Materialists who confront the most basic aspect of human existence — that we possess a mind, with powers of intellect and will — are forced into a massive denial of reality. As neuroscientist Michael Egnor explains in a new episode of Secrets of the Human Body, the brain is the organ of certain aspects of our experience. These can be deliberately stimulated by the neuroscientist in open-brain surgery, as has been known since the pioneering work of Wilder Penfield.
What are those brain-based experiences? Dr. Egnor, co-author with Denyse O’Leary of The Immortal Mind, lists movement, sensations, memories, and emotions. What has never been surgically stimulated is either will or abstract thought, not even “simple arithmetic, 1 + 1 = 2.”
That’s because, as the relevant science shows, those take place not in the brain but elsewhere. Evidently not in a physical place at all, as split-brain surgery also indicates. It is all a strong suggestion that humans possess not just a brain but a mind, which is to say, a soul: something that philosophers and theologians have long recognized.
This is a great challenge to pose to anyone you know who thinks the whole of a human being is purely material. The mind can use reason to add 1 and 1 and reach a sum of 2. The brain cannot. Watch: