I’m reading a fascinating book, The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul, by neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and science writer Denyse O’Leary, both of whose bylines you will recognize from Evolution News. You can pre-order it now, by May 31, and get a number of free items along with it, including a full PDF of the anthology Minding the Brain. See here for more details.
The book will be published on June 3, 2025. It opens with a very personal account by Dr. Egnor of an experience he had in the chapel of a Catholic hospital. It changed his outlook spiritually and began a journey of scientific discovery. The journey led him to the conclusion that his own field, neuroscience, pointed conclusively to the existence of an immaterial being, identical with the human soul known to religious tradition, that survives the body’s death.
The opening story turns upon the young Dr. Egnor’s fears that his son was autistic and would never truly know him. Autism becomes a metaphor for the atheist’s refusal to recognize the existence of his own soul, with its source in a creator whom he prefers not to know. I don’t want to give away the twist here. You’ll have to get the book yourself for that. It shows from scientific evidence, coordinated with the findings of centuries of philosophy, that the brain is not all there is to us. It is only a material instrument that your immaterial soul uses.
Before entering the chapel, Egnor was still an atheist, though a haunted one. He recalls, “God meant nothing to me. I wasn’t an angry atheist — I liked Christians and thought that Christianity was a lovely story — but I also thought it was a fairy tale.” How that assumption unraveled provides part of the narrative of The Immortal Mind.