As an atheistic medical doctor Michael Egnor believed the material world was all there is. He basically agreed with William Provine, a Cornell University biologist, a Distinguished University Professor, who said, in 1994: “Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear—and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.” Such was the godless world Egnor embraced.
He became a neurosurgeon wanting “to solve the mysteries of the brain and the mind—where our perceptions and thoughts come from, how consciousness comes from this landscape of gyri and sulci, how the mind emerges from this elegant three-pound organ” (p. 3). But as he aged there were occasional “eerie feelings” or “hauntings” that troubled him, most often when he was alone and contemplative, perhaps lying awake in the night or seeing a sunset. “They were disturbing and enticing at the same time.” In those moments he wondered: “Why was I here? Why does anything exist? What is life all about?” (p. 5). Such questions became more intense when his second son was born and showed troubling signs of autism. “One night, it all came to a head. I was called to see a patient at a Catholic hospital in another town. As I was leaving the hospital, I passed the chapel. I thought, ‘I don’t believe in God, but I’ll do anything now. I just want my son to know me.’ I went into the chapel and knelt before the altar. ‘God,’ I said, ‘I don’t know if you exist, but I need help. I am terrified that my son is autistic. It’s agony to have a child who will never know or love me.’ Then I heard a voice—it was the only time in my life I’d ever heard a voice in my head that was not mine—and the voice said, But that’s what you’re doing to Me’” (p. 5).
He left “the chapel a shaken man, and a different man.” The next day he contacted a priest and asked to be baptized. He realized that what had haunted him “all my life was the quest for truth. And when I found that Truth, it changed me” (p. 8). Soon thereafter he found his son acting quite normally, showing none of the worrisome autistic signs that had so distressed him. “I knew I had experienced a miracle. It seemed as if, just as I had stopped ignoring the Lord, He had also allowed my son to see me” (p. 8). He realized that there are “thin places” that allow us to discern God if only we learn to look through them. He shares the results of his spiritual journey in The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul (New York: Worthy Publishing, c. 2025; Kindle Edition), co-written with Denyse O’Leary. Unfortunately, as a scientist he “had been trained to believe that the soul is a myth and the mind is nothing more than the brain—that is, a physical machine.” But as he pursued the truth he “discovered that these supposed findings of science were myths. The real findings point in another direction.” Having done 7,000 brain surgeries and taught in medical school, he has seriously weighed the evidence and “come to see that the human soul is real and that human beings are not mere machines made of meat.” He now knows, through personal experience and careful study of philosophical materials, “that we human beings are spiritual, and not merely physical, creatures, created by God and destined for eternal life” (pp. 10-11).
Egnor begins his book by showing that surgeons seeking to stop epileptic siezures can split the brain into two hemispheres while the mind remains unified. A century ago a famous neurosurgeon, Wilder Penfield, discarded his philosophical materialism after dealing with the reality of human consciousness revealed in his epileptic patients undergoing surgery that split their brains in half. He found that “the brain was merely transmitting the instructions provided by the mind, which was a separate entity from the brain” (p. 28). Thus the mind is something other than the brain and deftly uses it. Penfield was especially struck by man’s ability to reason, to think abstractly. His conclusions were reinforced by Roger Sperry’s experiments in the 1960s, showing that: “A person with a split brain was still—in every way that mattered—one person with one mind.” (p. 21). As the decades have passed, the conclusions of Penfield and Sperry have been confirmed: “Split-brain patients have split perception but unified consciousness” (p. 23).
Neurosurgeons such as Egnor must often remove parts of the brain to save a person’s life. Treating strokes and tumors they cut out sizable sections of the cerebellum or other parts of the brain. If the mind is nothing more than the brain it would seem to follow that the one’s mental faculties would be seriously impaired in such operations. But they’re not. Nor do they necessarily end when a person slips into a coma. In fact, Egnor routinely tells “families of comatose patients to assume that their loved ones can hear everything said around them, and to keep the conversation upbeat and hopeful. It really makes a difference” (p. 58). So too, many persons suffering dementia (leading materialists to assume parts of the brain are diseased or dead) dramatically become quite lucid, often just before death. “Terminal/paradoxical lucidity is a direct challenge to materialist theory” (p. 74).
Equally challenging to materialists are credible Near Death Experiences such as the one recounted by Pam Reynolds. To treat a life-threatening brain condition she sought out the world’s leading aneurysm neurosurgeon, Dr. Robert Spetzler, whose “strategy was literally to create brain death due to a low body temperature and no blood circulation. That would give him a thirty-minute window to get rid of the aneurysm while her brain was like an object, unable to react” (p. 85). “Her EEG was silent, her brain stem responses were absent, and no blood flowed through her brain—in fact, all the blood was drained out of her brain. Yet her NDE entailed detailed knowledge of events in the operating room during clinical brain death, details that were confirmed afterward” (p. 91). Though she was, clinically speaking, brain dead, she felt herself leaving her body, watching the doctor as he worked, and she “was the most aware that I think that I have ever been in my entire life.” Then she slipped into another realm of reality, seeing people who “fit perfectly into my understanding of what that person looked like at their best during their lives” (p. 88).
Thus, to Egnor, the “immortality of the soul is a reasonable belief.” As is belief in the reality of God, who has given us our soul! He thinks “the mind can function independently of the brain forever because it belongs to a class of entities that are immortal by their very nature” (p. 124). Indeed, he says: “This is at the heart of the mystery I discovered in surgery and in learning and contemplation about the mind and brain—we are hybrids, composites of spirit and matter, with souls that bridge the spiritual world and the material world. We are mineral (in our bones), vegetable (in our growth and nourishment), animal (in our movement and sensations), and spiritual (in our reason and free will). We humans embody all elements of creation” (p. 190). But ultimately: “The fact that we have souls, that our souls are spiritual and made in God’s image and are destined for immortal life, is the most important thing about us. Nothing matters more” (p. 219).
The Immortal Mind is an engaging, readable, persuasive treatise, worth pondering and recommending.
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In 2004 Richard Sternberg was the managing editor of a journal published by the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. He approved and published an article by Stephen Meyer that dealt with the Cambrian explosion and mentioned (in one sentence) the possibility of intelligent design—“the first peer-reviewed article in a technical biology journal to do so.” Soon thereafter the defenders of Darwinian dogma (including the head of the National Human Genome Research Institute, Francis Collins) attacked Sternberg for allowing Meyer’s article to appear. He ultimately lost his position at the Smithsonian and forfeited significant research opportunities. But David Klinghoffer, a writer for The National Review, began following the controversy and has recently published Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome (Seattle. Discovery Institute Press, 2025; Kindle Edition).
The book’s title is important, for in The Last Battle (the final volume of The Chronicles of Narnia) C.S. Lewis declared: “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?” And what Plato said, in his Timeaus, was that there is a god who orders the cosmos in accord with mathematics and works demonstrating “intelligent choice and design.” There is an eternal realm providing the “forms” that shape all of creation. Though Aristotle disagreed with his teacher in many ways he remained, Sternberg believes, a Platonist inasmuch as he “rejected any role for chance in shaping life,” for to him “‘chance acting over extended periods of time could never do anything creative. It will primarily corrupt artifacts and break them apart’” (p. 110). Consequently, he identifies himself, philosophically, as a “Platonic-Aristotelian.”
Though a biologist by training, Sternberg seriously studied philosophy and contributed an essay, “Logos and Materialism: Why Aristotle Favors Intelligent Design and not Physicalist Thomism,” to Ann Gauger’s God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design, He began by citing Aristotle, who in his Metaphysics noted that the pre-Socratics were generally monistic materialists who tried to understand the physical world on a purely physical basis but found themselves needing to anchor their beliefs in “principles” transcending it. Aristotle thought it “was not likely” that these principles could be found in a purely physical realm. “So when someone said there is intelligence in nature just as in animals and that this is the thing responsible for the order and arrangement of everything, he seemed like a sane man in contrast to the random statements of his predecessors.”
Though Aristotle is often portrayed as a materialist, Sternberg thinks he “condones and indeed makes inferences to agency and design” that are “incompatible with a mechanistic naturalism and all that it entails. For as he puts it in his case against Democritus, Empedocles, and others, it is ‘[not] right to entrust the fact that things are in a beautiful state to spontaneity and chance’” (p. 325). Though he certainly departed from Plato in some ways, Aristotle maintained many Platonic views—especially inasmuch as he took an anti-materialistic position. This was affirmed in Simplicius of Cilicia’s commentary on Aristotle’s Physics: “Thus the truly marvelous Aristotle brought his teaching about physical principles to the point of the theology of the supernatural and showed that the entire physical or bodily order was dependent on the nonbodily and boundless intellectual goodness above nature, in this also following Plato.” To Sternberg: “Aristotle clearly believed that the form of an animal was immaterial and transcended the animal’s physical substance. In addition, forms are the products of a supreme mind and not the result of matter’s self-organizing capacities.”
Though he went through the conventional scientific training and was an atheist in his early years, Sternberg is a curious person who read widely, had serious conversations with philosophers, and became aware of enlarging loopholes in conventional Neo-Darwinian biology. So he’s not a conventional thinker and questions established dogmas, taking seriously new hypotheses that may better explain the data. Thus he often doubts that purely physical genomes shape and fully explain cells. He wonders, for example, how a one-celled human conceptus, considered only as a material entity, could possibly contain all the information necessary to build an extraordinarily complex human being. In fact he has concluded “that the genome is immaterial in nature” (p. 45). And he’s not alone in taking this position, for “biologist Michael Levin, with dual appointments at Tufts and Harvard and not an ID advocate, published a paper arguing, in his own words, ‘for a Pythagorean or radical Platonist view in which some of the causal input into mind and life originates outside the physical world’” (p. 45).
Sternberg openly acknowledges ancient thinkers such as Plotinus as philosophical guides for his position. He also thinks Aristotle rightly understood important aspects of embryology, opposing “the idea of pangenesis, of inheritance by particles.” There are certainly tiny bits of matter involved, but: “‘What takes those particles and builds them up into an embryo? The analogy is to letters, composing syllables, composing words and phrases and sentences. What’s generating that language? Is ink composing it? No, there has to be a source of agency.’ There is an end goal, a disembodied telos, that Sternberg says ‘attracts’ the embryo’s development. ‘It’s almost the inverse of the modern conception” and yet one that he thinks is correct.” (p. 51). He has aligned himself with “a tradition has persisted from ancient to modern times which, while using different terms, has seen in the genome not a material entity alone but an immaterial one as well: abstract, mathematical, not restricted to space-time” (p. 70).
Still more: as we study genomes we find “computational issues” that challenge mechanistic explanations of it. There’s a “surreal reality” to the cell that seems more like dancers than machines. This dance needs a choreographer who “not only selects which of 21 million proteins to make but also directs the process by which they are made and employed?” (p. 92). The mathematical aspects of this are “hyper-astronomical” and “pose an overwhelming challenge to any strictly materialist account of the genome’s operation” (p. 93). There’s no possibility that something as complex as the single-celled embryo (much less the universe) could result from “chance and necessity.” More than “matter in motion” is involved.
Plato’s Revenge is worthwhile both for its explication of Sternberg’s thought and exposing the ostracism he’s endured for challenging the evolutionary establishment. Klinghoffer writes clearly and enables those of us with limited scientific expertise to grasp a bit of what’s going on in the highest realms of biological research. As Jay Richards says: “Darwinian materialism fails to explain the biological information in DNA sequences. But that truth merely scratches the surface when it comes to explaining biological form. To understand organisms in all their complexity, argues Richard Sternberg, we must break completely with nineteenth-century materialism and reconsider the thought of ancient greats such as Plato and Aristotle. Sternberg’s argument might seem daunting to the non-specialist, but David Klinghoffer does a masterful job of explaining Sternberg’s revolutionary thought in a delightfully accessible way.”
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David Bentley Hart is a prolific (24 books, 1,000+ articles), often controversial philosopher/theologian espousing an Eastern Orthodox perspective. He generally writes for a scholarly audience, and I don’t commend his latest treatise to general readers since his language is often rather dense and difficult to fathom unless one is familiar with professorial lingo. Nevertheless his All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, c. 2024; Kindle Edition) provides a tantalizing discussion of current theories dealing with the philosophy of mind. He does this in imaginary dialogues—colloquys—between ancient Greco-Roman gods (Psyche; Eros; Hermes; and Hephaestus) wherein they discuss and debate the origin and nature of human consciousness—the mind, one of the most important philosophical questions. This is a vital issue, for “the advent and eventual triumph” of mechanistic materialism” or “methodological naturalism” during the Enlightenment has deeply shaped modernity. Hart sees “the modern mechanistic view of things as a kind of psychological disorder—a psychosis perhaps, or a neurosis at the very least” (p. 110).
Before the Enlightenment, influential thinkers such as Plato thought there was a mental aspect to Reality, something “transcendent or immanent or both” sustaining the world. Hart wants to revive that ancient view, validating it in the face of myriad materialistic assumptions and declarations. “Mind in itself must be that simpler, more basic, unifying ground, and matter must be an expression of mind—infinite mind, in fact” (p. 65). “My position,” he says “is definitely a kind of ‘idealism,’ but of a far more ancient and classical sort than” set forth by George Berkeley. Hart’s views seem compatible with some kinds of “panpsychism’ and “vitalism,” for he thinks that “mind and life are both irreducible” and are in fact manifestations of the same underlying reality. Furthermore: he would include language “as yet another aspect of one and the same irreducible phenomenon, ultimately inexplicable in mechanistic terms. It is also my conviction that a truly scrupulous phenomenology of mental agency discloses an absolute engagement of the mind in an infinite act of knowing that is nothing less than the source and end of all three of these realities, and indeed of all things; or, to say this more simply, all acts of the mind are participations in the mind of God” (pp. 17-18). “Or, then again, I might also say that what I hope to demonstrate is that ‘in the beginning was the Logos’” (p. 18).
The first dialogue shows Psyche musing about the existence and essence of a rose. This “admittedly humble episode” enables her to declare “that mental acts are irreducible to material causes; that consciousness, intentionality, and mental unity aren’t physical phenomena or emergent products of material forces, but instead belong to a reality more basic than the physical order; that the mechanical view of nature that has prevailed in Western culture for roughly four centuries is incoherent and inadequate to all the available empirical evidence; that in fact the foundation of all reality is spiritual rather than material, and that the material order, to the degree that it exists at all (on which we may reserve judgment), originates in the spiritual; that all rational activity, from the merest recognition of an object of perception, thought, or will to the most involved process of ratiocination, is possible only because of the mind’s constant, transcendental preoccupation with an infinite horizon of intelligibility that, for want of a better word, we should call God; and that the existence of all things is possible only as the result of an infinite act of intelligence that, once again, we should call God” (pp. 28-29).
Human consciousness cannot be observed by an outsider. It’s “an awareness of being aware: an illumination from within, a mysterious reflexivity or doubleness, not merely registering impressions from without, but experiencing itself as experiencing” (p. 126). It can only be described by persons aware of it. It’s a “first person” phenomenon, known only to an individual thinking about himself, “wholly inaccessible to any scrutiny from outside” (p. 35). It’s the only world we truly know, for it resides within us. It’s subjectively experienced, innately known. To materialists the mind is nothing more than the brain, which “is entirely determined by mindless impulses and momentums rather than by rationales or purposes” (p. 46). But that doesn’t fit we’ll with what we intuitively know. For example, our bodies, with their “capacities for growth, regeneration, reproduction, homeostasis, and responsiveness to mental intentions” must certainly be more than a “mere machine” (p. 51). Virtually none of the ancient thinkers “could have conceived of the body or the cosmos as a machine; they saw matter as being always already informed by indwelling rational causes, and thus open to—and in fact directed toward and filled with—mind” (p. 65).
They fully understood that it is “very difficult to say how mind can inhabit a world whose deepest reality is that of a mindless machine; but there are countless ways of coherently imagining how a world whose deepest reality is that of an integral phenomenal and rational structure should inhabit mind. Maybe, then, we’ll find reasons to conclude that it’s only by inhabiting mind that the world exists at all” (p. 99).
Interestingly enough, Hart thinks the ancient philosophers would easily embrace some of the recent findings of quantum physics! (And there is a certain kinship between the “prime matter” of Aristotle and the quantum realm!) The materialistic god in the dialogues, Hephaestus, recognizes that Psyche (and Hart) are ultimately trying to “get us to the mind of God,” who gives rational structure to the cosmos—
“the Old One’s great thought.” To which Psyche (and Hart) declare: ‘Well, in a word, yes.’” (p. 104). Yes to the Logos who’s made it all.