Earlier this month, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and philosopher Sean McDowell discussed key findings from The Immortal Mind: A neurosurgeon’s case for the existence of the soul (Worthy, June 3, 2025) at McDowell’s YouTube channel. Since May 6, the program has garnered nearly 357,000 views. Clearly, the topic is hot.

Two days ago, Discovery Institute published a video talk by Dr. Egnor on some of the topics from The Immortal Mind, given at its 2025 Dallas Conference on Science & Faith (February 8): “The scientific evidence of the human soul” (May 20, 2025/29:55 min):

Is The Soul Real? A Neurosurgeon Explores The Evidence

Many scientists and doctors believe that there is no such thing as the soul. That there is no part of us that persists beyond death. We are not spiritual in any respect. We are made up of cells and tissue, and completely controlled by a material organ in our heads: the brain. In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Michael Egnor makes the case—based on 40 years of practice and over 7,000 brain surgeries—that science has gotten it all wrong.

Here are a couple of excerpts from his talk:

An interesting feature of near-death experiences is who experiencers don’t see:

People have surveyed the literature [17:17] and there are thousands of of examples of this in the literature, where people go down a tunnel and they see loved ones and relatives at the other end of the tunnel. Nobody in the medical literature who’s had a near-death experience has ever seen a living person at the other end of the tunnel.

It’s not like you kind of want your mother and your mother’s still alive and you see her at the other end of the tunnel Only dead people are at the other [17:39] end of the tunnel, including people that you didn’t know were dead There are a number of examples of people who were in car accidents where someone in the car died and they didn’t know the person died because they were critically injured also and they saw that person on the other side of the tunnel but not people in the car who didn’t die.

Psychiatrist Bruce Greyson, the author of After (MacMillan 2021), also discusses these types of NDEs. Gary Habermas summarizes,

Another body of evidence comes from cases where particular persons, often friends or loved ones but sometimes others, had died recently, but the death was unknown to the NDEr until the deceased persons appeared in the NDE or deathbed vision. Over two dozen such examples were collected by Greyson, and other researchers have also presented similar accounts…

Among the many cases recounted by Greyson, two will be mentioned briefly. A young nine-year-old boy named Eddie was seriously ill in a hospital. Recovering from a thirty-six-hour fever, Eddie immediately told those in the hospital room that he had been to heaven, recounting seeing his grandfather, an aunt, and an uncle there. But then his startled and agitated father heard Eddie report that his nineteen-year-old sister Teresa, away at college, was in heaven too, and she told Eddie that he had to return. But the father had just spoken to Teresa two days prior. Checking with the college, the father found out that his daughter had been killed in a car accident the previous day, but that the college could not reach the family at their home, presumably because of Eddie’s hospital stay…

“Near-Death: What People Learn When They Are (Briefly) Dead,” an excerpt from Minding the Brain (Discovery Institute Press, 2023), February 25, 2024

Egnor offers philosophical reasons for thinking that the spiritual part of the human soul is immortal:

Our human souls can be thought of as having two parts. The physical part is everything that makes us physically alive. That part dies with the body. But the spiritual part of the human soul is the part that reasons and makes choices. It doesn’t and can’t die:

Image Credit: LizFoster - Adobe Stock

When we die, our bodies don’t go [25:57] away They disintegrate. But every atom inside our body will end up somewhere else. So the physical body can disintegrate. But can a soul, a spiritual soul, disintegrate?

To get a feeling for [26:15] the answer to that question, think about the number 8. There are two ways that the number 8 can be represented. One is written down on a piece of paper and the other is conceptually, thinking about the number eight.

Well certainly, the number 8 written on a piece of paper can disintegrate if you put the paper in fire and burn it. It just becomes a pile of ash. So in that sense the number 8 can die, can disintegrate. But the number 8 conceptually — one might say the spiritual number 8 — can’t die. You’re not going to hear from a mathematics department at the local university that the number 8 passed away yesterday. And so now we have to count 6, 7, [ ] 9, 10 …

Numbers don’t die. Abstract [27:10] things don’t die And spirits don’t die Matter disintegrates Spirits can’t disintegrate And note that this immortality is natural. Of course, it comes from God but we are naturally immortal That is, it’s in our nature that our spirit cannot disintegrate and cannot die.

Your spiritual soul has no off switch.

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