The Sean McDowell Show - Is the Soul Real? A Neurosurgeon Makes the Case

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

Many scientists and doctors believe that there is no such thing as the soul. Dr. Michael Egnor is a neurosurgeon presents the case that the brain alone does not explain the mind. Using modern neuroscience and his vast surgical experience, he believes there is a spiritual soul that transcends the brain, using fascinating case studies to prove his claim. Today, he's here to discuss his new book comes out June 3rd. READ: The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul Hardcover by Michael Egnor (https://theimmortalmind.org/)*Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf)*USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM)*See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK)FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowellTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=enInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Is the scientific evidence for the soul overwhelming? Our guest today is a former materialist who rejected belief in the soul, but because of his work and research as a surgeon, he now believes the scientific evidence is compelling. Why did he change his mind and what is that evidence? Well, you're about to find out. We welcome for the first time Dr. Michael Egner, author of the new book that I endorsed and found

fascinating. It's called The Immortal Mind. Dr. Eggner, thanks for joining us today. Thank you, Sean. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, the book starts with this fascinating, jarring story that when I read it, I went to my wife and I was like, you've got to hear this story. It's somewhat of a conversion story before you get into the scientific evidence for the soul. Since you start the book there, let's start this interview with your powerful conversion story.

Sure. I was born into a kind of a non-religious family as a child and I fell in love with science at a very early age. And I thought that all the mysteries of life, all the really meaningful things that one could discover could be discovered with science. So I believed in the Darwinian way of understanding man and, you know, physics and chemistry and all those things. and I majored in biochemistry in college and I wanted to be a doctor and I really wanted to be to be a neurosurgeon Because I wanted to understand the brain and the mind because I thought that I would understand on a deep level Who we are and what we are if I knew all the science there was to know about the brain

So I graduated from medical school, I trained in neurosurgery, and graduated from my residency in 1991, and went out and practiced as a neurosurgeon. And a number of things happened to me as a neurosurgeon and as a husband and a father that changed the way I look at the world. And as a neurosurgeon, I began finding patients who had large parts of their brains missing. A good example is a little girl who was born with only about half her brain. And I counseled her family that this didn't look good.

I couldn't be sure how she would do, but it didn't look encouraging. And couldn't be sure how she would do, but it didn't look encouraging. And as she grew up, I followed her and she was normal at every stage of development. In fact, rather bright. She's now in her mid twenties and a vibrant, normal young woman has a great job. Her mother says she's too smart for her own good.

And she has half a brain. I have a number of other patients with major parts of their brains missing who were really okay, who were really fine. And that didn't fit any of the neuroanatomy textbooks that I read in medical school. There were strange things going on there. The whole thing kind of came to a head when I was operating many years ago on a woman who had a brain tumor in her left frontal lobe. And we do awake brain surgery at times. And what awake brain surgery means is that the patient is given a local anesthetic like Novocaine, so they don't feel pain. The brain itself has no sensation of pain. So it's just like cutting your hair, you don't feel anything.

And we can stimulate the surface of the brain and get a map of the critical parts of the brain. So for example, if I'm removing a tumor, I can find out what parts I have to protect and what parts I can safely remove to get the tumor out. So it makes the operation safer. So she was awake and I was taking out the tumor and taking out much of the left frontal lobe of her brain and we were having

a conversation. And it was a perfectly normal conversation. It's the same kind of conversation you and I are having here right now as her big part of her brain is coming out. And it didn't seem to make any difference in her conversation. Fortunately, that was the whole point of the surgery was to keep her healthy. And I, after that operation, I thought, my goodness gracious, we don't understand what the brain does. There's something deeper here. Because none of my textbooks said you could take out most of the left frontal lobe and have a person be perfectly normal. So at around the same time, I had a religious conversion, one might say. And it was related intellectually to some of my doubts about Darwinism. I began reading more deeply about the Darwinian explanation for how we became human. And it struck me as pretty weak science.

I thought it was pretty bad science. I didn't look at it at that point from a religious standpoint. I just thought of all the scientific disciplines I knew, this is the one that I think was the least rigorous. But I have four kids. And when my youngest son was born, the first couple of months of life, he wasn't making eye contact and he wasn't smiling.

And he wasn't behaving as if he understood my wife and I to be people. We were like objects to him. And I became frightened that he was autistic. And autism has always terrified me. The idea that you have a child who you love and want to connect with, and they don't even know you exist.

You're just like a piece of furniture to them. So I was quite frightened of it. We took him to some neurologists and they said, it's too young, he's just a few months old, you really can't be sure. So by the time he was about six months old, but he still wasn't making eye contact, it wasn't really interacting with us.

And I was seeing a consult, a patient at an outside hospital, it was a Catholic hospital. And it was, I was at a point where I was emotionally really, really diswrought by this. You know, I was thinking, I'm never going to love my son, I'm never going to have my son love me, he's never gonna know me. And so after I saw the consult, it was late at night, there was a chapel in the hospital. So I was stopped by the chapel. And I went into the chapel and I got down in front of the altar and prayed and I said, God,

I don't know if you exist, I don't make praying a habit, but if you do exist, could you take this away from me, please? This is something I can't deal with. I can't have my son be autistic and not know me. And I heard a voice. Only time in my life I've ever heard a voice. And it was very clear. And it wasn't me saying it. And the voice said, but that's what you're doing to me. Whew. So I said, I kind of collapsed and I said, okay, I won't do it to you anymore. I won't be autistic to you.

But please make my son not autistic to me. So I went home and a few days later was his six month birthday and he was perfectly normal It's pretty fine. He's currently a law student and anything but autistic so so I That complemented in some sense my discoveries as a surgeon and in neuroscience that there's a lot more to man than just meat,

that we do have souls, that there's a spiritual aspect to us. And so I converted to Christianity, got baptized, many people in my family also got baptized. And since I had spent several decades of my life as an atheist and a materialist, I kind of feel like I have a debt to repay. We wouldn't call it vengeance, but I wanna convey to people that atheism and materialism are wrong and that God exists and that he's real and that we really do have souls.

So I began looking more deeply into the neuroscience of the brain and the soul to try to explain why I had seen these strange things with people with parts of their brains missing were perfectly normal. Then I can take out part of a woman's frontal lobe as I'm talking to her and it doesn't change her. And I found that there were other neurosurgeons and other scientists who really had seen the same kind of thing, that I wasn't the first person to notice this.

The greatest scientist in the neurosurgical profession was a guy named Wilder Penfield, who worked back in the mid 20th century in Montreal. And he pioneered the surgery of epilepsy. And one of his most common operations was awake brain surgery, the sort of thing that I had done with the woman with the tumor.

And he did about 1,100 patients with awake brain surgery. So it was, no one's ever come anywhere near those kind of numbers. Awake brain surgery is still done today, but if you do a few hundred in your life, it's a large volume. So Penfield really was responsible for a lot of the mapping of the brain that we know about today,

because he operated on all these over a thousand people and mapped all kinds of areas of their brain. He would map them by stimulating with a little electrical probe the surface of the brain while they were awake and he would ask them what they felt or what they saw or see if they moved. And he found peculiar things and they really surprised him because he had started out as a materialist just like I had. He found that when he would stimulate the brain and he must have stimulated the brain at least a million times in these 1,100 patients.

Well if you count out say two stimulations a minute and the operations last about eight hours I actually did the math. Yeah. It's over the math. Yeah. It's over a million stimulations. He could only stimulate four things from the brain. He could make the person move. He could stimulate the motor area and they'd raise their arm.

He could make them have a perception. Let's see a flash of light or smell something or hear something. He could make them have an emotion. There are parts of the brain, if you stimulate it, you get a powerful emotion. You get fear or joy. There's a part of the brain that makes you laugh. If you stimulate that, you feel like everything is funny. And he could stimulate memories. He could stimulate certain parts of the temporal lobe, and you'd have a memory of your mother's face or a memory

of a conversation that you'd had years before. But those were the only things he could stimulate. And what he left out is everything we're doing right now. He couldn't stimulate abstract thought. He couldn't stimulate the ability to contemplate philosophy or to think about the meaning of life. He couldn't stimulate abstract thought. He couldn't stimulate the ability to contemplate philosophy or to think about the meaning of life. He couldn't stimulate mathematics. Nowhere in the brain could he stimulate someone to say,

ah, one plus one is two. He couldn't stimulate logic or history or music. All the different kind of abstract higher level things we do. And he came to the conclusion because he was a pretty honest man. He said, well, maybe I can't stimulate abstract thought because it doesn't come from the brain. Maybe the brain is necessary ordinarily

for the exercise of abstract thought. If you drink too much alcohol or if you get hit on the head, you may not think as clearly for a while. But that doesn't mean that the thought comes from the brain. So he said that he called abstract thought mind action. He said that you can't stimulate mind action from the brain. You can stimulate individual things, movement, perception, emotion, and memory, but that's it. And then he looked back at the whole record of seizures, epilepsy. Looked back at thousands of cases of epilepsy, and he found exactly the same thing. When people have epileptic seizures,

they do certain things. They can go unconscious, but not always. Sometimes they're awake when they have the seizure and they have movements or they have perceptions Sometimes you have memories. Sometimes you have emotions, but there are no calculus seizures no one's ever no one's ever had a seizure where they couldn't stop doing mathematics and Panfield said why not if if mathematics comes from the brain and there have been hundreds of millions of seizures Once in a blue moon, you'd trigger off one plus one equals two, and you couldn't stop. He said, it never happens.

So the same thing that he found with seizures is what he had found with the awake brain surgery, that the brain is an organ that only does certain things. And the main things it does is it makes us move, it makes us perceive, it makes us perceive, makes us remember and gives us emotions. But it doesn't serve as the source for abstract thought. And so that was a remarkable finding and it's been pretty much ignored

within the neuroscience community. You read textbooks and people talk about it. I've had debates with neuroscientists where they say, oh, that Penfield study, I mean, that was 100 years ago. You know, we have much, much better studies now. And the reality is we don't have much better studies now. These were on 1,100 people, over a million stimulations

by a first rate scientist who studied the results. And nothing we do nowadays comes anywhere near that kind of detail and that kind of rigor. So Penfield's work, I think is amazing. He wrote a book called Mystery of the Mind, if viewers are interested in that, it's available on Amazon, where he recounts all of his experiences.

He also found that free will doesn't come from the brain. And the way he found that was he would ask the person during the operation, just raise your arm occasionally, just by free will. And what I'll do is I'll stimulate occasionally the part of your brain that controls your arm and I'll make it raise. and I want you to tell me when your arm goes up did you do it or did I do it and they always knew there were tens of thousands of stimulations he could never simulate free will he said well it's because free will doesn't come from the brain it's it's a it's a spiritual power it's not a physical power. So that got me to thinking and it it made sense in light of what I was seeing in my own patients and so I looked deeper into into the neuroscience. And I'm happy to talk about that.

Yeah let's go into some of these details. It's amazing that it's kind of this coalescing together of this personal spiritual journey and the neuroscience. It's not one or the other. There's kind of this intersection of the two. Let me take a step back. You said this kind of earlier towards the beginning about the person with half a brain who functioned normally and was even bright. And you said something referring to kind of neuroanatomy of textbooks not

preparing you to expect this. What is the worldview that's often in neuroanatomy textbooks? Why as materialists did you not expect this? As a backstory to that there is a there was a science of phrenology of reading the bumps on a person's skull to understand their personality and understand their brain that was developed back mainly in the 19th century a little bit into the early 20th century and it was it was people think of it as a pseudoscience it was was kind of crazy. You would feel the shape of the skull and say, this person's an honest man or something. But phrenology wasn't quite as crazy as it seemed.

It was wrong. But they didn't have radiology. They didn't have CAT scans or anything. So they couldn't image the brain. The skull does slightly, in some way, conform to the shape of the brain. So that was the only way they could have to evaluate the brain.

And what phrenologists were facing was, there was increasing evidence back then that certain areas of the brain controlled movement and perception and emotion and memory. That was becoming clear even in the 19th century. So they figured everything in the mind was controlled in the brain somewhere. So they started looking for honesty and integrity

and social deviance and they figured, well, you know, I'll see if I can find that. So it wasn't a completely irrational scientific project. It failed. It turned out that there is no part of the brain where you have honesty or integrity that doesn't come from the brain like that. But, so it was abandoned, but many philosophers of the mind

have pointed out that modern neuroscience is kind of like high tech phrenology. That is that neuroscientists are saying, well, you know, the frontal lobes are the processing areas for abstract thought. You know, so it's kind of another version of phrenology. In fact, we use functional MRI imaging, which is a method of MRI imaging

where you can see areas of the brain that light up when a person is thinking about certain things. And that's a lot like phrenology in a sense that you're looking for the spot that lights up to tell us about your character or about what you're thinking and things like that. And that's actually pretty weak science, and I think of it as high-tech phrenology. So what I think the textbooks have gotten wrong is that they don't understand the relationship between the soul and the brain, and they don't understand how the brain is wired. There are certain parts of the brain that are hardwired,

that it's like your computer. If you damage your computer in a particular spot, you can predict what's going to happen. And that's very hardwired for the motor areas, the sensory areas, the speech area, the brain stem. If you damage one square millimeter of that part of the brain, you can predict with great accuracy what's going to happen. But probably about half the brain, maybe even two thirds, is what are called association areas that are not like that at all. You can remove much of them and be perfectly normal. And the textbooks kind of lose that.

They don't realize that there are two kinds of, there are two kinds of powers of the mind that people have. There's the abstract thought. Its relation to the brain is quite nebulous. We don't have a good handle on that. And there's concrete things like moving and perceiving and breathing and those, the concrete things are in the brain. We can find them. We know where they are. The abstract stuff really isn't in the brain in the same way and neuroscience hasn't caught up to that truth.

Mm. Okay, so I want to make sure that I understand and our viewers are tracking with this. You made a distinction between kind of hard areas in the brain, specific areas tied to functioning, and those are damaged. Humans can't perform those functions. And then there's association areas

where if they're maybe damaged, other areas the brain, you know, with the soul we would argue, can compensate for that. Is the argument that from a materialist position there should be no association areas and everything should be reducible in principle to certain areas of the brain because that's all we are is the brain and matter. So like a computer, you remove that part, it doesn't function. Is that accurate? Yes, that's a reasonable way of looking at it.

The term, one way of describing these areas is the areas of the brain that have very well defined functions are often called eloquent regions. And non-eloquent regions are the regions that don't have so much function. People describe the non-eloquent regions as being association areas. But that's because they don't know what they do. So you just say it's association areas. But you can remove them. And you still associate just fine. So it's not even clear what they mean's association areas. Gotcha. But you can remove them and you still associate just fine.

So it's not even clear what they mean by association areas. I mean, it's supposedly it's where coordination and organization takes place. But in any machine that has coordination or organization going on, if you damage the coordination and organization, you substantially damage the machine. But that's often not the case with the brain.

I mean, the anterior left frontal lobe is considered an association area. And I removed it in a woman as I was talking to her, and she remained exactly the same. So I don't even know what is meant by association area. I think it's kind of a hand waving thing, like it's a mystery to us, so we'll call it association area. I think it's kind of a hand-waving thing like it's a mystery to us, so we'll call it association area.

That's really helpful. Okay, so let me ask you one more question before we dive into the evidence. There's these split brain experiments you talk about, totally fascinating. You get into near-death experiences, damaged brains, we're going to get there. But I was asked a question this past week. I was speaking at my alma mater where I did my doctorate, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, talking about the evidence for a soul. And a student asked me this question. He said, I'm engaging a friend of mine who's a skeptic,

doesn't believe in the soul, and he points out how in certain areas of the brain are damaged, the personality changes. Doesn't that show that we are reducible to the brain and there's no soul? Now I had an answer that I gave him, but how would you address that kind of objection that I'm sure you've heard before?

Sure. Well, I mean, it's obvious that certain areas of the brain can be damaged and you do have a change in personality. You find that just by drinking a glass of wine. I mean, you know, I mean, you know, the brain is a physical organ and emotion, which is very much a part of our personality is controlled by the brain.

So there are emotional centers. So yeah, sure, you can change things. The most famous person that people talk about who had brain damage and a change is Phineas Gage, who had a spike driven through his brain. And he was a church going kind of conservative guy before it happened and was a little bit more of a libertine afterwards.

So he still wasn't such a bad guy. I've actually read a bit about him. He wasn't that bad, but he kind of lived the high life a little bit after. But that's not news. That's not surprising. You know, as I said, you have a few drinks of wine, and you're going to behave differently.

So, there's no question that there's a component of us that is lodged in our brain, that controls our emotional tone. That's sort of the emotional background of how we live our life. That doesn't mean that we don't have souls. And then it gets into the question of how do you define a soul. And it's, I'm happy to go into that now.

It's a little bit of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, so it gets a little bit of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, so it gets a little deep, but we tend to think of souls as like ghosty things that kind of inhabit our bodies, like they're the same shape as us, but they step outside of us and they're translucent or something, and that's not really the classical way of understanding the soul, and at least in many Christian perspectives, not the Christian way. St. Thomas Aquinas believed that the soul was essentially everything about you that makes you different from a dead body. So that everything a living body does that a dead body doesn't do is what the soul is. So the fact that I'm talking now is part of my soul, because if I were dead

I wouldn't talk. That I'm breathing, it's also part of my soul, because if I were dead I wouldn't breathe. So the soul basically was the thing by virtue of which we are alive. It's what makes us a living thing rather than a dead thing. And that includes in plants, and plants have souls, their souls make them grow and reproduce and take nourishment and things like that. They're living things. Animals have souls. They make my dog like food and walk around and bark and do dog things. And human beings have souls. Our souls differ from the souls of any other living thing in that our souls are rational souls. They were rational, that's the abstract thought part that no other living thing has. And that kind of soul is a spiritual soul. And therefore our soul is a spirit. Whereas other living

things just have souls that run their bodies. You know, souls that run the plant, souls that run the dog. Our soul isn't that kind of soul. Our soul is a spirit. And a spirit has many characteristics that are quite different. Our spirits have the ability to reason, to act freely, to do free will. Our spiritual souls are immortal. You can't kill a spirit. You can kill a body. You can even kill a soul in the sense of if the body disintegrates, the soul that gave it life is no longer present because it's disintegrated. But if you have a spiritual soul, spirits can't disintegrate because they don't have parts. They're not made of matter. You can't break them up.

disintegrate because they don't have parts. They're not made of matter. You can't break them up God could if he chose make them not exist, but they can't die in the way that everything else dies Which I think is the most powerful argument for the immortality of the soul The least most powerful scientific argument for the immortality of the soul is that our is a spiritual soul, we have capacity for abstract thought and free will. Therefore, we can't disintegrate as a soul, and we can't die, our body disintegrates, and we will get new bodies. So let's jump into some of the evidence on this for the soul.

I responded to this young man, I said, you know, if we just are our brains, we'd expect a change of brains to affect our personality. But if we are body and soul, and our soul operates through our bodies, we would expect changes of the body to affect the way the soul operates through the body. So, Phineas Gage fits with both explanations,

so alone cannot be used as evidence for one versus the other. That's how I look at it, but you walked through in this book, the split brain experiments. This blew me away. I was trying to explain it to my wife. I thought this was so interesting. Walk through what happened and why you think it points towards the reality of the immaterial soul. Yeah, the split brain research is just utterly fascinating.

There are certain kinds of seizures, relatively rare seizures, that start out as a tiny seizure on one side of the brain. That doesn't bother the patient very much, but that then can travel over the entire brain. And if it travels over the entire brain, you have a generalized seizure. And they can be really nasty seizures.

There are people who have 30 or 40 of them a day, and they often don't respond well to medication. So they're constantly having these horrible seizures. There was research back in the 1940s on animals with that kind of seizure to try to find a way to stop those seizures. And what the surgeons would do is they decided, well, if they cut the connection between the hemispheres of the brain, then the seizure couldn't spread and maybe the person would be better off.

And it seemed to help the animals. So they tried it on people. So by the 1950s and 60s, it became a fairly standard operation. I performed it. And what you cut is the corpus callosum, which is a bundle of 200,000 nerve axons. I forgot the number actually. And it's about the size of the palm of your hand and it's connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. And you cut the whole thing from front to back and that stops those kind of seizures. Patients may have small seizures but they live a much, much better life. And What I found and what other neurosurgeons who've done that operation have found is that surprisingly these people are normal

After the surgery you'd think that cutting your brain in half Would have a quite radical effect. Yeah who you are you might be two people, you know So it'd be kind of like if you took a chainsaw to your computer and cut it right down the middle And still work just fine Think that there's something odd about your computer. You didn't you didn't expect that so, um, I if you were to meet a person who had had a corpus callus on me Which is the name of the operation you couldn't tell you your these are perfectly normal people and you ask them

Well, do you feel like you have two selves? I says, no, no, I'm still me. So there was a neuroscientist named Roger Sperry back in the middle of the 20th century, who realized that even though these people seem completely normal, it's a wonderful experiment in a way to separate the hemispheres. And he did very detailed research to try to find out, well, is there anything abnormal about them? And what he found was that some of their perceptual abilities were split. That is, if you show a picture, the left hemisphere of the brain is usually the hemisphere where we have language from. The right hemisphere can't speak. So if you show a

picture to the left hemisphere and you can do it by putting it in a certain place of the visual field that only the left hemisphere can see, the person can say what's in the picture. But if you show the same picture to the right hemisphere, the person can't say it, but they know what it is. They can pick the object out of a basket if you show an apple to the right hemisphere. The person will say I know what it is but I can't say it and if you give him a basket of fruit he'll pick out the apple. So there are all kinds of weird things that Sperry found like that that people aren't even aware of in everyday life. And he won the Nobel Prize for it. It was his classic research thing, 1972, I think,

Nobel Prize in Medicine. But Sperry himself noticed, noted that these people sure seem normal, you know, I can find subtle perceptual stuff. So two researchers since then have carried out very profound studies on these patients. The first was Justine Surgeon, who was a neuroscientist at McGill back 1980s. Took split brain patients, and she would put arrows in their visual fields.

So one hemisphere of the brain would see one arrow, the other hemisphere of the brain would see the other arrow. And she would ask them a question, and the question she would ask is, are the arrows pointing in the same direction? And the patient's almost always got it right. But think about this. One hemisphere saw one arrow, the other hemisphere saw the other arrow. No part of the brain saw both arrows. So how can a person compare them? So that general approach has been by a guy named Jere Pinto, neuroscientist in the Netherlands. And Pinto presents patients with visual stories. It will have like one part of the story is in one hemisphere, the other part of the story

is in the other hemisphere, but the story doesn't make any sense unless you can integrate these two. An example, I don't know, I'm not sure if this is when he's done, but this is a kind of, this is the kind of thing he's done. Where one hemisphere will get a picture of a broken window with like a hole in it. The other hemisphere will get a picture of a baseball.

And you ask what happened? And people with split brain surgery will say, oh, well the baseball broke the window. But no part of the person's brain has seen the window and the baseball. So what is it that is doing the comparing? And that's the spirit. That's the spiritual soul.

That's the part that's not from the brain. So I think that surgeon and Pinto's research on split brain patients actually points out the spiritual soul. You can actually in some sense see it, see it intuitively. That's the part of the mind that can compare things that no part of the brain has access to both together. So I find that fascinating.

It's totally fascinating. So what if a skeptic pushed back and said, okay, I think you're making a kind of God of the gaps, or in this case, we might say, soul of the gaps argument. Just because we don't know what physical mechanism helps explain this connection between the hemispheres and the brain, maybe it's something else in the body. I mean, there could be some other unknown natural phenomena that explains this and the Penfield experiments. Why do we have to punt towards something spiritual to explain this? This is a soul of the gaps akin to the god of the gaps.

Right. And that's exactly the argument they use. I've debated this with materialists and that's exactly what they say. Carl Sagan made one of the dumbest claims. Sagan was an atheist and a materialist when he said that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But that's not true, right?

The fact is that if you don't have evidence for something, it's perfectly reasonable to draw the preliminary conclusion that it doesn't exist. In fact, there's been a lot of that in science. I mean, there's no evidence for the luminiferous ether in the outer space. That was a big theory back in the 19th century. There's no evidence for vitalism, that there's a chemical that makes you alive, that that chemical is different from anything else. There's no evidence for a ton of theories. And we accept that as evidence that theory isn't true.

So absence of evidence is evidence for absence. It may not be proof, but it's evidence. And so what I say to neuroscientists who say, oh, no, we'll be able to figure this out. You just give us time. Science always progresses is have at it, have at it. Get back to me when you've got the evidence. Until you have the evidence, you have nothing. So yeah, I mean you can always say hey my theory is correct Just give me another hundred years and I'll prove it Okay, you know have at it, you know, but until then By far the best scientific explanation for the kind of research that that that that we're discussing is that the spiritual soul exists

And maybe neuroscientists will pull something out of their pocket. Good luck. Hmm. But they haven't pulled it out yet. They haven't yet? Okay. So let's talk a little bit more about the section in your book on terminal lucidity. Now I've done some programs on this, on deathbed experiences with Dr. Steve Miller. We've covered this, but I thought it was fascinating fascinating that came up in your book as a piece of evidence

for the soul So talk about what you mean about that why you think that points towards the soul well terminal lucidity or I have a Friend a Stephen Post who's a Neuroethicist who's written a lot about this. So we talk a lot about it. He's fascinated by it. And he actually likes calling it paradoxical lucidity, because it's not always terminal. It's often terminal. A person has late stages of Alzheimer's, a day or two before they pass away, they can have an interval of time, sometimes a couple

of hours, where they're all self again, and then they pass away. they can have an interval of time, sometimes a couple hours, where they're all self again, and then they pass away. But it doesn't have to be like that. That is that there are people who have these episodes of lucidity. And the lucidity can be rather striking, that you can have a person who's really not even verbal, who after years of being like that,

suddenly begins having conversations. There's usually an emotional component to it, meaning usually it's with a loved one, a family member, and they'll start reminiscing about their childhood and so on, and then it goes away. And from a materialist standpoint, that's awful hard to put together. I mean, you have an Alzheimer's ravaged brain. There's no reason that you would expect to just have that intermittently go away. It's again, it's as if your computer is massively damaged and it really hardly works at all.

And then all of a sudden it's perfect. That's pretty odd. This is not the way I would expect my computer to work. So what terminal lucidity points to, it's not proof. In science, you don't really get proof. You get inference to best explanation. What terminal lucidity points to is that there's an aspect to us

that isn't locked into the damaged brain so much. It can come out. And why it comes out, how it comes out, is that there's an aspect to us that isn't locked into the damaged brain so much. It can come out and why it comes out, how it comes out, that's grist for the mill. That's something else to understand. But terminal acidity is certainly not something that a materialist understanding of the brain would predict. Interesting. Okay. Talk a little bit about the section in your book on what are described as vegetative states,

sometimes permanent vegetative states, and how... Yeah, go for it. There's a landmark paper published, I think it was 2006, in the New England Journal of Medicine called Detecting Awareness in the Vegetative State. And it was a paper published by a guy named Adrian Owen, who was a neuroscientist at Cambridge University in England. Now he's, I think, working in Indiana. He came to the US.

And he studied a woman who was diagnosed as being in persistent vegetative state. This is the same state, for example, that Terry Shiavo was in. You may recall the Terry Shiavo case. But she had had an automobile accident, had massive brain damage. And several years later, it's still not woken up out of coma. And by examination by her doctors in Cambridge, she had no mind.

That is that she was just a shell. She was a body but had no mental processes. Her brain was shrunken down to a half or a third of its normal size. Most of it was destroyed. And there was just nothing there. She was reflexes. She had sleep-wake cycles but showed no evidence of understanding anything about what was going on around her or of having any thoughts at all. So Owen put her in an MRI machine and did functional MRI imaging. And functional MRI imaging shows brain areas lighting up if you're thinking about things. And he put her in the machine, he put headsets on her, and he asked her to think about things. Think about playing tennis, think about walking across the room, et cetera.

And areas of what was left of her brain lit up, which was kind of odd. He didn't expect that. So he took normal volunteers, 15 normal volunteers, put headphones on them, stuck them in the MRI machine and asked them the same questions. And they had the same patterns of brain activation as this woman in persistent vegetative state had, which on a superficial level would lead you to think, well, that means that she's thinking like they're thinking. So what he then did, because he's a really good scientist, he said, well, I'm not sure this is about thinking. Maybe just the noise, the sound

coming into the ear is what's making the brain light up. Maybe understanding isn't a part of it. So he took the normal people, put them back in the MRI machine, and he asked them the same question but he scrambled the words so they didn't mean anything anymore. And the brains didn't light up. He puts her back in the machine, scrambles the words, and her brain didn't light up. Wow. Her brain only responded when what you asked her to do made sense. Brilliant. What he's been able to do since then, and this has been repeated by a number of other

researchers, is you can communicate with some people in the deepest level of coma. They will tell you about their families. They can do arithmetic. You can ask them, what is six plus eight? And you count, and when you reach 14, the brain lights up. So about 40%, the latest numbers are, of people in the deepest level of coma are able to communicate that way. And so that of course doesn't prove the existence

of the soul and of all the arguments I make that we recount in the book, this is the one that gets the most pushback from the materialist neuroscientists. They say, oh no, I mean, it's still the brain lighting up. You know, it's not the soul, the brain lights up. But what this suggests is that there's a disconnect that your brain can be ravaged, can be almost destroyed. And you're still able to do some things, you're still able to, to think on a pretty high level. Keep in mind that this

is a person who can't move, can't talk, is probably blind, has no ability to interact with the world otherwise except that they can think about what you say to them. And this phenomenon is very well known, for example, to nurses who work in ICUs, people who are in deep coma. You still have to be careful about what you say around them. It's common knowledge among ICU nurses

that in the room with a comatose patient, you have to pretend that they're awake. Because if you say something upsetting, like, this guy isn't gonna make it, the heart rate goes up, the blood pressure goes up. People respond to what you say. So I always tell families that when you're in the room with a loved one who's in a coma assume they're awake,

assume they can hear you. Don't say things in their in their presence that that you know that would upset them. So there's a disconnect between the mind and the brain and that disconnect I, is more evidence for the soul. One of my favorite sections of your book, I thought the split brain was just absolutely fascinating but the section on free will, because that's something I've had debates with skeptics at times about morality, you can't tell somebody they should or shouldn't do something if you don't have the capacity for choice To do it or refrain from doing it

We also have this deep-seated belief that we make choices and that we're not just acted upon externally So any adequate worldview to me has to account for free will or at least the belief in free will now you argue that like physics and your study of through neurosurgery and neuroscience points towards the existence of free will and the soul. Explain that for us if you will. Well, free will is real and it's obviously real. There is no intelligent debate about it.

There is a raging debate in our society now, but it's not an intelligent one. It's just nonsense to deny free will. One of the best ways to empirically show that free will is real is to go over to the desk of a free will denier and pour your coffee on his laptop Hmm, and he will of course blame you for doing it. He's a what are you doing my laptop and you say hey I have no freewill I had no more choice as to whether I poured my coffee on your on the laptop than the coffee cup had So if you're gonna yell at something yell at the coffee cup

They I've debated the freewill question with Jerry Coyne, who's a blogger who blogs a lot. And I pointed out he had a very funny post where somebody dented his fender in a parking lot and then drove off. So he had this post where he was complaining about this jerk that dented his fender in a parking lot and drove off. And I pointed out and said, but Jerry, if free will isn't real, the person who drove off is no more responsible for that than the car he was driving is responsible for that. If we're all just meat machines,

you can't blame anybody for anything. I mean, it's no one's fault. You're just a meat machine. So even free will deniers believe in free will. I mean, pour your coffee on their laptop and you find out if they believe in free will. Because if you don't have free will, you say, hey, I had no choice.

You know, I had to pour the coffee. It's my chemicals still, I can't blame me. So the first bit of evidence that free will is real is that everyone believes in free will. Even free will deniers live their lives as if they believe in free will. There's no person outside of an insane asylum who doesn't believe in free will. The second reason for believing in free will is that free will deniers invariably invoke

determinism. They say that free will isn't real because everything in our brain is already determined and we, there's no room for free will in physics. Determinism in physics has, for the most part, been proven false. It was proven false by a guy named John Stuart Bell, a physicist in Ireland back in the 1960s,

who proposed a way of testing whether a physical state of the universe at one moment is completely determined in the way it transitions into the next moment. That is, is it all baked in the way it transitions into the next moment. That is, is it all baked in the cake or is there room for randomness or choice in this? And the experiments have been carried out by several physicists. One of them is named Elaine Aspect. And he did the experiments. The experiments themselves are rather complex, but very clearly showed

that determinism is false. That is that if you look at the state of things in your room right now, and you say the way the room will be, say 10 seconds from now, is it baked into the physical arrangement of things now? And the answer is no. There's always, there is room for free will.

There's room for randomness. And that's been physically shown. So the predicate for the denial of free will that materialists use, that determinism is the way physics is, is simply wrong. There's room for free will. The third argument against free will, which I find compelling, is that if you don't have free will, which I find compelling, is that if you don't have free will, then you are a complete slave of your chemicals and what's happening inside your brain.

In other words, you're just a chemistry set, and we don't pay attention to the opinions of chemistry sets. So if you deny free will, you say, I don't have the freedom to choose whether I believe in free will or not. It's all in my chemicals. And I don't pay attention to meat robots. I mean, if a meat robot wants to say something to me, I'll say, it's just a meat robot. I don't pay attention to that. It's as if you spill ink on the floor accidentally.

And it looks like it it looks like it Spells out it's it's it's going to snow tomorrow Do you really believe it's gonna snow tomorrow just because the spilled ink said it no, it's just spilled egg It's just a coincidence. However, if somebody who you trust a weatherman says it's gonna snow tomorrow you believe him the difference between the weatherman and the spilled ink is a weatherman has free will and can choose right and wrong and choose opinions. So what people who deny free will are saying is,

I'm just a meat robot, and my answer is, why would I listen to what you say? So the fourth reason to believe in free will is that the neuroscience really supports it. Wilder Penfield found that he could not stimulate the will anywhere. He couldn't find it anywhere in the brain, so he assumed it was free. And there's a guy named Benjamin Libet who did a lot of very interesting work in the mid-20th century. He found that there are brain signals, electrical signals that

happen before we make decisions that superficially look as though our decisions are driven by those signals and we didn't really have any choice. But Leibniz showed that you can veto those signals and the veto isn't from the brain. So he called that free won't. And he pointed out that the idea of free won't very nicely fits the traditional Christian understanding of temptation and sin. That is that we are tempted by things that we don't have control over. Our brain is telling us to do stuff all the time that we are better

off not doing. But we still retain the libertarian ability to consent or not consent. And that's the free will. So the argument about free will in my view is not even really an argument. The evidence is overwhelming that free will is real. And in fact, we all believe free will is real, even free will deniers, because they live their lives as if free will is real. So of course it's real. The point you made towards me about Penfield, I find just compelling in the sense that when he would prick the brains in a certain place, the patient's hand would move.

But then they could distinguish between, oh, you did that, and I'm holding with my hand back the hand moving, I did that. So there's this recognition of internal causation and external causation from the outside in. So it seems to be- Precisely. And people always know the difference. And we naturally recognize that. So you'd have to explain somehow we've been wired through this blind evolutionary materialist process to be able to make this distinction for

some survival advantage. Like I don't even know why we would need the belief that we have free will in the first place Let alone the belief of making a distinction between internal and external causation That's to me where it becomes just implausible well the the the the spiritual qualities of the soul that we've talked about which are Intellect and free will there's the compassion the capacity for reason and the capacity to choose freely, couldn't have evolved anyway, because they're not physical. Evolution, to the extent that it's a real thing, and I think overall, the Darwinian way of looking at

evolutionary changes is just junk science, I think it's terrible science. But even if that were true, you couldn't evolve free will and you couldn't evolve the capacity for reason because free will and reason are not physical things. And if evolution is true, it can only affect physical things because physical things are genes and natural selection and all that stuff.

So this spiritual soul of man is created. It's not evolved. It can't be evolved. Some parts of our body may have evolved. That's open to debate. But not the spiritual soul. It can't evolve. You're really getting to the root of what a materialistic process could,

in principle, explain. So, if ink fell on the ground and said, you know, like, take out the trash or it's gonna rain, we know it's not gonna say that anyways. It's mathematically improbable, but in principle, if it did, we wouldn't ascribe any authority to it. It's just an accident. It doesn't mean anything.

But the origin of consciousness, the origin of free will, the origin of information and DNA origin of free will, the origin of information in DNA, these are not physical things. There's an immaterial essence here. And how are they explained by a physical process? I had a debate with Michael Shermer for a couple hours, maybe six months ago, and his explanation, not the only one, is just kind of an epiphenomenon. It just appears at a certain level of complexity and to me I just think that's the ultimate non-explanation it's a fancy word to not explain a phenomenon at all now let me ask you this question you use this word in in the book and I'm an academic so I

was told in my interview at Biola early on, they're like, you're an apologist and sometimes apologists can, you know, overstate stuff. In academics, we need to really nuance things and stay very sober. And I'm like, okay, I understand. Yet in your book, you talk about the overwhelming scientific evidence for the soul. Now I know you use that word intentionally. Tell me why and just kind of sum up if you're going to say to somebody, why do you think the science is overwhelming towards the reality of the soul? Sure. Well, the reason it's overwhelming is because when you look at the really seminal experiments done in cognitive neuroscience over the past century, many of them point very directly

to the existence of the soul. And none of them provide any evidence to think that the soul doesn't exist. I mean, you can certainly study the brain from the standpoint of ordinary activity of the brain, action potentials, neurotransmitters, and that's perfectly good science, but that doesn't disprove the soul by any means. But there's tons of evidence. A very good example was Wilder Penfield's experiments stimulating the surface of the brain. I actually recently had a debate about this with a neuroscientist. And Penfield did, again, over a million individual stimulations of the surface of the brain in 1,100

patients and not a single time stimulated any kind of abstract thought at all. I have to admit that abstract thought probably doesn't come from the brain. Science doesn't get much better than that. You have a million trials of an experiment and a glaringly clear answer. The split brain surgery work, which is utterly fascinating, the idea that a person can compare images that are presented separately to the brain hemispheres, which are disconnected. And the capacity to compare the images cannot have come from the brain itself, because there's no part of the brain that sees both images.

The idea that a person in the deepest level of coma, whose brain has been functionally destroyed, can do mathematics and can talk to you about their family and even talk about philosophy using functional MRI imaging. All of these things obviously point to the existence of a set of powers of the mind that are unlinked to a substantial degree from the physical brain. And that's the spiritual soul. And frankly, if you want somebody who describes the spiritual soul in a way that is neuroscientifically the most accurate, I'd go back to St. Thomas Aquinas.

You know, the psychology of St. Thomas Aquinas very, very closely fits what we're learning in neuroscience. Dr. Michael Egener, your book is so fascinating. I give it my highest recommendation for a book of its kind. It's sophisticated but it's very readable. I'm not a scientist and I was able to track with some of the nuances about the brain. To me, when people ask me for evidence for the soul, I'm going to point towards the substance of consciousness. Brandon Riccobar, J.P. Morland,

I think the most sophisticated philosophical case, right alongside your new book, The Immortal Mind, as more of what you might call a scientific case for the soul. Of course, those certainly overlap. Really appreciate your work. In due time, we will definitely have you back to probe into some more of the depth of these. But I want to encourage folks to pick up The Immortal Mind. It comes out in June.

So if you're watching this before, you can pre-order it. You're going to enjoy it. It's fascinating. Believer or not, to me, this is the kind of evidence worth wrestling with because quite a lot is at stake. Before you click away, make sure you hit subscribe. This is a topic we're going to come back to, the soul, the afterlife, near-death experiences.

You have a whole chapter in your book on near-death experiences. We didn't even discuss that. So there's much more in the book, but make sure you hit subscribe because these are topics we are coming back to. In fact, I'm going to do a show soon on big lies about Satan. I've wanted to do that show for a while. That one is coming up.

So don't miss it. Make sure you hit subscribe if you thought about studying apologetics. At Biola, we have some of the leading philosophers of mind in the world and experts in intelligent design. We have a distance program. We would love to have you be a part of it. See information below. Dr. Eggner love to have you be a part of it. See information below. Dr. Eganer, this has really been a joy. Thanks for writing a great

book and thanks for coming on. Thank you, John. It's been a real privilege. Thank you.