Last month, The Immortal Mind: by neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and science writer Denyse O’Leary hit the stores. Here’s the podcast:

In this reading, Dr. Egnor shares his journey from being a medical student who believed science could explain everything, including how consciousness emerges from the brain and whether we have a soul, to a neurosurgeon who questioned the conventional materialist view. He discusses how years of operating on and examining patients with brain damage led him to wonder how large parts of the brain could be removed without affecting a person’s mind or their ability to think, reason, believe, and desire. His personal story, including a profound experience in a hospital chapel during a family crisis, became a turning point that challenged his atheism and led him to believe that the immaterial aspects of our minds are real and that nature is an open system, not a closed one. With the Introduction, Dr. Egnor sets the stage for the book’s exploration of how modern neuroscience and medicine offer compelling scientific evidence for the existence of the human soul.

From the transcript:

Dr. Egnor explains how a dramatic spiritual experience, which he recounts in the podcast and transcript, changed his attitude to science and neuroscience:

The purpose of good science is to follow the evidence where it leads and to pursue the truth about the world without ideological blinders. I had followed the evidence and it had shown me that the supernatural was real. The inference to God’s existence and to creation, design in biology, and the reality of the human soul is compatible with science, because it’s true. So, I went into the library and the operating room with a new resolve to do neuroscience and neurosurgery without blinders. I reread classic research papers on the relationship between the mind, our perceptions, emotions, memories, thoughts, capacity for reason, our free will and so on, and the brain, the three pound organ in our skull that generates electrical signals and neurochemicals. I read up on well-respected theories about how consciousness works, and we will discuss them in this book.

But now I read neuroscience without materialist blinders. That is, without the presumption that we are simply flesh and blood creatures without spirits or souls. I also read the work of many of the greatest philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Ludwig Wittgenstein, to explore a logical framework for understanding these profound questions about our minds and bodies. With this new insight into the human mind and brain, I began for the first time really to understand the truth about the human soul.

My journey and our journey

My own Christian journey began with me face down on the floor of a chapel, and in many important ways my scientific journey began there as well. It was only after that moment in the chapel that I began to ask the deeper important questions, the haunting questions, who are we? Where do we come from? And where are we going after we die? And I no longer settled for the stock answers that many scientists, like me up to that point, had naively accepted for so long.

You might also want to check out this video podcast: