This morning, a friend wrote to me about a statement in a recent article in Popular Mechanics. Discussing neurosurgeon Michael Egnor’s and my 2025 book, The Immortal Mind: (2025), it reads:

The real concern, says Newsome and Novella, of a book like The Immortal Mind—and the Discovery Institute in general, where Egnor pens regular articles—is that proof of God is couched within a scientific framework, giving credentials and a veil of credibility to a belief.

My friend asked, do these thinkers’ own opinions on the topic amount to a mere belief too? Well, yes.

As it happens, I had responded to the article by Hanna Webster earlier this week. At the time, I took issue with the definition of materialism used; it conceals rather than reveals materialism’s central thesis: “all matter, no mind.”

I didn’t really get into beliefs about God, for fear of making my response article overly long. In TIM, we were not arguing for the existence of God, except in one chapter, “And this all men call God.”

Actually, most of what we had to say, based on neuroscience and similar topics, could fit nicely into a Buddhist universe where the mind is real but there isn’t a God.

But then we stopped and realized that we had better provide an account of how our own view of the universe differs sharply on this point from that of the Dalai Lama. Buddhists believe in the spiritual nature of the mind but not in a monotheistic God.

Something similar happened when the Indonesian translation of The Spiritual Brain (2007), of which I am co-author, came out. The original subtitle was “A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul.” The translator had re-subtitled it, “A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of Allah.” (Eksistensi Allah)

First author Mario Beauregard and I were momentarily puzzled. We were not making an argument for monotheism but for the real existence of the human mind. Perhaps we did not foresee how easy it can be to confuse the two. Anyway, for all we knew, the distinction is more awkward in Indonesian language and culture.

When Michael Egnor and I did argue for the existence of God in 2025, we turned to classical philosophy rather than neuroscience. The great Catholic thinker Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) liked to end his logical demonstrations with “And this all men call God.” You can read about some of his arguments here.

You may also wish to read: “How much does the mind weigh? How long is it?”, my response to the Popular Mechanics article.