Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story

• A neuroscientist argues that brain science points to the existence of an immaterial mind or soul, pointing to cases like split-brain patients and hydranencephaly.
• However, mainstream neuroscientists strongly reject his interpretation of the evidence. They say he cherry-picks anomalies and ignores better-supported material explanations. This leads to pseudoscience.
• They also say it may be more productive to be transparent about what questions science can address and what it cannot.

For Michael Egnor, it started in a hospital chapel. The prominent neurosurgeon feared for his months-old son, who wasn’t making eye contact or smiling at people. Leaving the hospital, Egnor entered the chapel and spoke to God: “I am terrified that my son is autistic,” he said.

In the introduction of his book The Immortal Mind, Egnor recalls that he heard a clear voice respond back to him—God’s voice. It was then that he was converted to Catholicism, and the axis of his life shifted interminably. “I’m sorry,” he told God. “I won’t be autistic to You any longer.”

The night at the chapel sparked a decades-long quest for Egnor into the immortal mind. During the day, he would perform complex brain surgeries on his patients, many with unique brain traumas. These experiences sculpted his beliefs about the brain, the mind, and the soul.

For many scientists, it stops there. Not so for Egnor.

The 70-year-old has denounced Darwinian evolution in favor of a belief system called intelligent design, which claims that the complexity and perfection of cells, bacteria, and nature suggests creation by an intelligent force. Further, Egnor believes not only that the folds, ridges, and electrical activity of the human brain point to a creator, but also that science can prove this. Published with Hachette Book Group in 2025, he gives examples of common concepts in brain science and neuroscientific anomalies that suggest the existence of the soul.

I have a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience, so many of those examples I remembered from my undergraduate classes. Egnor opens the book by discussing split-brain patients, who have had a key white matter tract that connects the two hemispheres, called the corpus callosum, cut to stop debilitating seizure activity. This surgery is not performed as frequently now that more advanced methods exist.

Since I operated on Sam, I’ve cared for a number of patients who had split-brain surgery, Egnor writes. Like other neurosurgeons, I found no evidence, either from ordinary clinical examination or events in their lives, that indicates their minds were split, even though their brains were.

This, to Egnor, is hard evidence of what he calls throughout the text “the immaterial mind” or the soul, which is separate from the material brain. While most neuroscientists are materialists, Egnor breaks with the fray and supports the dualist theory of consciousness: “Materialism and atheism … are toxic, soul-crushing ideologies,” Egnor told the C.S. Lewis Institute in a podcast last September. “And they’re junk science, they’re bad science.”

Most neuroscientists these days disagree.

Materialism is the reality scientists collectively agree on in order to start at a common baseline of experimentation.

“If there’s some nonmaterial thing in there, I can’t do experiments on it,” says Bill Newsome, a neuroscientist for 40 years and a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. Materialism asks that scientists accept the laws of physics and reject, say, magic or miracles, as capable of influencing an outcome of an experiment. Therefore, any measurable outcome must also fall within the bounds of science.

Take split-brain research: In his book, Egnor argues that because patients maintain a continual sense of self after having their corpus callosi severed, the mind and the brain are distinct, and the mind must be nonmaterial. Split-brain patients have split perception but unified consciousness, he writes.

Although these patients still recognize themselves as one entity after surgery, they very much do have two minds, other neuroscientists argue. When scientists flash one image to the left eye—which the right hemisphere processes—patients cannot verbalize why they pressed a button of a picture associated with that image, because the right hemisphere has no language capabilities. They will instead justify how the picture relates to the image the other eye saw.

This itself is evidence of split minds, says Newsome. The corpus callosum is also not the only tract that connects the hemispheres; the anterior commissure sends messages across as well.

“That’s a deep misinterpretation of split-brain science,” he says. “People seem to have a lot of inter-hemisphere communication.”

Egnor also raises the work of the early 20th-century neuroscientist Wilder Penfield, who spent years stimulating the brain and recording what patients saw in their mind’s eye, what they smelled or heard. Penfield also studied seizure activity in real time.

Throughout the course of these experiments, Penfield postulated that people often experienced certain emotions or conjured specific memories during seizures but were not overcome with abstract thought. That Penfield could not pinpoint the place where abstract thought exists in the brain, and that calculus is not conjured during seizures is proof, in Egnor’s eyes, of an immaterial mind distinct from the brain.

I asked Newsome about this. “It seems like a stretch,” he says. For one, more recent research has identified a location in the brain for numerosity, and some types of memory are thought to be diffused across the brain and not stored in a specific place—like the hippocampus, which handles episodic and spatial memories. And third, it was highly unlikely that a majority of people in the 1930s knew calculus.

These are just a few examples Egnor uses to explain God in the book. He also talks about near-death experiences, current theories of consciousness, and the concept of hydranencephaly, a rare condition where a patient is missing large parts of their cerebral cortex. That this condition exists disproves all current theories of consciousness, says Egnor in our interview, because they all maintain it originates in the cortex.

There have only been a few documented cases of hydranencephaly in the literature. Steven Novella, a Yale School of Medicine neuroscientist, and Newsome both stressed that plasticity of the brain plays a big role here. Children who lacked certain regions of cortex would adapt to compensate for the tissue’s absence, whereas if an adult lost half their brain capacity (as is the case with a major stroke) it would be devastating. No one without a cortex is conscious, says Novella, and studies of hydranencephaly point out that most die before birth or within a year of life. But The Immortal Mind implies there are thousands of people walking around, completely fine, without cortical tissue.

The real concern, says Newsome and Novella, of a book like The Immortal Mind—and the Discovery Institute in general, where Egnor pens regular articles—is that proof of God is couched within a scientific framework, giving credentials and a veil of credibility to a belief. It’s common for certain movements to use the framework of science to misrepresent an issue—this is frequently seen in vaccine debates.

“It’s damaging to go out there and say, ‘I’m a neurosurgeon, and this is the way science works,’ and cherry-pick these distorted examples that may give people the impression that something is true, that isn’t true,” Novella says. He’s also the co-founder of the New England Skeptical Society and host of the podcast “The Skeptics Guide to the Universe.”

The scientific method demands starting with a hypothesis and gleaning more information through experimentation that does or does not confirm that hypothesis. What Egnor is doing is the opposite.

“It is the universal feature of pseudoscience—they’re starting with the conclusion, and they’re working backwards, rather than following the long-accepted process of science and logic and empiricism from front to back, wherever it leads,” says Novella. “He very much thinks that you can use supernaturalism as part of science. He’s just wrong about that.” Novella called Egnor “a classic ideologue” and a pseudoscientist. The two have been in tension for years, writing responses to each other’s articles as far back as 2007.

Like Egnor, Newsome is a Christian, but unlike him, Newsome believes in evolution. While he agreed with Egnor that both atheists and ardent believers can eschew important nuance and promote inflammatory derision, he pointed to the “antiscientific agenda” of the Discovery Institute.

“They don’t want to take the science seriously,” says Newsome. “They seize upon bits of science, anything that buttresses their particular argument they want to make about intelligent design. They take things and twist them to appear to support their position.”

It may be more productive, he went on, to be transparent about what questions science can address and what it cannot. When it comes to personal morality, the afterlife, or questions about free will, faith can step in to provide a path and alleviate existential fears, he says: Faith should be informed by science but not replaced by science.

“People like the Discovery Institute, and people like Egnor by extension, are way too quick to present tough problems and tough riddles and say, ‘We don’t know the answer to this, therefore it must be God acting,’” Newsome says. “And that’s just a cheap way out.”

This article includes excerpts from The Immortal Mind by Michael Egnor and Denyse O’Leary. (Copyright 2025) Used with permission from Worthy Books, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

downdo