Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, author with Denyse O’Leary of The Immortal Mind: (Worthy, June 3, 2025), was interviewed at The Stream recently by John Zmirak: Here’s an excerpt from the first of a three-part series:

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JZ: Materialists in our classrooms and TV science programs dismiss traditional claims for an immortal spirit or soul as wishful thinking or cultural leftovers from a past, pre-scientific worldview. What are the logical implications of that ideology for morality, human relationships, law, and other critical topics?

ME: If we do not have spiritual souls — if we are machines made of meat — we have no free will and thus cannot act in accordance with moral law. Free will presupposes that capacity for abstract thought, the capacity to form concepts, to reason and to make genuine choices based on moral reasoning. None of those are powers of material substances like brains. The denial of the soul has profound implications for human relationships. If we are mere animals, devoid of genuine capacity for reason and free will, then our relationships with one another in our marriages, families, friendships and jobs are reduced to physical interactions devoid of spiritual and immortal consequences. We see the impact of this materialist understanding of man in the violence in our cities, in human trafficking, sexual abuse, divorce and a host of interpersonal crimes and tragedies.

Without free will and moral responsibility, men cannot rationally be held accountable under law. Instead of justice for freely chosen immoral acts, law becomes human livestock management, incarcerating human animals who misbehave simply in order to remove them from society, to alter their behavior by rewards and punishments, and to discourage similar behavior. This is characteristic of totalitarian societies, in which personal free will is of little relevance and social control is paramount.

If there is no free will — if there is no immaterial soul — then there is no guilt and there is no innocence. Without free will, there is no reason not to incarcerate individuals who are statistically prone to illegal behavior, even if they have committed no crimes. If they protest “But I’m not guilty of anything!”, the totalitarian reply is, “Of course you aren’t. Neither are you innocent. You are merely an animal to be managed.”

Why Deny the Soul? 

JZ: Do you think that young people from religious households are drifting away from the faiths their parents tried to instill in them because they’re imbibing such materialism in high school, college, or from popular culture? Have you seen evidence of this?

ME: Materialism is rarely advocated explicitly in school — it’s a vacuous ideology easily refuted in open discussion. It has flourished mainly because it is not explicitly proposed. It is quietly stipulated, not scientifically or even logically demonstrated. Materialism is merely assumed, without honest examination, and students who challenge the materialist assumption are ignored, then ridiculed, then denigrated and too often canceled.

It is remarkable how seldom scientists working in the materialist paradigm are willing to explicitly defend it. When challenged, materialist scientists generally brush off perfectly legitimate questions as “unscientific,” “woo-woo,” “mysticism,” “creationism,” etc. I think that the intense reaction materialists have had to nonmaterialist evidence in neuroscience is simply because in light of such evidence, materialists have to explain themselves. Christof Koch, perhaps the world’s leading neuroscientist, has recently raised questions about purely materialist interpretations of neuroscience, and has been the object of an organized campaign to discredit him.

– “Is Your Mind Immortal or Are You a Meat Machine? Part I,” August 28, 2025

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Here’s an excerpt from Part 2: Michael Egnor at The Stream: How the mind transcends the brain. In his interview with John Zmirak, Dr. Egnor points out that epileptic seizures do not involve abstract thought because that type of thought is not simply a product of the brain. He noted that pioneer neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield started out as a materialist but became a dualist as a result of discovering things like these.

Here’s an excerpt from Part 3: Michael Egnor at The Stream: How materialists refute themselves. In Part 3, he also talks about how fellow health care personnel and patients have responded to The Immortal Mind, which makes a case for the immortal soul. Egnor: People I work with in the operating room and clinics and even patients tell me that they read our book and really liked it. They are glad we are speaking up.

Here are the whole of Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.