I recommend reading the remainder of this book. i will point out that a minor difference will become apparent for those who may have read my books and previous blog posts. dr. egnor appears to conflate spirit and soul in mankind, both being immaterial and immortal. i distinguish between the two entities but agree that both are immaterial and immortal. dr. egnor and denyse o’leary, his coauthor, have written a book with a powerful, everlasting message. they have confirmed, as i have posited in my writings with compelling evidence, that dualist interactionism correctly describes the reality of bidirectional interaction between the immaterial mind of man, including the mind of god, and the material components of the brain, its synaptic networks. that god created man with this interactive reality reflects god’s intent to have a personal relationship with us.

i conclude this series of blog posts based on selected comments from dr. egnor’s book with the following excerpt:

“we cannot enter eternity justified by our own lives - i have not lived a single day that would make me proud before god. the immortality of my soul and the eternal consequences of my life mean that i need to be forgiven. i need to place my trust in someone who bore my sins, and i need to accept his grace. scripture, self-reflection, and science all point to this reality about us. we are embodied spirits [with souls] who need god’s love and forgiveness, now and in eternity.”

in chapter eight dr. egnor discusses the concept of free will that accrued from dr. wilder penfield’s vast surgical experience. I include excerpts:

“for over eleven hundred patients, penfield never once encountered a situation where he stimulated a patient’s brain and the patient believed that the mental and physical activity he stimulated had been freely willed by the patient himself. that is, penfield was never able to find a ‘will’ center in the brain that, when stimulated, evoked a patient’s sense of will. penfield inferred that this meant that the will does not come from the brain, but is a power of the immaterial mind, and by its immateriality, the will is free [and functions through probabilities. . . . free will is real and not wholly determined by brain activity. the will seems to have a separate existence, independent of the brain. that convinced penfield that free will is real.

“the will and the intellect are immaterial powers of the spiritual human soul. the will is not determined by matter [and cannot be reduced to the physical functions of the brain’s synaptic networks]. in fact, it cannot be determined by matter, because it is spiritual, not material. the will can move matter as a final cause, a purpose, just as the intellect moves matter as a formal cause, an idea. the natural goal of the human intellect is the pursuit of truth, and the natural goal of the human will is the pursuit of the good.

“we have the free capacity - the spiritual capacity - to choose good or evil. . . . we are free to make choices in our lives.”

dr. egnor expands on his comments about the human soul in chapter seven, and i include several:

“in the material world, energy is neither created nor destroyed. but it is often transformed from one state to another. in fact, nothing in this universe simply dissipates; it is always transformed. the immaterial world is similar. an immaterial reality like the human soul may be transformed into a different reality, but it cannot be simply annihilated. . . . apart from physical [interactive] behavior [with the neural synaptic networks of the brain] the soul does not actually have a location. . . . we have seen from neuroscience that the immaterial aspect of the human soul is a unity. it has no parts, so it cannot be split or multiplied. . . . but the soul is not composed, therefore not decomposable. it could die only by being annihilated as a whole. but this would be contrary to a basic law of the universe: that nothing simply and absolutely vanishes, just as nothing simply pops into existence with no cause. . . . the fact that abstract thought has no physical place and cannot be split is consistent with the human soul having some immaterial powers. . . . the mind appears to have an immaterial source, and again, we have no reason to think that such a source is mortal by nature.”

dr. egnor has identified above a cause for entities within the universe. we know from scripture that there is a first cause, the creator, god. that the mind of humans has an immaterial source, ultimately that source is god, who is eternal.

at the end of chapter six, dr. egnor makes the following comments concerning Nde’s:

“from a research perspective, we could say that the retrospective evidence for nde’s is massive. . . . it’s also significant that religious beliefs and previous knowledge do not necessarily predispose a person to a near-death experience. . . . there isn’t even a remotely plausible physical explanation for this phenomenon. . . . verified nde’s confirm that there is an immaterial aspect to the human person - call it mind or soul - that survives the death of the brain. . . . as bruce greyson has said, ‘far from leading us away from science and into superstition, nde research actually shows that by applying the methods of science to the nonphysical aspects of our world, we can describe reality much more accurately than if we limit our science to nothing but physical matter and energy. . . . near-death experiences catch the mind, the human soul, in the act of surviving the death of the brain. . . . we must demonstrate that the soul belongs to a class of things that are, by their very nature, immortal. there are, we will show, some pretty good reasons to think that the soul, unlike the body, not only does not die, but cannot die.”

in chapter five dr. egnor shares considerable detail about near-death experiences (nde), and i recommend this chapter to you. (i have also posted a number of earlier blogs dealing with this issue.) dr. egnor describes the experience of a patient named pam reynolds who had a dangerous, life threatening aneurism at the top of her basilar artery against her brainstem. during the surgical procedure to treat the aneurism she was converted into a brain dead state with no blood flow to her brain, all blood within the brain drained out, her body temperature cooled to 25 degrees fahrenheit, the heart stopped, and her brain waves ceased. by multiple criteria she was dead. during this state she had a successful removal of the aneurism and was carefully resuscitated to full life. the description of the experience she had while clinically dead is an interesting read on pages 84-93, and mirrors the Nde’s of so many others across the world.

“. . . pam reynold’s ‘brain death’ was deliberately planned and carried out under meticulously documented circumstances. it entailed knowledge, verified later, that she could only have had if her soul - the immortal part of her mind - functioned while her brain was dead. it is clear evidence that the mind can function quite independently of the brain.”

an important take-away from this description is that there is increasing evidence that physical death does not include death of the human spirit and soul. it is of vital importance that we address this eventuality, even reality, in our lives on earth with the acceptance that we physically die to live . . . eternally . . . and by god’s grace, in the presence of his son, jesus christ, whose holy spirit seeks to indwell us in a personal interactive communion both in the present life and that to come.

in chapter three dr. egnor shares that “the mind is not simply the physical activities of the brain, that it also has an independent existence. this is often called the dualist view.” (see my PRECEDING blog)

“IF THE MIND IS PARTLY THE PRODUCT OF THE MATERIAL FUNCTION OF THE BRAIN AND PARTLY THE PRODUCT OF SOMETHING THAT IS BEYOND NATURE, THEN:

1. THERE WILL BE SOME MENTAL PHENOMENA WITHOUT THE BRAIN FUNCTION.

2. AS BRAIN FUNCTION IS ALTERED, THE MIND WILL NOT NECESSARILY BE ALTERED.

3. IF THE BRAIN IS DAMAGED, THEN MENTAL FUNCTION WILL NOT NECESSARILY BE DAMAGED.

4. BRAIN DEVELOPMENT WILL NOT NECESSARILY CORRELATE WITH MENTAL DEVELOPMENT.

5. WE WILL NOT ALWAYS BE ABLE TO CORRELATE BRAIN ACTIVITY WITH MENTAL ACTIVITY - NO MATTER HOW WE CHOOSE TO LOOK AT IT. . . .

   THE MIND GENERALLY DEPENDS ON THE FUNCTION OF THE BRAIN. BUT IT CAN ALSO, AT TIMES, FUNCTION INDEPENDENTLY.”

as you read my blog posts you may be wondering “so what?” i am providing increasing compelling evidence for the nature of the human mind that makes it receptive to the mind of god/the holy spirit who is also immaterial and immortal. the human mind was created in the image of the mind of god. it cannot be reduced to the physical/material functions of the brain and its synaptic networks though it interacts with it, a process referred to as dualist interactionism.

i begin this blog with a quotation from mortimer adler.

Mortimer Adler, in his philosophical work, notably Intellect: Mind Over Matter, addresses the relationship between the brain and thinking:

Brain as a necessary but insufficient condition

Adler argues that the brain is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for conceptual thought. In other words, while the brain plays a vital role, the human intellect, which enables us to engage in conceptual thinking, is considered something beyond mere brain activity. 

a helpful paraphrase i adopted from Kenneth samples, scholar at reasons to believe (reasons.org), is, “we need our brains to think, but we do not think with our brains.”

in chapter two of dr. egnor’s book he states that “. . . one thing we can say for sure is that the popular image of the brain as a ‘meat computer’ is wrong. it is not like a machine at all. through all this, the human mind remains not only a unity but also an agency - it can do things - even while working around very severe natural brain deficiencies.”

dr. egnor cites the neurosurgeon dr. wilder penfield in the first chapter of his book. dr. penfield’s primary research and work concerned the treatment of epilepsy in awake patients. this he could do since the brain has no pain receptors. patients needed only local anesthesia for the scalp and coverings surrounding it. during the operation he would stimulate foci in the brain to find the region from which seizures arose which would be removed, sparing vital regions that controlled neurophysiological functions.

“penfield observed that the mind has an existence independent of the brain, and that the mind uses the brain to interact with the world, in a way analogous to the way a computer programmer uses a computer to accomplish tasks. . . . penfield was amazed that there were some thoughts he could evoke just by stimulating the patient’s brain (for instance, a memory), and there were other thoughts that he could not evoke by stimulating the patient’s brain (such as the patient’s capacity for reason and reflection). . . . there was a key exception to what penfield could stimulate in the brain. he was never able to stimulate abstract thought - that is, the sense of self, the capacity to reason, and the exercise of free will. . . . neither epilepsy nor neurosurgeons, it seems, could evoke abstract intellectual thought by stimulating the brain. . . . he concluded that abstract thought is a function of something other than or beyond the physical brain. he came to define the mind as the element in an individual ‘that feels, perceives, thinks, wills, and especially reasons.’”

in his book, the mystery of the mind, dr. penfield stated “what a thrill it is, then, to discover that the scientist, too, can legitimately believe in the existence of the spirit. . . . the mind must be viewed as a basic element in itself . . . that is to say, it has a continuing existence. this seems to mean that the mind or human soul does not die with the body.”

dr. egnor states that “the immortal aspect of the human soul - that is, the mind that penfield observed while he was cutting into the brain - is unity. it has no parts, so it cannot be split or multiplied. . . . because the soul is not composed of separate parts, it cannot decompose, as a dead body does. like the abstractions it can uniquely comprehend, it is not mortal.”

Dr. egnor begins his book discussing split brain function. the two hemispheres of the brain are connected by a medial structure, the corpus callosum consisting of a “massive bundle of millions of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. . . . epileptic seizures, which are random uncontrolled electrical discharges in the brain, can jump from one side of the brain to the other through the fiber bundle, causing catastrophic convulsions each day. . . . seizures can often be treated successfully with medications, but sometimes that’s not enough. radical surgery is a last resort,” the cutting of the corpus callosum in half, separating the two hemispheres entirely. but dr. egnor goes on to state that “the corpus callosum doesn’t seem to have an irreplaceable neurological function in the brain. . . . even when the brain is split in half, many important aspects of the mind remain unified. thus, the mind is something that the brain isn’t. . . . what is most remarkable about the split-brain evidence is the unity of the mind despite splitting of the brain. . . . split-brain patients have split perception but unified consciousness. . . . it splits what we perceive with our eyes but not what we understand and reason about.”

i encourage those who are interested in delving deeper into this topic to obtain and read this book and selected references. what has been emphasized so far is that there is evidence that the mind is not the brain. dr. egnor cites the neurosurgeon, dr. wilder penfield, in his initial chapter, and this topic will be the focus of my next blog.