Reviewing the new book The Immortal Mind, by Egnor and O’Leary, John Zmirak is perceptive and troubling as he details the consequences of what he calls “soul denial.” Zmirak traces the condition to Darwinian materialism, of which the “most destructive implication…is the simplest.” It is
…that human beings don’t have souls. Our rational minds, our sense of self, our moral intuitions, our loves and hates and loyalties are finally fictions in this view — side-effects, illusions, the shadows cast by what is only really real: mere chemistry and physics. Your sense of “you,” my own experience of “me,” the “love” between two people … all of that is all just smoke and mirrors, produced as epiphenomena of what’s actually happening: neurons in our brains shooting sparks through the meat, driven by iron laws of deterministic causation or the blind whims of random chance. Free will is an illusion and our “selves” wink out at death.
Our Haunted Twin
Read the full review at Chronicles Magazine. Just one illustration, of many, of what happens when a culture or a country embraces soul denial comes to us from just across the border to our north. Zmirak notes
- The rise of euthanasia as a cost-saving strategy in nations with socialized medicine such as Canada. (Assisted suicide now accounts for 4.7 percent of deaths there, and is pressed by bureaucrats on traumatized veterans, chronically ill adults, and teens with mental illness.)
Imagine that: killing as a “cost-saving strategy.” I think of Canada more and more as the haunted twin of the United States, and a warning to us: Yes, it can happen here.
Science is invariably enlisted as the key support of soullessness, but as Michael Egnor and Denyse O’Leary show in The Immortal Mind, the best neuroscience points to another conclusion. Zmirak summarizes: “The mind transcends both body and brain. It survives physical death. Its horizons go far beyond the things of this earth, and our average threescore and 10 years spent here. It looks beyond and Above.”