Phil Cook

We live in a world with competing worldviews.

Naturalism is the belief that the material world is all there is. We have no free will because we are just random compositions of electrical and chemical reactions. We are nothing more than moist robots.

Materialists insist that all that exists are just “atoms in a void” as proposed by the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus.

It’s been said by many that belief in something other than what can be scientifically measured and reproduced is held only by the uneducated or the unintelligent and that any other belief sytem would gradually fade away once science was communicated effectively.

But it didn’t happen.

Interest in the spiritual component of life has only increased.

Do we have a soul? What is a soul? Is its source merely the body and the brain?

Dr. Michael Egnor is an award-winning neurosurgeon and has performed over 7,000 brain operations over the last 40 years.

Named as one of New York’s Best Doctors by the New York Magazine in 2005, he has been a professor at the State University of New York where he has served as the Director of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics.

He spent several decades of his life as an atheist materialist, but as his career progressed, he became more and more convinced that traditional naturalistic explanations were insufficient to explain what he was witnessing.

This was troubling as he was taught that the brain is the cause of the mind. The materialist says that everything in the mind is generated by the tissue of the brain.

But he was discovering that the capacity for abstract thought which includes reason and judgment and free will is not material and cannot be found in the brain.

Finally, his own doubts about his purely materialistic worldview came to a head in a chapel in the hospital in which he was working.

He tells the story about his experience with his fourth child who in the first six months appeared to have no connection to his parents or caregivers. The boy wouldn’t respond or look at them. Egnor was disturbed by this and feared the child that wouldn’t be able to relate to him. One day out of desperation he went into the chapel and decided to ask God, if a God was even there, for help.

Alone in the chapel, he told God that he didn’t want to have a child that wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t know him, that wouldn’t have a relationship with him.

And then he heard a clear voice. The voice said, “But that’s what you’re doing to Me.”

Soon after he converted to Christianity and was baptized.

Now, he says that neuroscience itself is pointing away from materialism. “By far the best scientific explanation for the kind of research we’re discussing is that the spiritual soul exists.”

Dr. Egnor has a new book out this week called, “The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul.”

He presents many examples and case studies showing how the mind or spirit exists apart from the brain.

One area he is fascinated with is the countless instances of near-death or deathbed experiences for which materialistic science has no explanation. In about 20% of near-death experiences, where the person was dead for a period of time and then revived, they know things that happened while they were “dead” and these things have been corroborated.

Egnor tells the story of Pam Reynolds who was receiving treatment for an aneurysm. In order for the operation to progress, she needed to be induced into a “braindead state” artificially. During the surgery, her heart was stopped, her body was cooled down to about 50 degrees fahrenheit, and all the blood was drained out of her brain. This gave the surgeon thirty minutes to do the operation. Repeated stimulations of the brain throughout the surgery confirmed that there was no brain activity of any kind. Her eyes were taped shut.

Afterwards, once she was revived, she said she had watched the entire operation. When her brain was shut off, she had floated out of her body and noticed in great detail what was happening. She listened to the conversations the doctors were having; she knew the songs on the radio that were being played. She could even describe the tools the doctors were using.

Each of these details were corroborated by those who had been in the room.

Some, during near-death experiences, are able to meet with people who have died before them. And in many cases, they met someone who they did not know had died. There are no recorded experiences of them meeting with people who are still alive.

The body is material and can die, but the soul cannot die as it is not material.

​​Phil Cook can be reached at 3upquarks@protonmail.com.