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in a family that didn'tparticularly value religion.
And I was never an angry atheist.
I always kind of I thoughtChristians were really nice people
and that Christianity was alovely idea, thought it was a myth.
I thought it just wasn't true.
And I fell in love with science.
I wanted to understand the world.
And so I majored inbiochemistry in college.

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And then in medical school, Ifell in love with neuroscience and
wanted to be a neurosurgeon.
So I studied all the textbooksand learned as much as I could.
And when I actually got topracticing neurosurgery, I found
out that there were therelationship between the brain and
the mind was different fromwhat had been in my textbooks, which

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had been sort of materialistic persp.
And I also went through areligious conversion during that
time.
And I really came to see thebrain, the mind, and the human soul
in a very different way.
And what really struck me wasthat the neuroscience behind the

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relationship between the brainand the mind pointed to a very different
understanding of the soul thanI had had when I was a Materialist.
So you've conducted thousandsof neurosurgery oper many.
Is it 7,000, something like that?
Yeah, yeah, about 7,000.
Which is.
Which is sort of an averagenumber for.
I mean, I've been doing thisfor about 40, 45 years, depending

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on how you define it.
So it's about an averagenumber for a surgeon who has worked
that many years.
What's a high number just fora range?
That's a good question.
I would imagine pushing 10,000would be pretty.
Pretty high, but.
So 7,000 is a pretty averagenumber, I think.

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So the audience knows this issomething that you know quite a lot
about, not just, you know,from textbooks, not just from theory,
but from actual.
In the field, surgery.
Yeah.
And that's a large part ofwhat motivated me to work with Denise
o' Leary on this book was thatI really felt that what I was learning

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from my own practice, from myown experiences with patients, didn't
fit the materialist paradigm.
And I went and looked at theneuroscience at a lot of the great
research experiments that havebeen done over the past century,
and I saw that other peoplewere really getting the same results
that I was.
They were seeing the samethings, although they weren't always

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so willing to talk about themthat way.
What were some of the thingsthat you were seeing?
Well, a good example is whenyou study neuroanatomy and neurophysiology,
you learn about all thedifferent connections and pathways
inside the brain and howcritical the cortex of the brain
is to consciousness and thingslike that.

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But I began seeing patientswho really had deficiencies in the
way their brains were structured.
But they were okay.
They were perfectly conscious.
Many of them were perfectly normal.
One example, there's a littlegirl who was born with about two
thirds of her brain missingand the rest of her head was filled
with spinal fluid.

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And I, yeah, I counseled herfamily that, well, I couldn't be
sure.
I mean, I didn't think she'ddo very well.
I thought she would be verydevelopmentally delayed.
And as she grew up, she grewup perfectly normally.
She's now a young lady in her20s, and she's bright and perfectly
normal.
Person can converse just likeyou and I can.

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And she's missing most of her brain.
I have other patients who havemajor problems.
I have a young lady who isalso missing important parts of her
brain, brain from birth, as abirth defect, who was a gifted student
in school and now has amaster's degree in English literature

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and is a published musician.
And perfectly normal person.
But I also.
I have some patients who arevery handicapped.
For example, I have a littleboy who's missing both of his brain
hemispheres.
The only thing he has is abrain stem.
And the condition is called hydrancephaly.
It's a rare condition wherechildren have strokes inside the

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womb and most of their brainis gone.
And he's got rather severecerebral palsy.
He has a lot of handicaps, buthe's fully conscious, totally conscious
kid.
And all the textbooks say thatconsciousness comes from the cortex,
the surface of the brain.
But he doesn't have a surfaceof the brain, and he's still completely
conscious.

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The point really struck homewhen a number of years ago, I was
doing awake brain surgery.
Awake brain surgery is when weoperate on patients while they're
awake.
We give them local anesthesiaso they don't feel any pain, but
we do it when they're awake ifwe have to map the surface of their
brain.
So we go in and use anelectrical probe to stimulate gently,

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the surface of the brain tofind out where the critical areas
are located.
If we have to remove a tumoror remove an area that's causing
seizures, we can be sure thatwe're not going to damage something
really important.
And in this young woman, I wasremoving part of her left front frontal
lobe because it wasinfiltrated by a tumor, and it was
near the area that controlledher speech.

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So I had to be able to listento her talking as I was doing the
surgery so I could know that Iwas protecting her ability to speak.
And we had a conversation as Iwas removing a major part of her
left frontal lobe.
And we were talking about theweather, we were talking about her
family, talking about the foodin the cafeteria.
And this went on for severalhours during the surgery.

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And when I was finished theoperation, I just thought, my goodness,
none of that is in any of the textbooks.
There's no neurosciencetextbook that says you can take out
most of the left frontal lobewith a person who's talking to you
as you're taking it out.
So I began to ask thequestion, what is the relationship

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between the brain and the mind?
And I found that aneurosurgeon before me named Wilder
Penfield, who lived back inthe mid 20th century, had asked that
question also.
And his question, he said itin a very elegant, eloquent, eloquent
way.
He said, and I paraphrase, thefundamental question in neuroscience

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is, does the brain explain themind completely?
Now, everybody knows that thebrain, to some extent, explains the
mind.
I mean, if you get hit on thehead with a baseball bat, your mind
isn't going to be quite thesame as before.
Or if you drink too much andyou get intoxicated, your brain's
different and your mind is different.
But is the brain the whole story?

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Is there anything else there?
And Penfield, who, just likeme, had started out as a materialist,
and he was one of the greatestneuroscientists of the 20th century.
After mapping the brains of1100 patients, doing the same kind
of surgery I did on thatwoman, only he did it 1100 times,
he came to the conclusion thatwe have a soul, that there's a part

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of the mind that is not in the brain.
And I was finding exactly thesame thing.
And there are many otherexperiments that also support that
view.
That was one of the thingsthat I enjoyed most about the book,
was the way that you laid outthe difference between brain, mind
and consciousness and soul.

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That there are aspects of usthat are controlled by the material
aspects of our brain.
But there's something thatexists completely independent of
the brain that can't be splitor separated, but that.
That can't be localized in thebrain itself.
Maybe that was what youreferred earlier.
You referred to thematerialist perspective.
Maybe you can share a littlebit about what that means.

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Sure.
That's a very good synopsis ofwhat we write about.
The brain is an organ justlike any other organ in the body.
For example, the eye is anorgan, and what it does is it helps
us see.
So vision is its job.

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The ear is the organ of hearing.
The heart is the organ ofpumping blood.
So you can reasonably ask,well, what is the brain?
The organ of what does thebrain do?
And it does really important things.
And you can say it does reallyfive things that are fundamentally
important.
The first thing is that itkind of controls the basic functions

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of our body, like our bloodpressure, our heart rate, all of
our hormones, things like that.
The second thing the braindoes is it controls our movement.
It allows us to move our limbsto do things like that.
Third thing is it controls our.
Our sensations.
So it controls our vision andour hearing and things like that.
It allows us to have memories.

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So when we remember ourgrandmother's face or something,
that comes from the brain.
And it allows us to have emotions.
We can feel happy or sad, andyou can tell if you can take a medication
that changes the way youremotions work.
So the brain is an organ thatdoes those things, and they're very
important.
But.
But what I found and what manyother neuroscientists have found

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is that the brain doesn'tgenerate abstract thought like reason
and intellect and the abilityto think things through logically.
And it doesn't seem togenerate the free will either.
The free will seems to comefrom an immaterial source.
So what I think is theclearest or most, is the truest way

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to explain the way the brainrelates to the mind is that the brain
does basic physiological functions.
It does movement, it doessensation, it does memory, and it
does emotion.
But intellect and will don'tcome from the brain, and they're
part of the soul.

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And we have immaterial souls.
And you can identify theimmaterial soul in ordinary neuroscientific
research and in ordinaryneurosurgical practice.
You can identify the soul inordinary practice.
Say more about that.
That.
Yeah.
Well, in the same way that Iwas having this conversation with
this lady when she was awake,removing a major part of the left

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frontal lobe of her brain, andeven though I was cutting out a big
part of the frontal lobe, itdidn't have any effect on our conversation
at all.
She was perfectly fine becauseI wasn't cutting out her soul.
Praise God for that.
Yeah, right, right.
So there's a part of us thatisn't made of me.

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You might say, you know, weare, in some sense made of meat.
We're animals, we're livingcreatures, but there's a part of
us that isn't meat.
And the materialist mythology,and it really is a mythology, is
that we're just robots made of meat.
You know, we just were.
The brain's the centralprocessing unit that makes our body

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work like robots.
And the reality is that inordinary neurosurgical practice and
in some of the bestneuroscience of the past century,
the evidence is very clearthat we're not robots made of meat,
that we have a soul, and thatpart of that soul has spiritual powers,
which are not material powers.

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So maybe you can illustrate this.
And by the way, this was oneof my favorite things, if not the
favorite thing about the book,was the way that you separated mind
from soul or the materialaspects that root themselves in the
brain to this thing called thesoul that does exist beyond the brain.
What is that?

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How does that work?
How is that a unified,singular thing in a way that can't
be divided?
That was kind of the journeythat I went on while reading the
book was something that seemedkind of nebulous, but I had a sense
of.
An intuitive sense of.
Came into sharper focus duringthe course of your book.
And so that was one of thegifts that I got from reading this.
Well, thank you.

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And that actually was a veryspecific intention of ours, was to.
Was to make the case thatthere's nothing particularly spooky
about this.
This is not magic, it's not aseance, it's not any kind of weird
thing.
This is very straightforwardlogic, very straightforward philosophy,

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and a very straightforward science.
And one of the things thatreally struck me about what I was
learning was that it fitbeautifully the.
The way that Thomas Aquinas,who's a Saint from the 13th century,
understood the way the soulworked and actually is very close

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to the way Aristotle felt thatthe soul worked.
So this is ancient wisdom thatI think we need to bring back, because
the materialist view thatagain, everything comes from the
brain and that we are justmeat robots doesn't fit the science,
it doesn't fit reality, and itdoesn't even make any sense.

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So were these observationsthat you had been carrying for a
long time about the way thebrain and the mind and consciousness
work, and then when youencountered Aristotle and Aquinas,
suddenly they offeredexplanations like, oh, these fit
with my experience, or had youencountered them first and they help
you re.
Understand what you'd seen?

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I encountered.
Well, I encountered thescience first and the experience
first, and I found all thesestrange things.
Again, this not notion thatthere were two different aspects
to the mind.
One aspect of the mind, likeour ability to see and to hear and
so on, was clearly linked veryclosely to the brain.

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I mean, that's a major part ofbrain surgery is protecting those
things.
But then the other aspect ofthe mind, the capacity for abstract
thought, for having concepts,for having reason for free will,
they weren't linked so closelyto the brain.
And so I. I began readingphilosophy of mind.
I was saying, well, I wonderif anyone else has seen this before.

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And I realized that, well,Aristotle saw it back 2,300 years
ago, and St. Thomas Aquinassaw it back about 800 years ago.
I'm not the first person tosee this.
And what I really wanted toconvey in the book is that these
classical ways ofunderstanding the soul, which is

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really largely the Christianway of understanding the soul, is
the truth that there's a.
It's the scientific truth aswell as the theological truth.
How did you feel when you saw that?
Was it a relief?
Was it like, what was?
I imagine there was someemotional experience to have observed
all these thingsscientifically and then to go back

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thousands of years and findlike, oh, yeah, no, we knew this
stuff once upon a time.
Well, I felt two things.
One was, you know, kind ofsome fascination certainly made me
take St. Thomas Aquinas a lotmore seriously.
And I figured, well, if he gotthis right, he probably got a lot
of stu right.
So I actually read.
I read as much as I couldabout God and about faith and about

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all sorts of things fromThomas Aquinas because he certainly
nailed it on this.
The other thing I felthonestly was some.
Well, I wouldn't call itanger, but some distaste for the
materialist way of looking atthings, because I think it's a very,

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very shallow mistake thatmaterialists make.
And I also felt a little bitof anger because it leads people,
especially young people, tobelieve things about themselves and
about humanity that simplyaren't true.
That is that if you're told bythe scientific community, which is

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a very impressive, imposingcommunity, if you're told by the
scientific community that,well, everything in your mind comes
from your brain, you don'treally have a soul.
Many scientists now claim thatyou don't have free will, which is
total nonsense.
Of course we have free will.
And when all these verydestructive messages are sent out

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by highly credentialed people,and when you look behind it, it's
nonsense.
It's scientific nonsense, it'sphilosophical nonsense, and it's
basically a lie.
And especially the way thatscience is set up as sort of the
high priesthood of the moderne. Scientists have been suddenly

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imbued with the answers toeverything probably since going back
to Darwin.
And so you're set up to believe.
Many people are set up tobelieve that the soul doesn't exist.
We're just, you know, meatpuppets, as you said.
And people believe that about themselves.
What are the consequences ofthat versus what would the consequences
be if they believe that theydid have an immortal soul or knew
that they were somethingbeyond a piece of meat.

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Absolutely.
And it's liberating in a lotof ways to understand that we are
spiritual creatures.
We are a composite of physicalcreatures, but also spiritual creatures.
And it's all blended in us.
And one of the beautifulthings that Thomas Aquinas pointed
out was that in a sense, weare all of creation put together.

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That is, we're made ofmineral, we're made of animal, we're
made of spirit.
We have everything together in us.
And we are created in God'simage in the sense that we are spiritual
creatures and we have spiritsthat are very tiny reflections of
God's infinite spirit.

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And it's not all thatdifficult to see, when you look at
the neuroscience and when youlook at the philosophy that makes
sense of it, the whole thingmakes pretty good sense, actually.
So one of the ways that youillustrate this throughout the book
is through many anonymizedcase reports of individuals that

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you work with.
And I think you spent a goodbit of time talking about the corpus
callosum.
And so maybe we can illustratesome of the things that you're talking
about by discussing when thecorpus collo.
What is the corpus callosum?
What happens when it gets severed?
What doesn't happen when itgets severed in patients?
Yeah, that's a fascinatingaspect to it.
And I found all the stuff thatwe talk about in the book fascinating.

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The corpus callosum issue,which is with split brain surgery,
I found to be just.
It still gives me chillsbecause it's.
Well, I'll explain.
Back in the 1940s, it wasfound that a certain radical brain
operation could be used forpeople who had intractable seizures,
people who were having manyseizures a day that couldn't be stopped

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with ordinary medications andso on.
There was an operation thatcould be done that could free them
from having these seizures.
And the operation is called acorpus callosotomy.
And what that means is that wego in and there's a huge bundle of
fibers about the size of thepalm of your hand that connect the
two hemispheres of the brain,and we cut those fibers.

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So the hemispheres arebasically disconnected.
There are a few tinyconnections that still remain that
we can't cut.
But it's literally 99.99925% cut.
When you cut the corpuscallosum and the things that we can
cut.
And when you do that, it stopsthe seizures.

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The seizures don't happen anymore.
What's remarkable is that whenyou meet people who've had this operation,
and I've met many of them andI've done the surgery, they're perfectly
normal.
I mean, their hemispheres arecut apart, but they're fine.
They feel fine.
They don't feel like two people.
They feel like one person.

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They feel like they alwaysfelt, except they don't have seizures
anymore.

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And this has been noticedsince the 1990s, 1940s and 50s.
And there was a neuroscientistnamed Roger Sperry back in the 50s
and 60s who realized that thiswas an amazing opportunity to study
what the hemispheres of thebrain do.
Because when they'reseparated, you can study them individually.

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And by putting objects in aperson's visual field, you can send
information to one hemisphere,but not to the other hemisphere if
they've been split apart.
So, for example, if I putsomething in my right visual field
that sends information to myleft hemisphere and vice versa.

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So you can basically talk tosort of, or inform each hemisphere
separately and study how thehemispheres work separately.
So Sperry did this researchand he won the Nobel Prize in medicine
for it because it wasfascinating research.
But I think, and even Sperryhimself commented that one of the

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most fascinating things is notthat there is a separation and there
is a perceptual separation.
Simple example.
The left hemisphere usually isthe hemisphere that controls speech
in most people.
So if you show a picture of anobject to the right hemisphere in
a split brain patient, thenthat information about what's in

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that picture gets to the righthemisphere, but the right hemisphere
is not connected to the left hemisphere.
So the person knows what theobject is, but he can't say what
the object is because he can't speak.
Wow.
However, if you like, theclassic example is an apple.
If you show a picture of anapple that goes to the right hemisphere
in a split brain patient, theright hemisphere sees the apple or

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the person sees the appleusing his right hemisphere.
But the right hemispheredoesn't have the power of causing
speech.
Only the left hemisphere cando that.
So if you ask the person, whatare you seeing?
The person says, I don't know.
But if you ask the person, sothey can't say the word meaning.
Go ahead, please.

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That they see it, but theycan't name it.
That they see it, but theycan't say, that's an apple.
However, they recognize it onsome level, though they recognize.
Oh, yes, yes.
They can't conjure the word.
Okay, got it.
Precisely.
But if you put a basket offruit in front of them, they'll hold
up an apple and say, this iswhat I'm saying.
Seeing.
Got it.

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But they can't say the word.
So.
So.
So Sperry found things likethat very, very, very interesting
stuff.
But he found, and subsequentresearchers have found, a fascinating
phenomenon in which there aremany things in the mind that are
not split when you split the hemispheres.
So the really fascinatingthing is that some things are split

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and some things are not split.
Split, even though the wholebrain is split.
And as an example of thefascinating work and just the brilliance
of this research, there is aresearcher named Alice Cronin at
Massachusetts at mit who hasdone work with split brain patients.

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And the work she's done isthat this is not about speech.
This is About.
About matching pictures.
She'll put one picture thatwill project to one hemisphere and
simultaneously three picturesthat project to the other hemisphere.
And she will ask the person,tell me, for the one picture, which

(29:47):
of the three picturesconceptually matches the first one?
An example would be, imagine that.
And this is an example thatshe actually used is to one hemisphere,
she gives a picture of anartist's palette, like a painter's
palette, to the otherhemisphere, she shows three pictures.

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One is of a violin, the otheris of a toilet plunger, and the third
is of an electric light bulb.
And she said, for the onepicture, tell me which one of the
three pictures conceptuallymatches that.
And people with split brainstuff will match the picture of the
palette, the artist's palette,to the vinyl violin, because they're

(30:29):
both kinds of art.
However, keep in mind that nopart of the patient's brain has seen
both sets of pictures.
One hemisphere sees thepalate, the other hemisphere sees
the violin.
There's no part of thepatient's brain that sees both the
palate and the violin becausethe hemispheres are split, but the
person can match them easily.

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So what's doing the matching?
And she's done hundreds ofthese different kinds of matches
and what she's found, whichother people have found.
Justine Surgent, a researcherat McGill.
Jair Pinto, who's a researcherin the Netherlands.
I found the same thing thatpeople with split brains have split

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perceptions in many ways.
Meaning, again, you show apicture to the hemisphere that doesn't
do speech, they can't speakthat thing, and so on, but they can
match pictures, conceptseasily across, even if no part of
their brain has seen both pictures.
So what that implies is thatthere's a part of the mind that's

(31:34):
not in the brain.
And that's very much what Ifind surgically.
That's what Dr. Penfield found.
And if you want to, we cantalk about Penfield's work, which
was fascinating also, please.
So Penfield was, and wementioned him a little bit before,
he was the surgeon who did1100 One Awake brain operations on

(31:57):
patients where he mapped thesurface of their brain.
And he found, when he wasmapping the brain, that he could
stimulate four differentthings in various patients.
He could stimulate movement,he could make them move their limbs.
He could stimulate sensationslike vision or things like that.
He could stimulate memoriesand he could stimulate emotions,

(32:21):
but he found that he couldnever stimulate the formation of
concepts.
He could never stimulate reason.
He could never stimulatemathematics or logic.
He said that's strange becausemost of what we do in our everyday
life involves concepts, butyou can't get it out of the brain.
The brain won't produce them.

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When you stimulate it, it'llproduce movement, it'll produce sensations,
memories, emotions, just fine.
Why is there a whole class ofthoughts, thoughts that can't be
elicited from the brain?
And he said, well, the obviousanswer, the simple, clear answer,
is those thoughts don't comefrom the brain.

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And now there's no question,no one doubts that the brain is permissive
of those thoughts.
Meaning if you get hit on thehead, you're not going to be able
to do a lot of reasoning for a while.
But what Penfield was arguingis that the capacity for reason doesn't
come from the brain.
The brain is necessary for thenormal exercises of it, but it's

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not the origin of it.
It's not sufficient for it.
And if you think about it,those things that Penfield couldn't
get out of the brain wereabstract thought, the formation of
concepts, et cetera, are thesame things that the split brain
research shows is not in the brain.
That is, this whole notion ofthinking abstractly, of thinking

(33:45):
conceptually, doesn't seem tocome from the brain, at least not
in the same way that ourmovement and our sensations and memories
and emotions come from.
From the brain.
Yeah, I just.
Please, go ahead, please.
Penfield also found that hecouldn't stimulate free will.
That is that he.
When he would stimulate thebrain, he could never make a person

(34:08):
think that what the personwould do in response to the stimulation,
like raise their arm, was hecould never make them think that
they had chosen it.
That is that they always knew,independently of what he did to their
brain, whether they chose itor not.
Or not.
Which implies that free willisn't from the brain.
There's no question the braincan influence our decisions.

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You know, if you're reallyhungry and that's a chemical thing
that goes on in your body andyour brain makes you want to eat,
but the final decision as towhat you eat is your free will.
It's not the brain itself.
I found that to be sointeresting that of course, through
getting hit on the head, youcan negatively impact these things,

(34:51):
but you can't generate themfrom nothing.
You can't stimulate the brainand generate someone to have the
perception that their will iscausing them to do something that
was a big light bulb momentlike, whoa.
And then also that you canliterally cut the brain in half,
you know, through the corpuscallosum, and you don't end up with
Two people, you don't end upwith two separate wills, two separate

(35:14):
perceptions.
But the materialist aspectwould say, when you cut the brain
in half, if consciousness isin the brain, brain, you should get
two separate sets of memories,two separate sets of wills and intentions.
And that's not what happens.
And I was like a big lightbulb went off when I read that.
And even before I thoughtreally deeply about this stuff, 30,

(35:40):
40 years ago, when we would dosplit brain surgery, I was just amazed,
I mean, after the surgery,that these people are just fine.
And again, if you do verydetailed, detailed research, you
can find perceptual splits,but it's very fine.
The patient doesn't notice it.
You don't notice it ineveryday life.
If we had a person who had hadthat surgery on the podcast with

(36:03):
us now, you couldn't tell the difference.
They're perfectly normal people.
And sometimes in science, themost important thing is to explain
negative results.
That is, in some sense, if youthink of it as an experiment, you
cut it in half and certainthings don't change.
And that's remarkable.
It's almost as if you took achainsaw and cut your computer right

(36:26):
down the center into twopieces, and it still works just fine,
like what's going on.
And the materialist paradigmfor this can't explain it.
There's nothing thematerialists offer that is a really
satisfactory explanation forhow this happens.

(36:48):
I should say materialists havenoticed that this is a problem.
And the typical explanationthat they offer for it is what's
called subcortical pathways.
And subcortical pathways aretiny pathways that do allow a little
bit of communication betweenthe hemispheres, even after a corpus
callosotomy.

(37:08):
But the amount ofcommunication that that offers is
minuscule.
For example, in Alice Cronin'sexperiments at mit, those patients
had what's technically calleda commissurotomy, which is an especially
complete cutting of the connections.
The corpus callosum has about2 million axons in it.

(37:31):
So those 2 million axons werecut, the only remaining axons numbered.
People have estimated about1,500 axons that allow other pathways.
And that's again, a tinyfraction of 1% of the pathways.
But people can justinstantaneously make these conceptual

(37:53):
comparisons.
So there's obviously somethinggoing on aside from these little
tiny pathways.
People have even estimated howmuch information content can get
across these other pathways.
And the recent estimates thatI've read is about 1 bit per second,
which, if you think about it,is practically nothing.
It's not so Much.

(38:14):
It's not much.
So the materialist explanationis, in my view, just junk science,
makes no sense at all.
And when you think about thoseexperiments, you're just looking
at the soul.
The soul is right there.
It's obvious.
Anybody with any common sensecan see it that, yeah, there's a
part of you that's not split.

(38:35):
That part of you that's notsplit is the immaterial part of your
soul.
And we also talked about youryoung patient that was missing two
thirds of her brain, that itwas just spinal fluid inside her
skull.
Skull.
And yet she had a fullyfunctioning intact consciousness,
memories, emotions, and noapparent function.
So wouldn't it also stand toreason, if the materialist perspective

(38:58):
were true, that such aphysically diminished brain would
result in not just aphysically diminished person in terms
of their cognitive abilities,but like something of a smaller soul?
Right?
Yeah, absolutely.
That doesn't seem to be the case.
Absolutely.
And even to the point of thiscondition called hydroencephaly,
where they don't even havebrain hemispheres, there is no brain.

(39:19):
From here up is gone.
And these people do have handicaps.
There's no question about it.
Of course, of course.
But they're fully conscious.
Fully conscious.
And when I raise these issueswith colleagues and people who are
neuroscientists, the peoplewho stick to the materialist explanations,

(39:42):
they're stuck with all thishand waving like, well, we can't
explain it now, but give ussome time, we'll figure it out.
It's bound to be a connection somewhere.
Some people call thatpromissory materialism, where you
kind of promise it.
And I always tell them, well,maybe you're right.
So here's my phone number.
And call me when you get the evidence.

(40:04):
But you don't have anyevidence right now.
I promise, I promise we'llfigure it out.
Give me a call.
Give me a call.
But until you have theevidence and they don't have the
evidence to explain how thisworks materialistically, in my view,
the only reason, reasonable,plausible, scientific explanation

(40:26):
for the results of experimentslike this is that we have spiritual
souls.
And it shows up in the research.
It also shows up.
You talk a lot about work withconjoined twins.
So we've talked about alldifferent kind of physical conditions.
And here's another one thatyou use to illustrate the unity of
soul even in, even the mostextreme circumstances.

(40:48):
Yes, a fascinating,fascinating thing.
Of course, we all know about that.
Some people can be joined as.
Or born joined as twins.
And there are rare instanceswhere the twins are joined at the
head.
And when they're joined at thehead, sometimes they share brain
tissue.
And the two of the mostremarkable ones are Tatiana and Krista

(41:15):
Hogan, two young ladies inBritish Columbia who are joined at
the head.
And they share what's called athalamic bridge, which is a large
part of brain tissue thatconnects the deepest parts of their
brains.
So they basically share brainsin some sense.
And they can do remarkable things.

(41:35):
These girls can see througheach other's eyes.
They share control of limbswhere they can move limbs together.
If their mother touches thehand of one of them, both of them
feel it.
So there's a lot of remarkable things.

(41:56):
However, they are completelydifferent people.
That is, they have differentpersonalities, they have different
likes and dislikes, they havedifferent opinions about things.
They have fights where they'lldisagree with one another.
So they share vision.
Go away.
Leave me alone.
Yeah, right, exactly, exactly.

(42:16):
So they share vision, theyshare cessation, but they don't share
opinions, they don't share reason.
They, they, they can't.
For, for example, if one kidstudies, studies the times tables,
both kids don't know the timestables, they both got to study the

(42:37):
times tables.
So that, well, at leastthat's, that's an extrapolation.
That is, they, they don'tshare a. Abstract concepts, they
don't share the.
And if you think about it,that goes along very much with what
Penfield found when hestimulated the brain with what we
find in split brain patients.
That there's a part of, partof our being, of our soul that is

(43:02):
material and that is relatedto the brain, but there's also a
part that's not related to the brain.
And these girls show that thepart that's related to the brain
is their vision, theirsensation, things like that, just
what Penfield found.
But their opinions, theirconcepts, their abstract thoughts
are their own.
They don't cross.

(43:24):
So the evidence is all aroundus if we look for it and if we recognize
what it means.
What an astounding thought.
The idea that you can share,you can see through someone else's
eyes, you can feel the thingsthat they're touching with their
hands.
But when someone learns afact, fact, you don't also learn

(43:45):
it.
Like that's just, that's just,that's mind, I mean literally mind
blowing stuff.
Yeah, it's fascinating stuffand it's.
But it's exactly what St.Thomas Aquinas would have said in
the 13th century.
You know, I said, well, whatwould he have said first?
I would have said it in Latin.
So I wouldn't have understood it.

(44:06):
Minor difference.
But the translation would bethat if, if people's brains were
connected and they could sharethat, what they would share would
be the ability to move things,the ability to have sensations like
vision, memories.
And these girls do sharememories to some extent, and emotions.

(44:27):
But he'd say, but theywouldn't share the spiritual part
of themselves.
They wouldn't share theirability to reason, their ability
to have concepts, their free will.
That would not be shared.
Because that's not the way thesoul works.
The soul basically has aspectsthat can be cut with a knife or that

(44:48):
can be shared and aspects thatcannot be cut with a knife and cannot
be shared.
And that can't be identifiedto any specific location in the brain.
Maybe that's what you mean bycan't be cut with a knife.
We don't know where that lives.
If there's nothing to mebeyond what's in the egg up here,

(45:09):
we should be able to findwhere free will lives.
We should be able to findwhere abstract concepts live.
And we should not just be ableto impact them negatively as in to
remove it.
We should be able to putsomething in.
I should be able to stimulateyour free will to do something.
I should be able to give youan abstract concept without you having
to learn it.

(45:30):
But we can't do that.
We can remove physical partsof the brain and diminish your capacity,
but we can't add anything toyour capacity.
Capacity.
Yes, yes.
And the brain is organized insuch a way that the areas of the
brain that control movementand sensation and memory and emotion
are very precisely placed inthe brain.

(45:51):
I mean, literally withinsubmillimeter precision.
For example, movement, I mean,moving your finger can be precisely
placed in the brain on a spot,on the cortex.
But you can't precisely placeyour ability to do some training,
subtraction or your ability tothink logically.
There's no subtraction area inthe brain.

(46:15):
So there's a tremendousdifference in our capacity for abstract
thought, for reason on the onehand, and our capacity for material
things like movement andsensation on the other hand.
And the Aristotelian or theThomistic understanding of the soul

(46:35):
predicts the.
Predicted that.
They predicted that that'swhat we'd find and that's what we
do find.
Incredible firsthand from a neurosurgeon.
Yes, yes.
And you also spent a bit oftime talking about near death experiences.
And this is something that Iknow many people are fascinated by.
I've never personally had aninterest in it.

(46:55):
Nothing wrong with it.
But to read the book and toread some of the experiences that
people have had in, in a postdeath experience in many ways really
opened my eyes to the breadthof that field.
And now I can understand whypeople are so fascinated by it.
So maybe you can talk a littlebit about those to show like this
goes way further.

(47:16):
Yeah, near death experiencesare quite fascinating.
I understand where you'recoming from when you say it, because
weren't too into it.
I actually wasn't either.
It just struck me as kind ofmystical stuff that's not very scientific.
But actually there is sciencebehind it.
It's quite remarkable.

(47:36):
Probably the most fascinatingnear death experience, at least in
modern times, was of a womannamed Pam Reynolds.
And she was a 31 year oldwoman who had an aneurysm at the
base of her brain.
An aneurysm is a ballooningout of a blood vessel and it was
about to burst.
She was getting headaches, shewas having neurological problems.

(47:58):
And the aneurysm was basicallyby ordinary methods at the time,
considered inoperable.
There's nothing that could bedone for it.
And she was going to die from it.
It was going to burst.
The only way that it could befixed was to open up the main blood
vessel at the base of herbrain and rebuild the blood vessel.

(48:20):
But you can't do that whilethe blood's flowing.
You can't.
I mean, that's not possible.
There's a neurosurgeon inPhoenix named Robert Spetzler who
is the world's expert on thiskind of surger.
And he actually developed atechnique for doing it.
And he operated on her in1991, in August of 1991.
And what he did was called astandstill procedure.

(48:42):
And it's a procedure where hewould take her to the operating room,
place her under generalanesthesia, monitor her brainwaves,
did all the fancy stuff.
He would cool her body down to60 degrees Fahrenheit from 98.6.
And that would be cold.
Oh yeah.
And what it would do is slowdown the metabolism in her body so
that that any damage to herbrain would be minimized because

(49:05):
there was minimal energyrequirements at that temperature.
Then what he would do is heput her on a heart lung machine and
he stopped her heart so therewas no longer any blood flowing.
And he raised the head of theoperating table to drain blood out
of her brain so he could seewhat he was doing inside the artery

(49:27):
because there wasn't any bloodin the artery.
And then he fixed The.
The artery.
It took him about 30 minutes.
He fixed the artery, and thenhe started her heart again and then
warmed her back up again andbrought her back to life, basically.
But she was as dead as itgets, meaning she was.
You know, her heart was stopped.
They monitor her brain waves.

(49:47):
Her brain waves werecompletely gone.
Everything was gone.
And so after the surgery, he.
He was seeing her and.
And asking her how she wasfeeling and how she was doing.
And she said, well, I. I feel.
I feel good.
And I watched the whole operation.
Operation.
And he said, you did what?
What?
And so she said, yeah, that when.

(50:07):
As soon as my heart stopped, I heard.
And she said it sounded like anatural d. She was a musician, so
she.
She knew about musical notes,and it was like a humming sound.
And then she said she feltlike she popped out of.
Out of her body and thenfloated up to the ceiling and then
floated over his shoulder andwatched him operate on her.
And so he.

(50:29):
It was a little skeptical, and.
But then she started des indetail his surgical instruments.
Something that a person whowasn't a neurosurgeon wouldn't know
anything about.
And she then described theconversations he had in the room
by quoting him what he saidduring the time that she was brain
dead.

(50:49):
Then she described what theother doctors said and did when she
was brain dead.
And she told their names.
I think there were 18different doctors who were in and
out of the room.
And she was describinggrabbing them all.
And she said that her visionwas beautifully clear.
She could see.
It was a vision.
It was more than you couldever see in ordinary life.

(51:10):
And then she said she saw atunnel, and she felt that she was
being pulled down the tunnel,but she wanted to go down the tunnel.
It was like a beautiful feeling.
And there was a little lightat the end of the tunnel, as they
say.
And she reached the end of thetunnel, and she was in this beautiful
world, and she saw, I think,her grandparents who had passed away.
And she had conversations withpeople there, and she wanted.

(51:31):
Wanted to stay there.
But she was told that she hadchildren to raise.
She had three kids, and shehad to go back into.
Into her body, and it wasn'ther time yet.
So she went back down the tunnel.
And she said that when shewent back into her body, it was like
diving into a pool of icewater, which it actually was because
her body temperature was 60degrees Fahrenheit.
And the remarkable thing aboutthis experience was that, again,

(51:54):
she was as dead as it gets,meaning that she didn't have any
blood in her brain, her heartwas gone and her brain was completely
monitored, meaning they hadelectrodes being sure that her brain
had no function when this was happening.
So it was like, it's almostlike a scientific experiment, although
it wasn't designed that way.
So that kind of experiencemany people have had.

(52:20):
About 9 million people in thiscountry, at least 9 million people
have had some kind of.
Have had some kind of neardeath or out of body experience.
It's been studied.
And so people have theseexperiences fairly commonly.
And I've debated this withmaterialists who try to say, well,

(52:43):
it's just hallucinations, it'shaving a seizure, it's having.
Who knows?
But anyone who denies thereality of these experiences has
to explain fourcharacteristics of the experiences
that many people have that aredifficult to explain except that
we have a soul that leaves the body.

(53:03):
The first characteristic isthat when people have these experiences,
as Pam Reynolds had,everything is beautifully clear.
That is that your vision isbetter than ever.
The colors are brilliant and beautiful.
You can think in very deepways and very organized ways.
And if this is all just ahallucination or from lack of oxygen,

(53:24):
your mind gets goofy.
You can't explain how you cansee so clearly and have such clear
thoughts.
The second characteristic,which is very important is that about
20% of people who have neardeath experiences have accurate out
of body experiences.
That is they go out of thebody and they see things while their

(53:45):
brain is dead that are accurate.
They can see name tags onpeople in the room.
If they're having a cardiacarrest, they can read the dialogue
on machines that are in the room.
They have things that are proven.
You can actually check and seethat they're telling the truth that
they couldn't have seen in aregular living body.

(54:06):
There had to be some other way.
The third characteristic,which absolutely fascinates me, I
think, and to me this is verypowerful evidence, is that when you
go down the tunnel, you seeall the dead people at the other
end and you talk with them.
There has never been a reportthat I'm aware of in the medical
literature and there have beenthousands of people of reports.
There's never been a report ofa living person being seen at the

(54:29):
other end of the tunnel.
Everybody you see is somebodywho's dead, which is kind of interesting
if it's just wishful thinking.
If the tunnel is just, well,gee, you know, I was going through
this near death experience andI kind of wanted to be comforted
by my mom who's still alive,or by my spouse who's still alive,
you'd see a living person there.
But you never see livingpeople, only dead people, even if

(54:51):
you don't know they're dead.
There have been severalinstances where people have been
involved in car accidentswhere there are many people in the
car and patients are taken todifferent hospitals.
Sometimes ambulances willsplit the patients up because one
hospital can't take this wholebunch of new patients.
And a person will have a neardeath experience in one hospital

(55:12):
and meet a person in the carwho died at a knock another hospital,
but not meet the people whodidn't die.
What the most famous exampleof this was.
Katherine Kubler Ross, who's apsychiatrist who has written extensively
on death and dying, reportedthe story of a little girl who had

(55:35):
a near death experience aftera car accident.
Her family was in a caraccident, was hit by a one way driver
who caused a terrible accident.
She was taken to a hospital.
She had a near deathexperience herself and members of
her family were taken to other hospitals.
She described her near deathexperience to Dr. Kubler Ross as

(55:55):
I saw my brother and I thinkmy brother and my mother at the other
end of the tunnel.
And Ross found out that herbrother and mother had died at another
hospital.
But her father didn't die andshe didn't see her father at the
other end of the tunnelbecause he wasn't dead.
So there's another famousexample of a little boy named Eddie

(56:16):
who he was nine years old, hehad a ruptured appendix and had a
near death experience, nearlydied from it.
And when he came around hetold his family that he had seen
a tunnel, that an angel tookhim down the tunnel.
And he met his sister at theother end of the tunnel, his 19 year
old sister who was in college.
And his father said but yoursister's not dead.

(56:41):
And then he got a call fromthe college that she had been killed
in a car accident the previousday and they hadn't been able to
reach the family.
So the boy knew she was dead,but the family didn't know she was
dead.
So how do you explain that?
Materialistically there's no way.
And the fourth characteristicof near death experiences that materialists
can't really account for isthat these experiences are transformative.

(57:04):
That is that people who havethem, they're really doing different
people after this happens,they become much more spiritual.
What people tend to say aftera near death experience is that they
realize that the things thatreally matter in life are more interpersonal,
more to do with compassion,with ethics, that things that you're

(57:25):
proud of the money you make,the accomplishments you have don't
really matter as much as howyou treat other people, as how you
relate to God, as howcompassionate you are.
Those are the things thatreally count in life.
And so that was one of themost striking things about that section

(57:46):
of the book, was that peoplewalk away from those experiences
with a much stronger sense ofmoral convictions, that there is
a moral component to thesenatural or supernatural experiences.
That you go through the tunneland what you experience there convicts
you morally and you returnwith a very changed sense of what

(58:06):
matters on earth.
That was that in the contextof everything else that we've been
talking about, about the unityof will, about the, about the unity
of conceptual thinking, youknow, the brain not containing the
mind or consciousness, thatelement of that, that, okay, we can
even say that there are thesenear death experiences where something
exists beyond what's going onin the physical body.

(58:28):
And when that thing is justallowed some time to free reign,
it goes and encounters in somenext, in some next realm, moral conviction.
And that, that was, that was.
I can still feel that in my body.
Like how it felt to read that.
Like what a, what a, what atestimony, I guess we'd say.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And of course there, there aremany, many theological questions

(58:50):
that arise from near deathexperiences because the near death
experiences don't always matchwhat we learn from theology.
So, and those are fascinatingquestions in themselves.
My own personal view on thisis that what people are experiencing
is not heaven.
That is, you're not there yet,you're on the outskirts.

(59:11):
And also in order to reportwhat you see, of course you report
in your body, you come back tolife and tell people what happened.
And we tend to filter thingsthrough our mortal bodies in ways
that what many people say withnear death experiences is that what

(59:32):
they're telling us about whatthey experience is the best they
can do.
But it's ineffable.
It is that what theyexperience is something that you
can't put in words.
And there's a book calledOtherworld Journeys and I'm blocking
on the author's name, but it'sa wonderful book and I, if I don't

(59:54):
try too hard, I'll think ofher name.
But it's a wonderful book andOtherworld Journeys is the title.
And it's a book that looksback at out of body experiences that
people have had throughouthistory in various cultures.
And these experiences, whichare spiritual experiences, particularly

(01:00:14):
near death experiences, areculturally conditioned to some extent.
That is that people, it's notso much probable that they are different
experiences, but people try toreport them to other people according
to what they're familiar withculturally, so that you see a being

(01:00:38):
of love and light.
And a Christian may interpretthat being as Jesus, a Buddhist may
interpret it as Buddha,depending on how you interpret it.
So it's a deep, profoundexperience that's difficult to put
it into words.
And the reports we get arefrom the people who come back.
Right.
So maybe you're in some sortof, I don't know, we could call it

(01:01:01):
perhaps a waiting room.
And so.
Yeah, sure, sure.
It's, it's like the green room.
Right, right, right.
Exactly, exactly, exactly.
Well, you, you brought up yourpersonal perspective on this, and
maybe now would be a good timeto talk a little bit about your own
conversion story.
I, I, I listened to you tellit on another show and I was very
moved by it.
That was a very brave thing togo into.

(01:01:22):
And, and how to the book andto where you are today.
Sure.
Well, at around the same timethat I was seeing in my professional
life that the typicalmaterialist and also atheist way
of looking at the humanperson, the human brain, the human
mind and soul, didn't add upthat there was more to us than that.

(01:01:46):
I also had experiences I'msure many people have had I will
call hauntings.
And I would be going about mydaily activities with my family,
my work, my recreation,whatever, and I'd all of a sudden
start to think, like, how didI get here?
What is this all about?
You're in this amazing world.
I don't know where I camefrom, I don't know where I'm going.

(01:02:08):
I don't know why I'm here.
And we take so much for granted.
But goodness gracious, this isa fascinating place.
And for the most part, wedon't think about how to explain
it.
And that would, it would kindof creep me out, you know, I'd say,
goodness gracious, it's like,it's like I'm missing the story here.
And then I'd get back to workand go on and do my other distracting

(01:02:29):
chores.
And when my youngest child wasborn, I have four kids, and my youngest
child, my son, we noticed whenhe was very small that he wasn't
making eye contact with us andhe wasn't smiling.
And I became concerned that hehad a severe kind of autism, which
was kind of terrifying, youknow, that he wouldn't be able to

(01:02:51):
connect to me.
And my wife had the same concerns.
And so we took him to aSpecialist who said he was a few
months old at this point.
And the specialist said, youreally can't tell when they're this
young.
You can't be sure.
So it was really bothering me.
I was terrified of that, ofhaving a child who wouldn't know
me.
And so I one night was seeinga consult, a patient at a Catholic

(01:03:16):
hospital.
There was a.
Was near my main hospital.
And after I saw the patient, Iwas leaving the building and there's
a chapel there they kept open24 hours.
And so I decided to go in thechapel and pray because I had no
other choice.
I was just.
So I went in the chapel, kneltdown in front of the altar and said,

(01:03:37):
lord, I don't know if you exist.
I have my doubts, but I. I'mpulling out all the stops now.
I need some help on this.
I can't emotionally deal withhaving my child be someone who doesn't
know me, that I can't form abond with.
And I heard a voice.
Only time in my life I've everheard a voice.

(01:03:57):
And the voice was very clear,it was inside my head, but it was
not me.
And the voice said, but that'swhat you're doing to me.
And I collapsed, said, well,all right, I'm very sorry, I didn't
mean to do it to you.
I realized that in a way I'vebeen autistic to you and that's painful

(01:04:20):
to the Lord when we're notconnecting to him.
And so I promised him Iwouldn't do it anymore.
And I asked him to heal my son.
And so I called the church thenext day, said, hey, how can I get
baptized?
I was never baptized and myfamily too, and everybody got involved.
And a couple days later, myson's six month birthday and at his

(01:04:47):
little birthday gathering, hestarted to smile and look at us and
made eye contact and was anormal child.
So I believe that it's painfulto God when we don't have a relationship
with him.
And he gave me the grace ofsharing, showing me what that felt

(01:05:10):
like, and then healed my son.
Can you talk about what apowerful story, by the way.
Can you talk about some of thechanges that happened in you and
in your life?
And may I ask how old you wereat the time?
Let's see.
Well, this happened 25 yearsago and I'm almost 70 now, so 45.
Yeah, mid-40s.

(01:05:31):
So you had spent 45 years asan unbeliever, maybe.
Can you talk a little bitabout the things that changed for
you personally and in Yourfamily in the months, years that
followed, sure.
Well, again, I'd come from aperspective that I wasn't an angry
atheist.
I thought Christians werereally nice people, and I thought

(01:05:52):
Christianity was a beautifulstory and Christ was a very admirable
man.
But I came to realize throughthis experience and through just
contemplating all this thatit's not just a beautiful story,
it's the truth.
And the truth, it's even morebeautiful as the truth.
And.
And with my own family, thereare some members of my family have

(01:06:16):
become Christians with me, andsome members are not yet.
They're in many ways betterpeople than I am, but they still
haven't come to the Lord.
I hope and pray that theywill, but one of the things it made
me very resolute about doingwas to try to help other people who

(01:06:38):
were kind of in the same boat.
I was brought up in a secularenvironment, brought up in an atheist
environment where faith in Godwasn't really a big part of their
lives.
To understand that faith inGod is not only good for us in sense
of, it's reassuring and so on,because it's not entirely reassuring,
that is that knowing that youhave to answer to the Big Guy is

(01:06:59):
not, you know, you take thingsa lot more seriously in a lot of
ways, but that it's right.
Right.
I mean, the idea thatChristians live in this happy little
bubble where, you know, Jesustakes care of everything and we got
nothing to worry about.
If you're a Christian, you gota lot to worry about.
You got a lot.
You have to do right by Godand you have to do his will.

(01:07:23):
But I want people tounderstand that the science, that
this logic, reason, philosophyis all on the side of Christianity,
that atheism and materialism are.
Are lies.
They're just wrong.
And they're junk science.

(01:07:43):
They're junk philosophy andjunk logic.
And so part of what I've donefor the past 25 years has been to
devote myself to debatingatheists, to writing about this.
I blog a lot for evolutionnews and views and mind matters news
at the Discovery Institute,which is a think tank that tries

(01:08:08):
to advance the theory ofintelligent the idea that there is
design in nature.
There are many differentreligious perspectives in the institute.
Some people in the DiscoveryInstitute are not religious.
Some people do not believe in God.
Most people there areChristians, but not all.
There are people who are Jews.
There are people who come fromdifferent perspectives.

(01:08:31):
But everybody there believes,as I do, that there is evidence for
intelligent agency,intelligent design in the nation,
natural world, for evidence ofintelligent Design in life, in biology
and physics, in neuroscience,that there's evidence for God's action,

(01:08:53):
I think.
Yeah.
I spoke with Dr. John westlast week.
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
John is wonderful.
He is.
So just a quick question.
So your beliefs startedshifting, your whole perception of
reality started shifting, shifting.
And as you began confrontingor encountering your colleagues in

(01:09:13):
the field of neurosurgery,many of whom were materialists, what
was that like and what hasthat been like over the course of
the past 25 years?
Well, it's kind of interestingthat neurosurgeons aren't particularly
materialists.
I mean, there certainly are.
There are some that are for sure.
But I mean, there are manyvery, very devout Christians and

(01:09:38):
Jews and people who are veryserious about and Muslims or people
who are very serious abouttheir faith who are neurosurgeons.
I think of neurosurgeons verymuch, at least in this sense, almost
like engineers, in a sensethat it's an applied science.
You have to take thescientific ideas and make them work
in the real world.
You can't just live in thisabstract world of theories.

(01:10:01):
And because if you get thescience wrong in neurosurgery, you
kill people.
So you've got to get thescience right.
So neurosurgeons are a littleless tolerant of crazy theories.
And materialism is quitehonestly a crazy theory.
And so there are a lot ofneurosurgeons who agree with me.
I mean, I'm not the onlyneurosurgeon who thinks this.

(01:10:23):
Eben Alexander is aneurosurgeon, wrote a book about
his own near death experience.
I'm blocking on the title of it.
I think Heaven is Real, Ithink actually is the name of the
book.
And there are manyneurosurgeons who are very devout
people.
Ben Carson is a very devoutChristian who is a neurosurgeon.

(01:10:46):
Where you really find most ofthe materialists and the atheists
is in the neurosciences, is inthe basic sciences.
And part of that maybe it justattracts people who tend to think
along those lines.
Part of it is that if you're abasic scientist and your career depends
on getting grants and gettingpapers published, you're going to

(01:11:10):
have a tough timeprofessionally if you express Christian
views, if you express a beliefin the soul, materialists can be
awfully nasty people.
And you can professionallysolve, suffer quite a bit by sort
of coming out.
And as someone who believes inthe spiritual soul, who believes

(01:11:30):
in God, who believes inChrist, is not good for your career
in some of the basic sciences.
It's incredible what a lack oftranscendent morality will allow
people's consciences to dowhen they don't believe.
Right?
Absolutely.
And what's really funny isthat, and I've noticed this repeatedly
with materialists and atheistson this issue, is that they will

(01:11:53):
engage debate a little bit,but ultimately they just want to
censor you.
That is, they just want toshut you up.
And I have never seen anybodyon the intelligent Design or Christian
side of things of this debatethat we're having now want to censor

(01:12:14):
the other side.
That is that I want thematerialists free range.
I want to hear what they haveto say.
I want to hear, hear their arguments.
I just want to be able torespond to their arguments.
So the people in the DiscoveryInstitute want intellectual freedom.
They want the people to havethe ability to tell the truth as

(01:12:35):
they see it and to discussthese issues in the scientific realm
and the philosophical realmopenly, without fear of censure and
without fear of cancellation.
Yeah, that seems to be the thing.
From the Christian side we canhave an open debate, but on, on the
materialist side, theChristian perspective cannot be allowed.
Yeah, we welcome debate.

(01:12:57):
There's nothing I love morethan talking about this with people
who disagree with me becauseactually those are very interesting
conversations.
The problem that we encounterso much in the Intelligent design
discussions and in discussionsof the immateriality of the human
soul is that our opponentsoften try to shut us up rather than

(01:13:23):
engage us.
Well, that's not always the case.
There are many materialistsand atheists who are willing to talk,
and that's to their credit.
But there are many who justtry to censor us.
Maybe you can talk a littlebit about why materialism is a crazy
theory.
I happen to agree with you,but I'd love to hear more about that.

(01:13:44):
Well, it's a crazy theory in avariety of ways.
One is the, that there are somany things in reality that are obviously
not material.
A very good example is we havethe capacity to think of infinite
numbers.
That is that there is nonumber that is too high for me to

(01:14:06):
think of it.
For example, if you name anumber a quadrillion billion zillion
quadrillion, I'll just say quadrillion.
I'll just say that number plus one.
So there's no finite limit.
How can the capacity to thinkof an infinite number of numbers

(01:14:27):
come from a finite brain?
I mean, they're simply logical problems.
Another very interestingexample that has been used classically
and it was used classically byphilosophers a thousand years ago
is the human capacity to thinkof perf concepts.
For example, if you arethinking about what a triangle is,

(01:14:51):
you think that a triangle is athree sided closed plane figure whose
internal angles sum to 180 degrees.
That's the geometricaldefinition of a triangle.
However, there is no physicaltriangle anywhere that is exactly,
exactly that.
That is that if you draw atriangle on a piece of paper, it's

(01:15:14):
never perfect.
180 degree angles, the linesare never perfect, even on the quantum
level.
Because of quantumuncertainty, nothing is ever perfect.
But our ideas can be perfect.
So how do you get perfectideas out of an imperfect brain?
So there's a lot of logical reasons.

(01:15:36):
Materialists, for example,obviously believe in the ability
of mathematics to describe the world.
But mathematics itself is notmaterial, that is that the whole
range of numbers and of allthe mathematical operations that
go on are not things that havelocation and substance.

(01:15:58):
You don't say like well howmuch does the number 8 weigh?
Or where is the number 8 located?
It's not material.
So the belief that the onlything that exists is material, it's
just nonsense, it's stupid.
We all know that's not the case.
The other problem withmaterialism, and many materialists
try to get away with this byfudging on the definition of materialism.

(01:16:21):
Many materialists identifythemselves as physicalists.
And physicalism is thematerialist belief that the only
thing that's real is thingsthat can be described by the law
laws of physics.
So they'll kind of say, okay,so numbers are real because they're
part of the laws of physics.
But that's it, no further than that.

(01:16:42):
And the problem with that is aproblem that's been long noted and
was pointed out by C.S.
lewis, is that the ability tomake an argument, to use reason to
make logical points, dependsupon the logical laws of logic.
If A, then B, A, therefore Blaws of non contradiction, all these

(01:17:06):
logical laws.
However, if the only thingthat exists are the laws of physics,
and if all of our ability touse logic comes from our brain, and
our brain is driven purely bythe laws of electromagnetism, by
the laws of chemistry, etc.
There's no logic in the lawsof, of physics.

(01:17:28):
The laws of physics involveNewton's laws and Maxwell's equations
and equations of chemistry,but it doesn't involve the laws of
logic.
So how do you get logic out of physics?
They're two different things.
So if you say the only thingthat exists is physics, then you're

(01:17:48):
admitting that you're notusing logic.
And if you're not using logic,why would we listen to what you,
you have to say?
So the whole materialistenterprise, whether you call it materialism
or physicalism or whatevername you want to make up, is self
contradictory.
It's self refuting.
If you're arguing that, hey,I'm just a piece of meat, that's

(01:18:10):
all I am is a piece of meatdriven by physical laws, okay?
I mean, if I accept that, thenI'd stop listening to you because
you're just a piece of meatwho listens to, to a piece of meat.
It's nonsense.
So materialism or physicalismor whatever name these guys want
to conjure up for theirmisunderstanding is self refuting.

(01:18:33):
It's silly and it reallydeserves mockery.
And I believe that themetaphysical perspective of Thomistic
dualism, which is the way oflooking at the mind that St. Thomas
used, or hylomorphism, whichis Aristotle's way of understanding,
understanding the world, or ofidealism, which is Plato's way of

(01:18:55):
understanding the world, thoseare all genuine, profound, important
philosophical perspectives.
Which one is exactly right isopen to reasonable debate.
Materialism is just a mistake.
It's not a perspective.
It's like saying one plus oneequals five is mathematics.

(01:19:15):
No.
Well, it's not mathematics.
It's just a mistake.
So materialism is just a mistake.
There are honest debatesbetween people who follow Plato,
people who follow Aristotle,people who follow Plotinus.
There are various differentphilosophers that we can have nice
discussions about.

(01:19:36):
Materialism is just a stupiderror and it doesn't deserve much
respect.
Especially when it'sconfronted with some of the things
that we've discussed tonight.
For example, where theconsciousness, where the soul.
Soul lives, missing brain,severed brain, shared brain, right

(01:19:57):
near death experiences, theseare things that strict materialism
simply cannot explain, thatare scientifically documented.
Meaning if these two thingscannot both be true at the same time,
plus you have the logicalarguments, plus like where are the
laws of physics written?
Where are they written down?
Like is.
Is it just a habit?
Does matter.
Just have these, these habitsthat it can break at any time.
Precisely.

(01:20:18):
Materialism, physicalism is,it's, it's pernicious, it's sticky,
it sticks to people andthey're very reluctant to let it
go.
And you actually document inthe book some of the arguments that
people make trying they,trying to, trying to find, slice
things like it must be this.
They're, they're proceedingfrom a foreordained conclusion, their
own minds.
And so they try to figure outlike you talked about some of the,

(01:20:39):
the one bit brain connections.
Like it must be that becauseit can't be this other thing.
Right.
It always boils downeventually to what people have called
promissory materialism.
That is that if you pin peoplewho take materialistic or physicalist
understandings of science, ifyou pin them, eventually they just

(01:21:01):
run out of explanations.
They say, okay, I can'texplain that, but hey, science is
going to be able to explain itin 10 years.
You just wait and it's like you're.
But that's not science, right?
Saying that we have no ideabased on our metaphysical framework
how this works, but trust us,we'll let you know one of these days.
Well, that's not science.

(01:21:21):
You know, again, I give themmy phone number.
Call me when you have the evidence.
Until I see the evidence, Idon't accept materialism.
And yeah, materialism is avery pernicious thing and as I said,
is real junk science.
I also want to talk about howthis relates to this.
And this was a supplysurprising chapter later in the book

(01:21:44):
about artificial intelligence.
And I, I found, obviously it'sa big subject, you know, artificial
general intelligence.
I saw another, another videojust today, like ChatGPT 5.0 artificial
general intelligence, likesome YouTube thumbnail.
And you actually provide apretty, a pretty astounding refutation
based on the premises of your book.

(01:22:06):
Yeah, the, the, the idea thata machine of any sort, a computer
or a network can be consciousis just nonsense.
The way I think of it as asimple kind of illustration.

(01:22:28):
If I use a sundial to tell mewhat time it is.
So I have a little, maybe if Ihave a little sundial out in my garden,
I look out there and oh, it'saround 2 o' clock in the afternoon.
Well, that's nice, but Iwouldn't begin to think that my sundial
itself knew what time it was.
It's just a tool that I use soI can know what time it is.
It's a tool, it's an instrument.

(01:22:51):
If I look at my cheap Casiowatch and I say, oh my, well this
is not a sundial.
You know, this watch is muchmore accurate than a sundial, but
it still doesn't know whattime it is.
It just tells me what time it is.
You know, it's a tool.
And I can buy a robot Rolexwatch and I can say, wow, now this,
this is a fancy watch, this isa very sophisticated watch.

(01:23:13):
But my Rolex watch doesn'tknow what time it is either.
It's not any smarter than mysundial or my Casio.
And then if I ask Chat GPTwhat time it is, Chat GPT will give
me the time.
But it doesn't know what timeit is either.
It doesn't know it any morethan a sundial knows it, or my Casio
watch knows, or the Rolexwatches it, or the the Rolex knows

(01:23:34):
it.
Machines don't know things.
Machines are instruments.
They're chunks of silicon andmetal and they do amazing things,
but thinking is not one of them.
And in fact, if you thinkabout it, when you have a concept
in your mind, the concept isalways about something, which is

(01:23:56):
a rather remarkablecharacteristic of thoughts.
When you think of like I thinkabout Washington D.C. or I think
about my pen, or I thinkabout, about my family, it's always
directed at something.
And so thoughts always have ameaning to them, a direction to them.
But computation never has aninherent meaning.

(01:24:19):
That is, computation is simplythe matching of an input, like a
pattern of electrons to anoutput, another pattern of electrons
according to a set of rules,which is the algorithm.
And that's how computers work.
They match pattern, algorithm, pattern.
But those patterns don't havemeanings of their own.

(01:24:39):
The only meanings are what weascribe to them.
And an example of what thatmeans is, let's say that I'm typing
an essay that I believematerialism is true.
So I'm typing away and then Idecide halfway through the essay
that no, no, I'm going tochange my opinion.
I'm going to type the essaythat materialism isn't true.

(01:25:01):
My word processor will handlethe materialism is true essay exactly
the same way it handles thematerialism isn't true essay.
It doesn't care about themeaning of the essay.
When you use Microsoft Word,the meaning of what you type into
it is irrelevant to it.
It doesn't care because it'snot thinking.

(01:25:22):
If it were thinking, it mightnot accept what you write.
It might say, no, I disagreewith that.
I'm not going to let you type that.
But it never does that.
In fact, that's what makescomputation so useful, is that it
has no meaning of its own.
And by having no meaning ofits own, is a blank slate that we
can put meaning onto.
So computation, you know, AGI,none of that stuff involves any,

(01:25:49):
any consciousness on the partof the machine.
Machines are never conscious.
They can never be conscious.
It's not inherent.
They don't have souls.
And because they don't havesouls, they don't have experiences.
And so they're they're never conscious.
We use them to help us or tohurt us, as the case may be.
But the machines themselves have.
Have no consciousness and cannever have consciousness.

(01:26:12):
I experienced some of thiswhen I tried to use AI for some image
generation and realized forvery quickly that AI can't actually
see anything.
Like, you know, you look atthe images where it's got the horror
hands, you know, wherepeople's fingers are all distorted.
And a person would look atthat immediately and know like, well,
that's obviously wrong, butthe AI can't actually see it.

(01:26:33):
It's just using numbers toproduce something that we can see
and we can understand, butthat it can't actually understand
innately to itself becauseit's working on algorithms.
Yes, precisely.
And I think the watch analogyis kind of a nice one that, that
I'll believe that AI can thinkwhen someone can show me how a sundial

(01:26:54):
knows what time it is.
It's nonsensical.
It's childish thinking.
It's magical thinking.
And there's no magic in AI, nomatter how spooky it may seem.
It's not magic, it's computation.
And I think it's veryimportant that we learn how it works,

(01:27:15):
that we use it, we use it properly.
It has enormous potentialbenefits and enormous potential risks.
But none of that has anythingto do with consciousness of the machine
itself, because machines cannever be conscious.
That's right.
And don't ascribe livingcharacteristics to a computer, to
an algorithm, to raw computation.

(01:27:35):
They're not the same as we are.
And you could even see thatbeing used in a way to manipulate
people, that is thatprogrammers could make AI where people
think that when they'reinteracting with the AI, that they're
interacting with a conscious entity.
And that has a lot of hazardsand so on.
But the only consciousness onemight say in that is the consciousness

(01:28:01):
of people who program it anduse it.
The machine itself has noconsciousness and never can.
All this is why I so greatlyappreciated your book.
Here it is again, the Immortal Mind.
Because everything that we'vebeen talking about today is actually
in this book.
And so hopefully you can get asense of how impacted I was to read
this and the shift that itcreated in my thinking and the different

(01:28:23):
ways it got me thinking aboutproblems that I hadn't really considered
seriously before.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
And that's our dream cometrue, is to have people see the truth
more clearly.
And what's in the book is the truth.
Wonderful.
Just.
May I ask you just a Couplequestions about your career and we

(01:28:43):
close on that.
So one of the things thatfascinates me is the experiences
of men who do very significantand high stakes things.
So here you are, you're ayoung man, you've been fascinated
by the brain for your whole life.
You tell some of that story inthe book, and then you've gone through

(01:29:04):
medical school and trainingand you're getting ready to do your
first opinion open brainoperation, like on a, on a real living
patient.
How, how old were you at the time?
Let's see, first off, firstoperation, probably I was probably
like 28 or so.
28 years old?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So can you, can you take, takeme into that moment?

(01:29:26):
Take us into that moment?
Like, yeah, well, that'ssomething that I couldn't, I don't
think I could do that.
Well, it's, it's, I mean,it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's
not an easy thing.
I, I'm the director of, thedirector of the residency program
at Stony Brook, meaning that Itrain the young neurosurgeons.
So and this is something wetalk about a lot is how do you make
this transition from being amedical student who does interesting

(01:29:49):
things and so on, but not atthat level of responsibility, into
being a neurosurgicalattending where you are the guy in
charge doing it.
And neurosurgery residency isabout seven years long.
In fact, it's exactly sevenyears long.
And we have a very specificway we train people through those
seven years.
And residents start out asassistants, so they don't take the

(01:30:14):
primary responsibility foroperating and taking care of patients.
And they learn from people whohave the experience.
And they're gradually givenopportunities to take more responsibility
through their training.
And their final year oftraining is where they take responsibility
that's commensurate with whatthey would have as an independently

(01:30:34):
practicing neurosurgeon.
And at the end of theirtraining, I, as the residency director
have to sign a paper that saysthat they are competent to safely
practice on the public, thatthey can go out and do operations
on people without supervision,without somebody standing there.
So the way you get throughthat process, from being a medical

(01:30:56):
student, never having done anysurgery, to being somebody who goes
out in real life and does iton your own, is you go through a
seven year period ofcontinuous observation.
These guys, guys work thebetter part of 80 hours a week.
And we watch them very carefully.
They start out with small responsibilities.
And as they show us that theycan do A good job with that, we give

(01:31:19):
them more responsibilities.
That's not to say that whenyou reach the other end of the training,
that it's easy.
Meaning that I think thehardest thing that a doctor faces,
especially a neurosurgeon, isthat sense of responsibility.
The major complication ratefor neurosurgery in the best of hands
is maybe a couple percent.

(01:31:41):
That is that 98% of youroperations go great.
But if you're doing 200operations a year, which is fairly
common for a neurosurgeon,that means that there are four operations
per year that have majorcomplications, and that's on your
conscience.
And if you've been doing thisfor 40 years, that means that there's
100 patients who've had majorcomplications related to your work.

(01:32:06):
And that's if you're reallygood, that's like the low number.
And you have to deal with that psychologically.
And different people deal withit different ways.
And I talk with the residentsin training about how will you feel
if a patient doesn't do welland you blame yourself for it.
And that's the price you pay.
As.

(01:32:26):
As a neurosurgeon, I'd nevereven considered that before.
That inevitably somepercentage of patients may not do
well due to circumstancesbeyond your control.
And yet the way that we ashumans tend to think is there are
no circumstances beyond our control.
You can still have the bestday ever or something.
God forbid, a mistake could be made.

(01:32:47):
These are real things thathappen to real people because we
don't live in a perfect worldeven when we're at our best.
Yes, neurosurgeons tend to.
I tell the residents they livewith faces in their minds, and they
rehash operations they've doneand decisions they've made.
You go back years, say, gee, Iwish I could have done that differently.

(01:33:10):
I wish that it turned out adifferent way.
And you live with that.
And some people just can'ttake it psychologically.
There are neurosurgeons whojust quit.
They just find some other wayto make a living.
Some neurosurgeons developpersonalities that aren't very nice.
They blame other people.
Things don't work out right.

(01:33:31):
It was the nurse's fault.
It was the other guy's fault.
It's not my fault.
There's a neurosurgeon namedHenry Marsh who wrote a wonderful
book, and I'm blocking on thename of the book.
It's so hard.
Getting older is not easy, butit's a great book.
Look up Henry Marsh.

(01:33:51):
And again, if I don't thinktoo hard, I'll think of it.
But it's a book about badneurosurgical outcomes.
He's a neurosurgeon fromEngland, an excellent neurosurgeon.
And the book is about casesthat didn't go well and how he felt
about it.
And every neurosurgeonexperiences that.

(01:34:12):
So it's a big part of the profession.
And I try when we train theyoung neurosurgeons to kind of get
them ready for facing thatwhen they go out to and practice
on their own.
Yeah, this is a very human thing.
Have you found that your faithhas helped you in that regard?
It certainly has.
It certainly has.

(01:34:35):
Neurosurgeons sort of the jokethat neurosurgeons think they're
God.
And if you have faith, yourealize that you aren't God.
And so it does help you toknow that things are out of your
hands in many ways.
On the other hand, I'mresponsible, responsible to God,
and he expects me to do thebest I can.

(01:34:57):
So as I'm sure you've had thesame experience in your Christian
life that faith in God doesn't.
It's not a ticket to just doanything you want to do.
It's not like, well, hey, Godwill take care of it.
No, it comes with a lot of responsibility.
Comes with a cross.
It comes with a cross.

(01:35:18):
Amen.
Amen.
Well, thank you so much forthat, the brilliant insights in your
book and in this conversation,and they're going to stick with me.
I can feel them.
I'm going to be thinking aboutthis for the rest of the day.
So I really appreciate howmuch you've had to share and how
much that you give of yourwisdom and experience in sharing
these topics that are faroutside of the realm of people.
But really, we live with themevery day.

(01:35:40):
All right, well, thank you somuch, and it's been a privilege to
meet you and to speak with you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Where would you like to sendpeople to find out more about you
and what you do?
Well, the Immortal Mind isavailable on Amazon, so you can find
it there.
Mike Egner and Denise o' Learyare the two authors.
Also, I blog a lot at MindMatters News, which is part of the

(01:36:02):
Discovery Institute, and alsoat Evolution News and Views, also
part of the Discovery Institute.
The Discovery Institute hasbeen a leader in this effort to get
to the truth about science,the truth about the natural world.
And I've learned a lot from them.
And I think readers andlisteners will also.

(01:36:23):
Thank you, sir.
Those will be linked in theshow notes.
Thank you.
Thank you, Sa.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}DR. MICHAEL EGNOR - The Brain, the Mind, and the Soul: A Neurosurgeon's Journey from Atheism to Faith