Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, today I'm excited to welcome back renowned neurosurgeon, Dr. Michael Egnor to continue talking with me about his new book, the Immortal Mind, A Neurosurgeon's Case for the Existence of the soul.
Dr. Egnor is a professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook. Named one of New York's best doctors by New York Magazine in 2005, Egnor is an award winning brain surgeon who has performed over 7,000 brain operations.
Dr. Egnor, welcome back.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: Thank you, Andrew. It's a pleasure to be back.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: And by the way, you know, 7,000 brain operations, are you adding to that tally daily, Weekly? How many are you doing these days?
[00:00:57] Speaker A: Two, two or three a week.
And yeah, yeah, I'm getting a little old for this, but yeah, I do. Two or two or three a week.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Yeah. And you can trace that all the way back to your training in Miami, which you say was a very busy and opportune place to learn your trade.
And you detail some of that in the book.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it was a busy time. I spent six years at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami and it was. It's a very. It's a very, very busy place.
[00:01:24] Speaker B: Well, so you've written this book making a case that the human soul exists and that the mind is immortal. And over a couple of episodes of the podcast, we're unpacking some of the arguments and evidence that you've marshaled for these provocative ideas. In a previous episode, we covered some basics as we teased out some of the key insights of your book. You covered the definitions of mind, brain and soul. You broke down for us the difference between the materialist view and. And the view that you hold. The dualist view, it's called. We discussed the example of split brain surgery and what that reveals about the unity of the mind. We talked about what we can learn about the mind and brain from cases of conjoined twins. And you also explained why you include near death experiences in your book as part of the whole argument. We also talked about how you push back on the claim that the human mind was produced through a gradual Darwinian process.
Well, today I'd like to dive a little deeper into your story and the arguments that you present in your book.
Now, from a young age, you saw science as an escape and a place where facts and truth were to be found. Did you grow up religious and what drew you to science and the brain as a child?
[00:02:36] Speaker A: It's a great question, Andrew. No, I didn't grow up religious.
I wasn't baptized as a child. My mother would occasionally go to church and bring me with her, but my father didn't go, and we were not a religious family.
And I was always fascinated by the natural world. I was fascinated by the kind of profound questions of, you know, what is reality, where did the universe come from, things like that. But I always saw it in a scientific perspective, and I always knew I wanted to do some kind of science in my life. And I was drawn over time into medicine and into neurosurgery.
And in medical school, I fell in love with neuroanatomy and neurophysiology in part because I thought that was getting at the big mystery of life, the mystery when, if you understand how the brain works and you understand all there is to know about what it is to be human.
So I wanted kind of a firsthand knowledge of that, and neurosurgery seemed to be the way to do it.
So I went into neurosurgery. And what I found as I learned the craft of neurosurgery is that there are a lot of things in the real world that weren't quite like what the textbook said.
One example would be there was an operation where I was removing much of the left frontal lobe of a woman who had a brain tumor that was infiltrating her frontal lobe. And we had to do the surgery with her awake so we could map the area of her brain that controls speech.
And we use local anesthesia so she didn't feel any pain.
So I'm talking to her as I'm taking out much of her left frontal lobe and mapping her brain.
And it just haunted me, this weird thing that I can have a conversation. I mean, she was perfectly normal. We were just chatting about the weather, chatting about the food in the cafeteria, stuff like that, as I'm taking out parts of her brain that the medical textbook said were responsible for much of her higher thought, much of her abstract thought. And here she is talking to me and not turning a hair as I'm taking out that part of her brain. And she. She did very well with the surgery. The tumor was cured, and she lives. Lived a normal life.
And that amazed me. And I realized that a lot of the stuff in the textbooks about the way the brain and the mind work wasn't really true. There are. There certainly are aspects of the mind that are very closely related to the anatomy of the brain, vision, hearing, perception, memory can be very close, closely related. Emotions can be very closely related. Our ability to move, to move our limbs is very closely related.
But abstract thought and free will don't bear the same, the same kind of close relationship. And that fascinated me.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And you write that surgery gave you the chance to, you know, take that front row seat in the drama of life. And it gives you such an interesting and insightful view of this particular topic. You know, the differences between the mind and brain and how they're connected.
Well, one of the cool stories you share in your book is your own mother was the recipient of life saving brain surgery and that had the effect of making surgeons look like heroes in your household.
[00:05:56] Speaker A: Yes, yes. When I was a toddler, my mother had a rupture of a brain aneurysm and she was very crit ill. And she was treated at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York. And she survived, she had some, some disabilities, but she survived. And so as I was growing up, that was always sort of the pinnacle.
The best and most exciting thing you could be was to, was to be a neurosurgeon. And that undoubtedly influenced me. And I went to medical school at Columbia and I, as a medical student, scrubbed in the, probably the same operating rooms that my mother was operated on.
[00:06:36] Speaker B: That's cool. Well, you were an atheist during your medical training and part of your career as a neuroscientist. Were you an angry atheist? Had you come to terms with that, in a way? How did you view those who believed in God?
[00:06:50] Speaker A: Well, no, I was never, never an angry atheist. I, I frankly always found Christians to be really nice people. And I, I, I, I like Christians.
And I also, I, I found I would read the Bible a little bit and I found kind of fascinating, but I, I just thought it was all a fairy tale. I, I figured, you know, that if I was to go to church, I'd have to leave my brain outside because it was all just, it was just a fairy tale. I kind of associated Christianity with mythology and, but as time went on, as I began to see things in the real world as a neurosurgeon and doing science and just growing up and living an adult life, I came to see that things like Christianity, and particularly Christianity started making a lot more sense to me and I began to really have some doubts about the scientific or even the logical validity of atheism.
[00:07:54] Speaker B: Right. And you say you were troubled by what you call hauntings, occasional deep thoughts like, why am I here? Why does anything exist what is life all about? And those questions came to a crisis after your youngest son was born, leading to a life altering moment in a hospital chapel. Can you tell us that story?
[00:08:13] Speaker A: Yes.
I had been getting these, these feelings that I was missing something really important about the world and about my, about my life.
And I think probably most of us at some point have those feelings that, you know, you're going about your daily life, being concerned with all the things that go on day to day, your job, your family, making a living, all that stuff.
And you kind of forget to ask the questions like, well, why am I even here? Where's all, where did all this place come from?
And when my youngest son was born, my wife and I noticed a couple months after he was born that he wasn't making eye contact and he wasn't smiling.
And at an age when babies would be expected to do that. And we got concerned that he had autism. And that was really torturing me, this thought that I would have a child who didn't even know me, you know, who lived in his own little world and was heartbreaking. I was just devastated by this.
So it took him to a neurologist, had another doctor evaluate him. He said, he's too young to know. You can't really be sure.
So one night I was seeing a patient at a Catholic hospital as a consult. And as I was leaving the hospital, the hospital chapel was open and I decided, well, you know, I, I don't really go to church, but I, I'll try anything. I was so heart, heartbroken. So I went into the chapel and I got down in front of the altar and I said, God, I, I, I don't know if you really exist, but I, I can't handle this. I, I, I, I can't, I can't live with my son being autistic, my son not knowing me. And, and then I heard a voice, the only time in my life I've ever heard a voice. And the voice said, but that's what you're doing to me.
And I, I collapsed. I realized then what this was all about.
And I'd said, all right, Lord, I, I, I won't do this to you anymore.
I will acknowledge your existence and I will learn about you and get closer to you and love you, but please heal my son.
So a couple days later at my son's six month birthday party, he started to smile and to look at us and he was a totally normal baby. And he's right now a law student and very bright, personable young man who's anything but autistic.
So I went to the church and I said, how do I get baptized like now?
And so myself and a number of people in my family entered the church, and I've been very passionately devoted to the Lord and to his work ever since.
[00:10:59] Speaker B: Yeah, fascinating story. A dramatic encounter there.
Well, with your materialist blinders suddenly gone, as you put it, you saw neuroscience and neurosurgery in a very different light. You write that you no longer settled for the stock answers that many scientists have naively accepted for so long. How did it affect your career and your research to do such a 180?
[00:11:20] Speaker A: Well, atheism and materialism are really handicaps in science because you restrict yourself to.
To a very narrow set of causes and a very narrow way of looking at the world.
And when you include the idea that the world is governed by a mind, by a rational mind that has good intentions and it makes a lot more sense of things.
And I found my belief in God and my realization of the fact that. That the universe is created by. By an infinite intellect, that it's been tremendously helpful. The. My own scientific research is centered around understanding blood flow to the brain and the interaction with the pulsations of the heart and how the brain reacts to that.
And I found that if I take an engineering approach and I ask the question, if this system of the heart and the brain were a design system, how would it be best designed? That has led me to discover a number of very important things about how the system actually works that I would not have discovered if I hadn't. If I hadn't had the inference to design in my research.
So belief in God and recognition of his beautiful design in the universe is not only important for our personal salvation and just our personal understanding of reality, it can be very, very valuable for a working scientist.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
Now, as you departed atheism, you also departed a reductionist view of the brain and the mind.
You hold a dualist view. Tell us briefly for, you know, for viewers who and listeners who don't quite understand what that term gets to, just define that for us. And also how you define mind, brain and soul, briefly.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: Sure.
The brain, of course, is an organ and it does specific things. And the scientific evidence is that basically it does five things. One thing it does is it controls vital functions like breathing and heartbeat and so on. The second thing it does is it controls movement, so it can make. Lets you move your limbs. Third thing is it controls perceptions like vision and hearing and touch. Fourth thing is that it controls emotions so there's a lot of emotional stuff that comes out of brain physiology. And the third, the, the fifth thing it controls is memory. If we have specific memories, like remembering your grandmother's face is definitely comes from brain activity. There's a ton of science that supports that. But the capacity for reason and for free will, the capacity to think abstractly, not about a physical object, but about concepts like mercy and justice and mathematics and logic, that all doesn't come from the brain.
The brain is necessary for the normal exercise of abstract thought, but the brain is not sufficient for it.
We have souls, and our souls are what make us alive. And our souls are spiritual. And a spiritual soul has both material things like our bodies and the control of our bodies. And it has immaterial things like again, our capacity to know God, our capacity to use reason, our capacity, our capacity to exercise free will.
[00:14:47] Speaker B: Okay, yeah, that's, that's helpful. Now you push back on the widespread materialist view in neuroscience that the mind is simply what the brain does. In one chapter, you explain that even when the brain is split in half, many important aspects of the mind remained unified. How does this point to an immortal soul?
[00:15:06] Speaker A: The, the immateriality of an aspect of the mind that is that the fact, and I believe it is a fact, that our capacity for abstract thought and our capacity for free will are not generated by the brain. The brain helps us express these things and helps us experience them, but it doesn't come from the brain. That immateriality of that aspect of our soul means that our soul cannot die in the same way that that our body can.
A, an abstract, immaterial thing cannot cease to exist in the same way a material thing ceases to exist. A good analogy to help us understand that is if you think about the number eight, you can choose anything abstract, we'll think about the number eight. There are two ways that the number eight can, can be in your experiential life. One way is if you just Write the number 8 on a piece of paper.
The other way is if you think about the number eight, you're just abstractly thinking about it. Well, if you write the number 8 on a piece of paper, that version of number 8 could so called die, meaning you could put it in a fireplace, the paper burns up, that written number eight is gone. But the concept of number eight, the abstract concept, can't die. That is that there will never be a time when a department of mathematics will announce that, well, yesterday, sadly, the number eight passed away. So from now on, we're Counting from seven to nine. Meaning abstract things don't disintegrate, they don't fall apart, they don't die.
And there's a part of our soul that is abstract, incapable of abstract thought. So that means that our soul is not the kind of thing that. That can cease to exist, at least not in the sense of dying.
So there's very strong evidence, I believe, that just from a logical philosophical standpoint, to believe that the human soul is immortal. And that, of course, was the viewpoint of St. Thomas Aquinas and many of the greatest philosophers and theologians.
And there is considerable scientific evidence for that also.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, I was really intrigued by your chapter asking just how much brain the mind needs to function.
You write that while some brain areas are vital, significant portions can be removed or injured without necessarily affecting the mind. What did you learn about the parts of the mind that don't map to localized areas of the brain?
[00:17:39] Speaker A: That's probably about half the brain. It doesn't really map to the mind in a clean way.
And those areas are commonly called association areas. Large areas in the frontal lobes, the parietal lobes, and other parts of the brain.
And there are many people who lack those parts of the brain, either because of trauma or because of surgery or because they're born without them.
And they're very normal people. They're very highly functioning people. Now, of course, there are many injuries to the brain that cause a lot of disability. So it's not that the brain doesn't count, it's that there are a number of anomalous situations. A good example was a little girl that I've cared for since she was born, who was born missing half or two thirds of her brain. Major part of what was inside her skull was just spinal fluid, which is water, and a lot of her brain was missing. And I counseled her family when she was born that I couldn't be sure how she was going to do, but it didn't look good. And as she has grown up, she's been perfectly normal at every stage of life. And she's a bright young lady. She's in her 20s now. Her mom jokes that she's too smart for her own good sometimes.
And she's a perfectly normal young lady, if you were to meet her, is perfectly fine. She's missing two thirds of her brain. So there's a lot of that that goes on. And that doesn't mean the brain isn't important, but it means that we really need to rethink the textbooks and particularly we need to rethink the materialist ideology, and it's really just an ideology that the mind is completely caused by the brain. That simply isn't true. And there's a ton of science, there's a ton of personal experience that tells us that's not true.
[00:19:29] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, Definitely calls that view into question, for sure. Well, you have a whole chapter explaining why the immortality of the soul is a reasonable belief to hold. Let's talk about that for a moment to grasp this. You write that every living thing begins and ends physically, and we need to be clear about how the human soul is different in the material world. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It's transformed from one state to another. You write that the immaterial world is similar. What does neuroscience and everyday life tell us about the immortality of the soul? I know we've touched on this already, but in particular, you mentioned everyday life. You know, what is it showing us about the duality here?
[00:20:11] Speaker A: Well, I think what it.
The implications for our lives, if that's what we're getting at, I think is very important in that if our soul is immortal, and I think there are powerful theological reasons, philosophical reasons, and scientific reasons to conclude that our soul is immortal, then everything we do has eternal ramifications that essentially things really matter. How we treat other people, how we relate to God, whether we do right or do wrong morally, these are eternally important issues.
And it encourages us to take things very, very seriously. And also, when you deal with other people, that you're dealing with an immortal creature like yourself, and that people therefore warrant respect, consideration.
It makes us take life and take interpersonal relations a lot more seriously.
[00:21:16] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. Now, one of the things you mention in your book is free will.
I've read parts of eminent Stanford professor of neurology, Robert Sapolsky's book Determined, wherein he announces after 40 years of studying humans and primate apes that we are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control. Our biology, our environments, their interactions.
This denial of free will, you say, is probably the majority view among neuroscientists, the idea that we're utterly controlled by our brains.
Now, I know that our decisions can be affected by external forces, and because of the power of habit, it can take some doing to introduce surprise into an equation and go against the expected or predicted behavior. But I certainly don't buy the claim that we're not free to choose. What convince you about free will?
[00:22:06] Speaker A: Well, there are four reasons, at least four, to affirm that free will is real. The first reason is that every human being who's ever lived and every human being alive today believes in free will.
Even scientists like Dr. Ciplosky actually believe in free will.
What you believe is much more than what you say. What you believe is what you do.
And everyone lives like free will is real. We, we experience our lives every day like we're actually choosing. We hold people accountable for their choices. We believe that there is moral law after all. If there is no free will, there can be no moral law because there's no right or wrong. We're all just meat robots. And you don't. You know, a robot isn't blamed or given credit for what it does. It's just a robot.
So everybody actually believes in free will.
It's just that some people aren't candid about what they actually believe.
And that goes to an expression. If I'm not mistaken, it was Carl Sagan who said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And the claim that free will isn't real, when every human being lives his or her life as if free will is real, is an extraordinary claim. And it requires extraordinary evidence that we don't even have ordinary evidence that free will isn't real, let alone extraordinary. So that's one reason why free will is real is that everybody knows it's real. The second reason why free will is real is that the denial of free will is self refuting. That if you say that nothing I do is by my choice, everything is imposed upon me, then even your opinion that free will isn't real isn't your choice, it's imposed upon you. And if it's imposed upon you, why would we trust it? It's forced by your brain chemistry. Why would he ever think that that would necessarily be true?
So the denial of free will is basically saying, I'm just a robot. And my answer is then why would I listen to what you say?
The third reason to believe that free will is real is that free will denial is based upon the belief in determinism. Determinism is the idea that everything that happens in the universe from moment to moment is determined by the state of the universe just before it happens.
And that theory is now pretty much completely disproven. There's a, there's a physicist named Elaine Aspect from France who won the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago along with two other physicists that he, that he worked with for actually doing experiments who, that, that, that have shown that what's called local determinism is clearly not true.
That is that there's room for free will.
In quantum dynamics, in the way the world works, free will has plenty of room to work.
The fourth reason to believe that free will is real is that there's actually a lot of scientific evidence that supports the inference to free will, evidenced by a neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield and by a neuroscientist named Benjamin Lieben. So there's a ton of reasons, at least four solid ones, to, to support the idea that free will is a very real thing.
[00:25:18] Speaker B: And do you find that when, when free will gets denied in your fields, is it, is it more to do with a commitment to methodological, methodological naturalism and materialism, or is it somehow people are afraid that it's going to get connected to a religious view?
Why do you think they find it convenient to deny it?
[00:25:42] Speaker A: Well, I think both of your explanations are right on target.
Many people in the scientific world have a commitment to immaterialism.
Exactly why that is is a whole nother question.
Some of it is just moving with a herd.
If you express immaterialist views as a scientist, people look at you askance.
So unfortunately, so to kind of go along, to get along and get grants, you got to kind of play the game.
So that's part of the reason.
The other part of the reason, I think is that the denial of free will and the endorsement of materialism is kind of like a virtue signaling thing. It's a way people have of saying, you know, look how committed I am to the cause of materialism. I don't even believe in free will.
And I think it's. As I said, as I said, it's self refuting, it's bad science, it's terrible ideology, and it's just wrong.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: Well, near the end of your book, you have a chapter I found quite helpful, evaluating popular models of the mind, from behaviorism and identity theory to functionalism.
You explain where each falls short. Why is the dualist view the best fit to explain the evidence that's coming out of neuroscience and neurosurgery?
[00:27:04] Speaker A: Well, the materialist theories all posit that the fundamental source for the mind is the brain and that there's nothing else involved, it's just the brain.
The, the eliminated materialists actually believe that there is no mind. We were kind of mistaken by that. And it's only the brain. That is what you think of as your mind is just your brain. That's it.
And that's a very radical view. And there is a ton of neuroscience that suggests that there are aspects of the mind that are not generated by the brain. One way to look at it is that while normal functioning of the mind under ordinary circumstances has the brain as necessary for normal functioning, the brain is not sufficient for the functioning of the. Of the intellect, the capacity for abstract thought, or for the functioning of free will.
So there is something above and beyond the brain that contributes to the mind. That's the dur. That's the dualist view. The advantage of dualism, besides the fact that it fits the scientific evidence much, much better, is that dualism encompasses the materialistic viewpoint. That is that every dualist recognizes that there are things in the brain that cause things in the mind. I mean, there's no question about that. The brain causes us to move.
It causes perceptions, it causes emotions, and it causes memories. And I'm a dualist, but I totally acknowledge that. But abstract thought, the reasoning, the power to reason, and free will do not come from the brain.
They're influenced by the brain, for sure, but they don't come from the brain, and that's good science.
So dualism, I think, is from a scientific standpoint as well as a logical and philosophical standpoint, a much better way of looking at the mind brain relationship than materialism is.
[00:29:04] Speaker B: Right.
Well, as we wrap up our conversation today, I wanted to touch on something we're seeing all around us these days in our various professions and, you know, places and circles, and that's AI, you know, artificial intelligence. You think it's unfounded that AI will spontaneously develop human like intelligence or creativity, because the two intelligences are fundamentally different.
And I mention this also because we're coming into a time now where we see a lot of what I call relational AI, you know, AI models and algorithms that are designed to. To sound like someone with a brain, a mind, you know, to look like a human being. And a lot of us are, you know, turning to that because it's comforting, it's convenient, and, you know, we're getting tricked in some ways. So it's a good thing to look at. And you do have some thoughts about it. Can you explain why the two intelligences you feel are completely distinct and never will infringe on the other?
[00:30:05] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a philosopher in the 19th century named Franz Brentano who thought very deeply about the question, what is it that absolutely distinguishes mind from matter? If you had to think of, like, one thing that just captured the whole picture. And he pointed out that there's something called intentionality is what distinguishes mind from matter. And what intentionality is is the quality of aboutness that a thought has.
That for Example, when you think it's always about something, you think about the weather, you think about your family, you think about Washington, D.C.
there's always an object of your thought. Whereas matter, like a lump of dough or a pencil, doesn't have an aboutness to it. So thoughts are always about something, and matter is never about anything. So the question with AI is, is there intentionality or aboutness intrinsic to the system? And the answer is no, because AI is a computational process. And computational processes are simply a input in terms of signals into a system that processes those signals and puts an output of signals, the cis, that, that, that processing is called an algorithm. And none of that has any meaning.
That is your computer. For example, when you're using your. Your computer to type an essay, your computer doesn't care about the meaning of what you're typing. Your computer doesn't say, oh, no, I disagree with you on that.
So computation is all about syntax. It's all about the arrangement of electrons and the organization of things, whereas thought is, is all about semantics, all about what things mean.
And computers can't handle meaning. And in fact, if they, if computers did care about meaning, they'd be much less useful because then you'd have to buy a different computer for every different essay you typed because it would have to have a different meaning. So AI is. AI is just a human artifact. When you're interacting with, with AI, you're really interacting with the programmers who program the AI, and they are human beings. But, but there's, there's no there, there. There's no mind in AI. It's the same as a book. When you, when you read a book, you're reading what the author wrote in the book. The book itself doesn't tell you a story. The author is the one telling the story, using the book as a tool.
It's like my. It's like my, my wristwatch. I use my wristwatch to tell time, but my wristwatch doesn't know what time it is. My wristwatch doesn't know anything because it doesn't have a mind.
[00:32:41] Speaker B: And although we are getting to a point in AI where there's advancements in, you know, natural language processing and the lambs to where it is tricking us. It is, it is, you know, making us think perhaps in some cases that there is a mind behind it, you know, that, that we can turn to it, and obviously you've got the knowledge factor, you know, where it gathers lots of data and can spit it out quickly.
But, but there are people that are turning to it for companionship, for therapy.
What would you say is a good way to guard against, you know, the potential pitfalls that a relational AI can, can provide or, or offer?
[00:33:24] Speaker A: Well, the, the AI is in a sense a test of our gullibility.
To believe that AI is conscious or is like, like a person is just a mistake. It's silly. And if we believe that, then we're being kind of gullible and it's best if we don't take that belief. When you interact with AI, you're interacting with the people who built it. You're interacting with the software engineers and the programmers. And I use AI myself for various tasks and so on. It's just fine. But I realize that I'm not dealing with an intelligent computer computer. I'm dealing with a clever computer program written by some, some very clever and very good programmers. But there's no mind inside the computer or inside the AI of its own.
[00:34:17] Speaker B: I like that. A test of our gullibility. We do need to stay on our toes in this, this new age that we're living in. Well, just wrapping up. As I said, your book argues for the existence of spiritual immortal souls.
And how do you think we, recognizing that we have immaterial minds and immortal souls, how has that impacted you? And how do you think it should impact us if we accept that?
[00:34:43] Speaker A: Well, I think it impacts me in a personal way is that it reaffirms my faith in God.
I am amazed at how accurate a lot of the classical theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas have been regarding modern neuroscience. By far, I think the best way to understand neuroscience is to use the Thomistic dualism model of the mind brain relationship. It works very, very well for modern science and it has been a great help in my own professional work, working with people.
Obviously, if you believe that the soul is immortal and you see people as God's beloved creations, it kind of helps you deal with people. It helps you understand people, and it helps you understand yourself. And it helps me in my scientific research, my scientific research regards blood, blood flow to the brain and the interaction with the heartbeat. And if I, because I recognize that as a design system by, by, by, by a profoundly brilliant designer, it helps me to understand the system better. So it makes our lives a lot better. If we acknowledge the truth that we have spiritual immortal souls and that we are creations of God and that we are loved by God, I'm sure you.
[00:36:03] Speaker B: Would agree that it makes you a better neurosurgeon as well.
[00:36:06] Speaker A: Yes, yes. I say a prayer before every, every operation and I say a prayer afterwards, thanking God for all he's done.
[00:36:14] Speaker B: Yeah, acknowledging those, those parts of us that are not just physical, I think is very important.
Well, Dr. Egnor, thanks so much for taking the time to unpack your new book. I'm excited about it, and I hope our listeners and viewers will get themselves a copy and jump into this. This is a very exciting and intriguing topic, and I'm glad you've written it.
[00:36:35] Speaker A: Thank you, Andrew.
[00:36:37] Speaker B: Well, to learn more about the Immortal Mind and order your copy, just visit the immortalmind.org that's the website, the immortalmind.org and if you haven't enjoyed part one of this discussion, which teases out some key insights of the book, be sure to catch it in a separate episode for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for watching and listening ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
