Is the Soul Real? A Neurosurgeon Makes the Case

Is the scientific evidence for the soul overwhelming? Our guest today is a former materialist who rejected belief in the soul, but because of his work and research as a surgeon, he now believes the scientific evidence is compelling. Why did he change his mind? And what is that evidence? Well, you're about to find out. We welcome for the first time Dr. Michael Edgar, author of the new book that I endorsed and found fascinating. It's called The Immortal Mind. Dr. Edgar, thanks for joining us today.

Uh, thank you, Sean. It's a pleasure to be here.

Well, the book starts with this fascinating, jarring story that when I read it, I went to my wife and I was like, you've got to hear this story. It's somewhat of a conversion story before you get into the scientific evidence for the soul. Since you start the book there, let's start this interview with your powerful conversion story.

Sure. Um I was um born uh into a kind of a non-religious family as a child and I fell in love with science at a very early age and um I thought that all the mysteries of life, all the really meaningful things that one could discover could be discovered with science. So I I believed in the Darwinian way of of understanding man and you know physics and chemistry and all those things and um I majored in biochemistry in college and I wanted to be a doctor and I really wanted to be to be a neurosurgeon because I wanted to understand the brain and the mind because I thought that I would understand on a deep level who who we are and what we are if I knew all the science there was to know about the brain. So uh I graduated from medical school. I trained in neurosurgery and graduated from my residency in 1991 and went out in practice uh as a neurosurgeon. And um uh a number of things happened to me as a neurosurgeon and as a as a husband and a father um that changed the way I look at the world.

Uh, and um as a neurosurgeon, I began finding patients who had large parts of their brains missing. Uh a good example was a little girl uh who was born with only about half her brain. Uh and I counseledled her family that this didn't look good. Uh I I couldn't be sure how she would do, but it didn't look encouraging. And as she grew up, I followed her and she was normal at every stage of development. In fact, rather bright. Uh she's now in her mid-20s and a vibrant normal young woman. Has a great job. Uh she's her mother says she's too smart for uh for her own good. Uh and she has half a brain. Um I have a number of other patients with major parts of their brains missing who were really okay or really fine. And that didn't fit any of the neuroanatomy textbooks that I that I read in medical school. There there were there were strange things going going on there.

Uh, the whole thing kind of came to a head when I was uh operating many years ago on a woman who had a brain tumor in her left frontal lobe and we do uh awake brain surgery at times and what awake brain surgery means is that um the patient is given a local anesthetic like novocaane so they don't feel pain um the brain itself has no no sensation of pain so it's just like cutting your hair you don't feel anything and um we can stimulate the surface of the brain and get a map of the critical parts of the brain. So, for example, if I'm removing a tumor, I can find out what parts I have to protect and what parts I can safely remove to get the tumor out. Uh, so it makes the the operation safer. So, she was awake and I was taking out the tumor and taking out much of the left frontal lobe of her brain and we were having a conversation and it was a perfectly normal conversation. This is the same kind of conversation you and I are having here right now as her big part of her brain is coming out and it didn't seem to make any difference uh in her conversation. Fortunately, that was that was the whole point of the surgery was to keep her healthy. Um and I after that operation I I thought my goodness gracious, we don't understand what the brain does there. There there's something deeper here. Uh because none of my textbooks said you could take out most of the left frontal lobe and have a person be perfectly normal.

Um, so um at around the same time I I I had a uh a religious uh uh conversion one one one might say. Um and um it was related intellectually to some of my doubts about Darwinism. I I I began reading um more deeply about the Darwinian explanation for how we became human. And it it struck me as pretty weak science. I didn't I thought it was pretty bad science. I didn't look at it at that point from a religious standpoint. I I just thought of of all the scientific disciplines I knew, this is the one that I think was the least rigorous.

Um, but I um I have four kids and when my uh youngest son was born, uh the first couple months of life, um he wasn't making eye contact and he wasn't smiling and he wasn't behaving as if he um understood my wife and I to be people. we were like objects to him and I became frightened that uh he was autistic. Uh and autism has always terrified me. The idea that you have a a child who you love and and want to connect with and they don't even know you exist. You're you're just like a piece of furniture to them. So I was quite frightened of it. We we took him to uh some neurologists and they said it's too young, you know, he's just a few months old. You really can't be sure. So by the time he was about six months old, he still wasn't making eye contact and wasn't really interacting with us. And um I was seeing a a a consult a patient at a at an outside hospital was a Catholic hospital. And it was I was at a point where I was emotionally really really distraught by this. You know, I was thinking I'm I'm never going to love I'm never going to have my son love me. He's never going to know me. Uh and um so after I saw the consult, it was late at night. I um there was a chapel in a hospital. So I stopped by the chapel and um I went into the chapel and I uh I got down in front of the altar and prayed and I said, "God, I I don't know if you exist. Uh I don't make praying a habit. Uh but if you do exist, could you take this away from me, please? This is something I can't deal with. Uh I can't have my son be autistic and not know me." And I heard a voice. Uh only time in my life I've ever heard a voice. Um, and it was very clear and it wasn't me saying it. And the voice said, "But that's what you're doing to me." So I said, I I kind of collapsed and I said, "Okay, I I I won't do it to you anymore. I won't be autistic to you. Uh, and um, but please make my son not not autistic to me." So, uh, went home and a few days later, uh, was his six-month birthday and he was perfectly normal. He's perfectly fine. He's he's currently a law student and anything but autistic.

Uh, so um so um I that complemented in some sense my discoveries as a surgeon and in neuroscience that there's a lot more demand than than just meat. that that that that we do have souls that there's a spiritual aspect to us. Uh and I so I converted to Christianity, got baptized. Many people in my family also got baptized.

Um, and um since I had spent, you know, several decades of my life as an atheist and and a materialist, I kind of feel like I I have a debt to repay. Uh it's wouldn't call it vengeance, but I uh I want to con I want to convey to people that atheism and and materialism are wrong uh and that God exists and that he's real uh and uh that we really do have souls.

Um, so I began looking more deeply into the neuroscience of the brain and the soul uh to try to explain why I had seen these strange things that people with parts of their brains missing were perfectly normal. um that I can take out part of a woman's frontal lobe as I'm talking to her and it doesn't change it doesn't change her. And I found that there were other neurosurgeons and other scientists who really had seen the same kind of thing that I wasn't the first person to notice this.

Uh, the greatest uh scientist uh in the neurosurgical profession was a guy named Wilder Penfield um who worked back uh in the mid-20th century in Montreal and he pioneered the surgery of epilepsy and one of his most common operations was awake brain surgery the sort of thing that I had done with the woman with the tumor and he did about 1100 patients uh with awake brain surgery so I no one's ever come anywhere anywhere near that those kind of numbers. Awake brain surgery is still done today, but but uh you know if you do a few hundred in your life, it's it's it's a large volume. So Penfield um really was responsible for a lot of the mapping of the brain that we know about today uh because it was he operated on all these over a thousand people and mapped all kinds of areas of their brain and he would map it by stimulating with a little electrical probe the surface of the brain while they were awake.

Um, and uh he would uh ask them what they felt or what they saw or see if they moved. Um, and he he found peculiar things and that really surprised him because he would has started out as a materialist just like I had. He found that when he would stimulate the brain um and he must have stimulated the brain at least a million times in these 1100 patients. Well, if if you count out uh say two stimulations a minute and the operations last about eight hours. I actually did did the math. Yeah. So, it's it's over a million stimulations. Uh he could only stimulate four things from from the brain. He could make the person move. He could stimulate the motor area and they'd raise their arm. He could make them have a perception. Let's see a flash of light or um uh smell something uh or or or hear something. Um he could make them have an emotion. There are parts of the brain if you stimulate it, you can get a powerful emotion. you get fear or joy. Uh there's a part of the brain that that makes you laugh that that that if you stimulate that you you feel like everything's funny.

Um, and uh he could stimulate memories. He could stimulate certain parts of the temporal lobe and you'd have a memory of your mother's face or a memory of a conversation that you'd had years years before. But those were the only things he could stimulate. And what he left out is everything we're doing right now. There's you. He couldn't stimulate ab abstract thought. He couldn't stimulate the ability to contemplate philosophy or or to to think about the meaning of life. He couldn't stimulate mathematics. Nowhere in the brain could he could he stimulate someone to say, "Ah, 1 plus 1 is two." He couldn't stimulate logic uh or or history or music. All all the all the different kind of abstract higher level things we do. And he came to the conclusion because he was a pretty honest man. He said, "Well, well, maybe I can't stimulate abstract thought because it doesn't come from the brain. Maybe the brain is necessary ordinarily for the exercise of abstract thought. If you drink too much alcohol or if you get hit on the head, you may not think as clearly for a while, but that doesn't mean that the thought comes from the brain." So he so he said that that um he he he called abstract thought mind action. He said that it you can't stimulate mind action from from the brain. You can stimulate individual things movement perception emotion and memory but that's it.

And then he looked back at the whole record of seizures epilepsy. Looked back at thousands of cases of epilepsy and he found exactly the same thing. When people have epileptic seizures they do certain things. uh they they can go unconscious but not always. Sometimes they're awake when they have the seizure and they have movements or they have perceptions. Sometimes you have memories, sometimes you have emotions, but there are no calculus seizures. No one's ever no one's ever had a seizure where they couldn't stop doing mathematics. And Penfield said, "Why not? If if mathematics comes from the brain and there have been hundreds of millions of seizures once in a blue moon you'd trigger off 1 plus 1 equals 2 and you couldn't stop. He said it never happens. So the same thing that he found with seizures is what he had found with the awake brain brain surgery that the brain is an organ that only does certain things and the main things it does makes us move. It makes us perceive, makes us remember and gives us emotions. uh but it doesn't serve as the source for abstract thought.

Um, and uh so that that was a a remarkable finding and and it's been pretty much ignored within the neuroscience community. Uh you read textbooks and people talk about it. I've I've I've had debates with neuroscientists where they say, "Oh, that Penfield study, I mean that that was 100 years ago. Uh you know, we we have much much better studies now." And the reality is we don't have much better studies now. These were on,00 people over a million stimulations by a first rate scientist who studied the results and nothing we do now nowadays comes anywhere near that that kind of detail and that kind of rigor.

Um, so Penfield's work I I think is amazing. Uh he wrote a book called mystery of the mind. If uh viewers are interested in that it's available on Amazon uh where he recounts all of his experiences. He also found that free will doesn't come from from the brain. And the way he found that was he would ask the person um during the the operation just raise your arm occasionally just you know by uh by free will. And what I'll do is I'll stimulate occasionally the part of your brain that controls your arm and I'll make it raise. And I want you to tell me when your arm goes up, did you do it or did I do it? And they always knew. there were tens of thousands of stimulations. He could never stimulate free will. He said, "Well, it's because free will doesn't come from the brain. It's it's a it's a spiritual power. It's not a physical power."

So, um, that got me to thinking and it it it it made sense in light of what I was seeing in my own patients. Um, and so I looked deeper into into the neuroscience and I'm happy to talk about that if you'd like.

Yeah, let's go into some of these details. It's amazing that it's kind of this coalescing together of this personal spiritual journey and the neuroscience. It's not one or the other. There's kind of this intersection of the two. Let me take a step back. You said this kind of earlier towards the beginning about the person with, you know, half a brain who functioned normally and was even bright. and you said something referring to kind of neuroanatomy textbooks not preparing you to expect this. What is the worldview that's often in neuroanatomy textbooks? Why as a materialist did you not expect this?

Um, as a backstory to that uh there is a um there was a science of phronology uh of reading the bumps on a person's skull to uh understand their personality and understand their brain. That was developed back mainly in the 19th century a little bit into the early 20th century. And um it was it was people think of it as a pseudocience. It was kind of crazy. you know, you feel the shape of the skull and say this person's an honest man or something. Sure. But phenology wasn't quite as crazy as it seemed. Uh it was wrong, but they didn't have radiology. They didn't have CAT scans or anything. So they couldn't image the brain. Um the skull does slightly in some way conform to the shape of the brain. So that was the only way they could have to evaluate the brain. And what phologists were facing was there was increasing evidence back then that certain areas of the brain controlled movement and perception and emotion and memory. That that was becoming clear even in the 19th century. So they figured everything in the mind was controlled in in the brain somewhere. So they started looking for uh honesty and integrity and uh social deviance and they figured well you know I'll see if I can find that. So it wasn't a completely irrational scientific project.

Um, it failed. Uh it turned out that there is no part of the brain where you have honesty or integrity that doesn't come from the brain like that. But so it was abandoned. But many philosophers of the mind have pointed out that modern neuroscience is kind of like high-tech phronology. that is that neuroscientists are saying well you know the frontal loes are the processing areas for abstract thought uh you know so it's it's kind of another version of phronology in fact we use functional MRI imaging which is a method of MRI imaging where you can see areas of the brain that light up when a person is thinking about certain things and that's a lot like chronology in a sense that you're looking for the spot that lights up to to to tell us about your character or about what you're thinking and things like that. And that's actually pretty weak science. And uh I think of it as high-tech phenology.

So what what I think the textbooks have gotten wrong is that they don't understand the relationship between the soul and the brain. And they don't understand how the brain is wired. There are certain parts of the brain that are high that are hardwired. Uh that it's it's like your computer. If you damage your computer in a particular spot, you can predict what's going to happen. Uh, and that's that's very hardwired for the motor areas, the sensory areas, the speech area, the brain stem. If you if if you damage one one square millimeter of that part of the brain, you can predict with great accuracy what's going to happen. But probably about half the brain, maybe even twothirds, is what are called association areas that are not like that at all. you can remove much of them and be perfectly normal. And the textbooks kind of lose that. They don't realize that there are two kinds of there are two kinds of powers of the mind that people have. There's the abstract thought. Its relation to the brain is quite nebulous. We we don't have a good handle on that. And there's concrete things like moving and p and perceiving and breathing. And those the concrete things are in the brain. we can find them. We know where they are. The abstract stuff really isn't in the brain in the same way. And neuroscience hasn't caught up to that truth.

Okay. So, I want to make sure that I understand and our viewers are tracking with this. You made a distinction between kind of hard areas in the brain, specific areas tied to functioning, and those are damaged. Humans can't perform those functions. And then there's association areas where if there may be damaged other areas the brain you know with the soul we would argue can compensate for that. Is the argument that from a materialist position there should be no association areas and everything should be reducible in principle to certain areas of the brain. Uh because that's all we are is the brain and matter. It's like a computer. You remove that part, it doesn't function. Is that accurate?

Yes, that that's a reasonable way of looking at it. The um the term the one way of of describing these areas is the areas of the brain that have very well- definfined functions are often called eloquent regions and non-eloquent regions are the regions that don't have so much function. People describe the non-eloquent regions as being association areas, but that's because they don't know what they do. So you just say it's association areas. But you can remove them and you still associate just fine. So it's not even clear what they mean by association areas. I mean it's it's supposedly it's where coordination and organization takes place. But in any machine that has coordination and organization going on, if you damage the coordination and organization, you substantially damage the machine. But that's often not the case with the brain. I mean, the the the anterior left frontal lobe is considered an association area. And I removed it in a woman as I was talking to her and she remained exactly the same. So I don't even know what is meant by association area. I think it's kind of a handwaving thing like it's a mystery to us. So we'll we'll call it association area.

That's really helpful. Okay. So let me ask you one more question before we dive into the evidence. There's these split brain experiments you talk about. Totally fascinating. You get into near-death experiences, damaged brains. We're going to get there. But I was asked a question this past week. I was speaking at my alma mater where I did my doctorate, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, talking about the evidence for a soul. And a student asked me this question. He said, "I'm I'm engaging a friend of mine who's a skeptic, doesn't believe in the soul, and he points out how when certain areas of the brain are damaged, the personality changes. Doesn't that show that we are reducible to the brain and there's no soul?" Now, I had an answer that I gave him, but how would you address that kind of objection that I'm sure you've heard before?

Sure. Well, I mean it's it's it's it's obvious that that the certain areas of the brain can be damaged and you do have a change in personality. Uh you find that just by drinking a glass of wine. I mean you know I mean you the brain is a physical organ and emotion which is very much a part of our personality is controlled by the brain. So there there there are emotional centers. So yeah sure you you can change things. Most um the the most famous person uh that people talk about uh who had brain damage and a change is Phineas Gage uh who had a spike driven through uh through his brain and he was a churchgoing kind of conservative guy before it happened and was a little bit a little bit more of libertine afterwards. Still wasn't wasn't such a bad guy. I've actually read his read read a bit about him. He he he wasn't that bad but he kind of lived the high life a little bit after.

Um, but that that's not news. That's that's not surprising. Uh, you know, as I said, you'd have a few drinks of wine and you're going to behave differently. So, there's no question that there's a component of us um that is lodged in our brain uh that controls our emotional tone. It's sort of the emotional background of how we live our life. That doesn't mean that we don't have souls.

Um, and um then it gets into the question of how do you define a soul? Uh, and um, it it's um I'm happy to go into that now. It's it's a little bit of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinus, so it gets a little deep, but um, we tend to think of souls as like ghosty things that kind of inhabit our bodies, like they're the same shape as us, but they step outside of us and they're translucent or something. Uh, and that that's not really the classical way of understanding the soul and at least in many Christian perspectives, not the not the Christian way. Uh, St. Thomas Aquinus uh believed that the soul was essentially everything about you that makes you different from a dead body. So that everything a living body does that a dead body doesn't do is what the soul is. So the fact that I'm talking now is part is part of my soul because if I were dead I wouldn't talk. That I'm breathing it's also part of my soul because if I were dead I wouldn't breathe. So um the soul basically was the thing by virtue of which we are alive. It's what makes us a living thing rather than a dead thing. And that includes uh in plants and plants have souls. Uh their souls make them grow and reproduce and and take nourishment and things like that. They they're they're living things. Animals have souls. Uh they makes my dog uh like food and walk around and bark and do dog things. And human beings have souls. Our souls differ from the souls of any other living thing in that our souls are rational souls. That we're rational. That's the abstract thought part that no other living thing has. And that that kind of soul is a spiritual soul. And therefore, our soul is a spirit. Whereas other living things just have souls that run their bodies. You know, souls that run the plant, souls that run the dog. Our soul isn't that kind of soul. Our soul is a spirit and a spirit has many car characteristics that are quite different. Our spirits have the ability to reason to uh to act freely to do free will. Our our our spiritual souls uh are immortal. Uh you you you can't kill a spirit. You can kill a body. You can even kill a soul in the sense of if the body disintegrates, the soul that gave it life is no longer present because it's disintegrated. But if you have a spiritual soul, spirits can't disintegrate because they don't have parts. They're not made of matter. You can't break them up. Uh God could, if he chose, make them not exist, but they can't die in the way that everything else dies. uh which I think is the most powerful argument for the immortality of the soul uh at least most powerful scientific argument for the immortality of the soul is that our soul is a spiritual soul. We have capacity for uh abstract thought and and and free will. Therefore um we can't disintegrate a soul and we can't die. Our body disintegrates and we will get new bodies.

So, let's jump into some of the evidence on this for the soul. I uh I responded to this young man. I said, you know, if we just are our brains, we'd expect a change of brains to affect our personality. But if we are body and soul and our soul operates through our bodies, we would expect changes of the body to affect the way the soul operates through the body. So, Phineas Gage fits with both explanations. So, alone cannot be used as evidence for one versus the other. That's how I look at it. But you walked through in this book uh that split brain experiments. This blew me away. I was trying to explain it to my wife. I thought this was so interesting. Walk through what happened and why you think it points towards the reality of the immaterial soul.

Yeah, the the split brain research is is is just utterly fascinating. And um uh there are certain kinds of seizures, relatively rare seizures that start out as a tiny seizure on one side of the brain that doesn't bother the patient very much, but that then can travel over the entire brain. And if it travels over the entire brain, you have a generalized seizure. And they can be really nasty seizures. There are people who have 30 or 40 of them a day. uh and they often don't respond well to medication. So, they're constantly having these horrible seizures.

Um, there was research back in the 1940s on animals with that kind of seizure to try to find a way to stop those seizures. And what um the surgeons would do is they decided, well, if they cut the connection between the hemispheres of the brain, then the seizure couldn't spread and maybe the person would be better off. And it seemed to help the animals. So, they tried it on people. So by the by by the 1950s and60s it became a fairly standard operation. I've performed it. Um and what you cut is the corpus colosum which is um a bundle of um I it's like 200,000 nerve axons. I forget the number actually. And it's about the size of the palm the palm of your hand and it's connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. And uh you cut the whole thing from front to back and um uh that stops those kind of seizures. The patients may have small seizures but they live a much much better life.

And um what um I found and what other neurosurgeons who've done that operation have found is that surprisingly these people are normal after the surgery. You'd think that cutting your brain in half would have a quite radical effect on who you who you are. you you might be two people, you know, so it it'd be kind of like if you took a chainsaw to your computer and cut it right down the middle and it still worked just fine. You'd think that there's something odd about your computer. You didn't you didn't expect that. So, um uh if you were to meet a person who'd had a corpus calistomy, which is the name of the operation, you couldn't tell. You're per these are perfectly normal people. And you ask them, "Well, do you feel like you have two selves?" says, "No, no, I'm I'm I'm still me."

So, um there was a neuroscientist named Roger Sperry back in the um middle of the 20th century who realized that even though these people seem completely normal, it's a wonderful experiment in a way to separate the hemispheres. And he did very detailed research to try to find out well is there anything abnormal about them? And what he found was that some of their perceptual abilities were split. That is if you show a picture the the left hemisphere of the brain is usually the hemisphere where we have language from. The right hemisphere can't can't speak. So if you show a picture to the left hemisphere and you can do it by putting it in a certain place of the visual field that only the left hemisphere can can see. The person can say what the what what's in the picture. But if you show the same picture to the right hemisphere, the person can't say it, but they know what it is. They can pick the the object out of a basket. If you show an apple to the right hemisphere, the person will say, "I know what it is, but I can't say it." And then if you give him a basket of fruit, he'll pick out the apple.

So, um, so there all kinds of weird things that Spiri found like that that people aren't even aware of in everyday life. Um, and he won the Nobel Prize for it. It was was it was this classic research thing, 1972, I think, Nobel Prize in medicine. Um, but Sperry himself noticed uh noted that these people sure seem normal. You know I I I can find subtle perceptual stuff. So two researchers since then have carried out very profound studies on these patients. Uh the first was Justine Sergent who was a neuroscientist at McGill back uh 1980s. um took split brain patients and she would put um arrows in their visual fields. So one hemisphere of the brain would see one arrow, the other hemisphere of the brain would see the other arrow and she would ask them a question and the question she would ask is are the arrows pointing in the same direction? And the patients almost always got it right. But think about this. One hemisphere saw one arrow, the other hemisphere saw the other arrow. No part of the brain saw both arrows. So how can a person compare them?

So um that general approach has been fought by a guy named Yier Pinto neuroscientist uh in the Netherlands and Pinto um presents patients with visual stories. you'll have uh like one part of the story is in one hemisphere, the other part of the story is in the other hemisphere, but the story doesn't make any sense unless you can integrate these two. An example, I don't know, I'm not sure if this is one he's done, but this is a kind of this is the kind of thing he's done where one hemisphere will get a picture of a broken window with like a hole in it. The other hemisphere will get a picture of a baseball and you ask, "What happened?" And people with split brain surgery will say, "Oh, well, well, the baseball broke the window." But no part of the person's brain has seen the window and the baseball. So what is it that is doing the comparing? And that's the spirit. That's the spiritual soul. That's the part that's not from the brain. So I think that um surgeon and Pinto's um research on splitbrain patients actually points out the spiritual soul. You can actually in some sense see it see it intuitively. That's the part of the mind that can compare things that no part of the brain has access to both together. So I find that fascinating.

Uh, it's totally fascinating. So what if a skeptic pushed back and said, "Okay, I think you're making a kind of god of the gaps or in this case we might say soul of the gaps argument just because we don't know what physical mechanism helps explain this connection between the hemispheres and the brain. Maybe it's something else in the body. I mean there could be some other unknown natural phenomena that explains this and the penfield experiments. Why do we have to punt towards something spiritual to explain this? This is a soul of the gaps akin to the god of the gaps. Right?

And and that that's exactly the argument they use. I've I've I've debated this with materialists and that's exactly what what they say. Um um Carl Sean um made one of the um the dumbest claims. Uh second was an atheist and a materialist uh when he said that um uh he said that um absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But that's not true. Right? The fact is that if you don't have evidence for something, it's perfectly reasonable to draw the the preliminary conclusion that it doesn't exist. Right? In fact, that there's been a lot of that in science. I mean there there's no evidence for um the uh luminiferous ether in in in outer space. That was a big theory back in the 19th century. There's no evidence for vitalism that that there's a chemical that makes you alive that that chemical is different from anything else. Um there's there's no evidence for a ton of theories and we accept that as evidence that theory isn't true. So um absence of evidence is evidence for absence. It may not be proof, but it's evidence. And um so what I say to neuroscientists who say, "Oh, no. We'll we'll be able to figure this out. You just give us time. Science always progresses." Is have at it. Have at it. Get back to me when you've when you've got the evidence. Until you have the evidence, you have nothing. So yeah, I mean, you you can always say, "Hey, my my theory is correct. Just give me another hundred years and I'll prove it." Okay? you know, have at it, you know, but until then, by far the best scientific explanation for the kind of research that um that that that we're discussing is that the spiritual soul exists. And maybe neuroscientists will pull something out of their pocket. Good luck, but they haven't pulled it out yet. They haven't yet.

Okay. So, let's talk a little bit more about the section in your book on terminal lucidity. Now, I've done some programs on this on deathbed experiences uh with Dr. Steve Miller. We've covered this, but I thought it was fascinating that it came up in your book as a piece of evidence for the soul. So, talk about what you mean about that, why you think that points towards the soul.

Well, terminal lucidity uh or I I have I have I have a a friend Steven Post who's a a neuroethicist who's written a a lot about this. So we talk a lot about it. He's fascinated by it and he he he actually likes calling it uh par paradoxical lucidity because it's not always terminal. Uh some it's often terminal. A person has the late stages of Alzheimer's um a day or two before they pass away they can have an interval of time sometimes a couple hours where they're their old self again and then they pass away. But it doesn't have to be like that. That is that there are people who have these episodes of lucidity.

Um, and the lucidity can be rather striking that you can have a person who's really not even verbal who after years of being like that suddenly begins having conversations. There's usually an emotional component to it, meaning usually it's with a loved one, a family member, and they'll start rem reminiscing about their childhood and so on, and then it goes away. And um, from a materialist standpoint, that's awful hard to put together. I mean, you have an Alzheimer's ravaged brain. Um, there's no reason that you would expect to just have that intermittently go away. Um, it's again, it's as if your computer is massively damaged. Um, and it it really hardly works at all. And then all of a sudden, it's perfect. I said, "This is pretty odd. This is not the way I would expect my computer to work."

So um what terminal lucidity points to it's not proof uh in science you don't really get proof you get inference to best explanation what terminal lucidity points to is that there's an aspect to us that isn't locked into the damaged brain so much it it can come out um and why it comes out how it comes out that's grist for the mill that's something else to understand but terminal acidity is certainly not something that a materialist understands understanding of the brain would predict.

Interesting. Okay. Talk a little bit about the section in your book on what are described as vegetative states, sometimes permanent vegetative states and how Yeah, go for it.

That there was a landmark paper published I think it was 2006 in the New England Journal of Medicine called uh detecting awareness in the vegetative state. And it was a paper published by a guy named Adrien Owen who was a neuroscientist at Cambridge University in England. Uh now he's I think working in Indiana. He came to the US and um he um studied a woman who um was diagnosed as being in persistent vegetative state. Uh this is the same state for example that Terry Shiabo uh was in. You may recall the terabo case. Uh but uh she had had an automobile accident had massive brain damage.

Um, and um several years later it's still not woken up out of coma and um by examination by her doctors in Cambridge she had no mind that is that there was she was just a shell. She was a a body but had no mental processes. Her brain was shrunken down to a half or a third of its normal size. Most of it was destroyed. Um, and there was just nothing there. She had she was reflexes. uh she had sleepwake cycles uh but showed no evidence of understanding anything about what was going on around her or of having any thoughts at all. So, uh, Owen, um, put her in an MRI machine and did functional MRI imaging. And functional MRI imaging shows brain areas lighting up if you're thinking about things. And he put her in the machine, he put headsets on her, and he asked her to think about things. Think about playing tennis, think about walking across the room, etc. And um, areas of what was left of her brain lit up, which was kind of odd. He didn't expect that.

Uh, so he took normal volunteers, took 15 normal volunteers, put headphones on them, stuck them in the MRI machine, and asked them the same questions, and they had the same patterns of brain activation as this woman in persistent vegetative state had, which on a superficial level would lead you to think, well, that means that she's thinking like they're thinking. So what he then did, because he's a really good scientist, he said, well, I'm not sure this is about thinking. Maybe just the noise, the sound coming into the the ear is what's making the brain light up. Maybe understanding isn't a part of it. So he took the normal people, put them back in the MRI machine, and he asked them the same question, but he scrambled the words so they they didn't mean anything anymore and the brains didn't light up. He puts her back in the machine, scrambles the words, and her brain didn't light up. Wow. her brain only responded when what you asked her to do made sense. Brilliant.

What what he's been able to do since then, and this has been repeated by a number of other researchers, is you can communicate with some people in the deepest level of coma. Uh they will tell you about their families. Um, they can do arithmetic. Um, you can ask them um what is 6 plus 8? And you count. And when you reach 14, the brain lights up.

Um, so about 40% the latest numbers are of people in the deepest level of coma um are able to communicate that way. Uh, and um, so that of course doesn't prove the existence of the soul. And of all the arguments I make uh, that we recount in the book, this is the one that gets the most push back from the materialist neuroscientists. They say, "Oh, no. I mean, it's it's still the brain lighting up. You know, it's not the soul. the brain lights up. But what this suggests is that there's a disconnect that your brain can be ravaged, can be almost destroyed, and you're still able to do some things. You're still able to to think on a pretty high level. Keep in mind that this is a person who can't move, can't talk, is probably blind, um has no ability to interact with the world otherwise except that they can think about what you say to them. And this phenomenon is very well known for example to nurses who work in ICUs. People who are in deep coma you still have to be careful about what you say around them. It's very it's common knowledge among I ICU nurses that in the room of the comeomaos patient you have to pretend that they're awake because if you say something upsetting like yeah this guy isn't going to make it. The heart rate goes up the blood pressure goes up. keep people respond to what you say.

So, I I always tell families that um when you're in the room with a loved one who's in a coma, assume they're awake. Assume they can hear you. Don't say things in their in their presence um that uh that uh you know that would upset them.

So, um, there's a disconnect between the mind and the brain and that disconnect I think is more evidence for the soul.

One of my favorite sections of your book. I thought the split brain was just absolutely fascinating. But the section on free will because that's something I've had debates with with skeptics at times about morality. You can't tell somebody they should or shouldn't do something if you don't have the capacity for choice to do it or refrain from doing it. We also have this deep-seated belief that we make choices and that we're not just acted upon externally. So any adequate worldview to me has to account for free will or at least the belief in free will. Now you argue that like physics and your study of through neurosurgery and neuroscience points towards the existence of free will and the soul. Explain that for us if you will.

Well free free will is is real and is obviously real. Um there there is no intelligent debate about it. Uh there is a raging debate uh in our society now, but it's not an intelligent one. Uh it's it's just nonsense to to to deny free will. The the one of the best ways to empirically show that free will is real is um to um go over to uh the desk of a free will denier and pour your coffee on his laptop. And he will of course blame you for doing it. He say, "What are you doing to my laptop?" and you'll say, "Hey, I have no free will. I had no more choice as to whether I poured my coffee on your on the laptop than the coffee cup had." So, if you're going to yell at something, yell at the coffee cup.

Um, I've debated the the free will question with Jerry Coin, uh, who's a blogger who blogs a lot. And I pointed out he he had a very funny post where somebody dented his his his fender in a parking lot and then drove off. So, he had this post where he was complaining about this jerk that dented his fender in a parking lot and drove off. And I pointed out and said, "But Jerry, if free will isn't real, the person who drove off is no more responsible for that than the car

He was driving is responsible for that. If we're all just meat machines, you can't blame anybody for anything. I mean, it's no one's fault. You're just a meat machine." So, even free will deniers believe in free will. I mean, pour your pour your coffee on their on their laptop and you find out if they believe in free will because if if if if you don't have free will, you say, "Hey, I had no choice. You know, I had to pour the coffee. It's my chemicals doing it. You can't blame me."

So, um the first bit of evidence that free will is real is that everyone believes in free will. Even free will deniers live their lives as if they believe in free will. There's no person outside of an insane asylum who doesn't believe in free will.

Uh the second reason for believing in free will is um that free will deniers invariably invoke uh determinism. They say that free will isn't real because everything in our brain is already determined and we there's no room for free will in in physics. Um determinism in physics has for the most part been proven false. it was proven false um by um a guy named John Stewart Bell uh a physicist in on Ireland back in the in the 1960s who proposed a way of testing whether a physical state of the universe at one moment is completely determined in the way it transitions into the next moment. That is is it all baked in the cake or is there room for randomness or choice in in this? And the experiments have been carried out uh by uh several physicists. One of them is named Elaine Aspect. Uh and he um did the experiments. The the experiments themselves are rather complex but very clearly showed that determinism is false. That is that if you look at the state of things in your room right now and you say the way the room will be say 10 seconds from now, is it baked into the physical arrangement of things now? And the answer is no. There's always there there is room for free will. There's room for randomness. And that's been physically shown. So the the the the predicate for the denial of free will that that that that materialists use that determinism is the way physics is is simply wrong. There's room for free will.

Uh the third argument against free will which I find compelling is that um if you don't have free will then you are a complete slave of your chemicals and what's happening inside your brain and in other words you're just a chemistry set and we don't pay attention to the opinions of chemistry sets. So if if if you deny free will you say I don't have the freedom to choose whether I believe in free will or not. It's all in my chemicals and I don't pay attention to meat robots. I mean, if a meat robot wants to say something to me, I'll say, "Hey, it's just a meat robot." I don't pay attention to that.

Um, it's it it's a it's as if you spill ink on the floor accidentally and it looks like it it looks like it um uh um spells out it's it's it's going to snow tomorrow. Do you really believe it's going to snow tomorrow just because the spilled ink said it? No. It's just spilled ink. It's just a coincidence. However, if somebody who you trust, a weatherman, says it's going to snow tomorrow, you believe him. The difference between the weatherman and this and the um and the spilled ink, because the weatherman has free will and can choose right and wrong and choose opinions. So, what people who deny free will are saying is I'm just a meat robot and my answer is why would I listen to what you say?

Um so the the the fourth reason to believe in free will is that the neuroscience really supports it. Um Wilder Penfield found that he could not stimulate the will anywhere. He couldn't find it anywhere in the brain. So he assumed it was free. And uh there's a guy named Benjamin Lieut um who did a lot of very interesting work in the mid- 20th century. He found that there are brain signals, electrical signals that happen before we make decisions that superficially look as though our decisions are driven by those signals and we didn't really have any choice. But Liebert showed that you can veto those signals and the veto isn't from the brain. So he called that free won't. uh and um and and and and he pointed out that the idea of free won't very nicely fits the traditional Christian understanding of of temptation and sin. That is that we are tempted by things that we don't have control over. Our our brain is telling us to do stuff all the time that we are better off not doing. But we still retain the libertarian ability to consent or not consent and that's the free will.

So the argument about free will in my view is not even really an argument. Uh the evidence is overwhelming that uh that uh free will is real and in fact we all believe free will is real even free will deniers because they live their lives as if free will is real. So of course it's real.

The point you made towards the end about Penfield I find just compelling in the sense that when he would prick the brains in a certain place the patient's hand would move but then they could distinguish between oh you did that and I'm holding with my hand back the hand moving I did that. So there's this recognition of internal causation and external causation from the outside in. So precisely it seems and people always always know the difference and we naturally recognize that. So you'd have to explain somehow we've been wired through this blind evolutionary materialist process to be able to make this distinction for some survival advantage. Like I don't even know why we would need the belief that we have free will in the first place let alone the belief of making a distinction between internal and external causation. That's to me where it becomes just implausible.

Well, the the the the spiritual qualities of the soul that we've talked about which are intellect and free will. There's the capac the capacity for reason and the capacity to choose freely couldn't have evolved anyway uh because they're not physical. Evolution to the extent that it's a that it's a real thing. And I think o overall the Darwinian way of looking at um evolutionary changes is is just junk science. I think it's terrible science. But even if that were true, you couldn't evolve free will and you couldn't evolve the capacity for reason because free will and reason are not physical things. And if evolution is true, it can only affect physical things because physical things are genes and and natural selection, all that stuff. So um this spiritual soul of of of man is created. It's not evolved. It it can't be evolved. Our some parts of our body may may have evolved. That's that's open to debate, but not the spiritual soul. It can evolve.

You're really getting to the root of what a materialistic process could in principle explain. So if ink fell on the ground and said, you know, like take out the trash or it's going to rain, we know it's not going to say that anyways. It's mathematically improbable. But in principle, if it did, we wouldn't ascribe any authority to it. It's just an accident. It doesn't mean anything. But the origin of consciousness, the origin of free will, the origin of information in DNA, these are not physical things. There's an immaterial essence here. And how are they explained by a physical process? I had a debate with with Michael Shurmer for a couple hours maybe six months ago. And his explanation, not the only one, is just kind of an epiphenomenon. It just appears at a certain level of complexity. And to me, I just think that's the ultimate nonexlanation. It's a fancy word to not explain a phenomenon uh at all.

Now, let let me ask you this question. You use this word in in the book, and I'm an academic. So, I was told in my interview at Biola early on, they're like, "You're an apologist." And sometimes apologists can, you know, overstate stuff. Uh, in academics, we need to really nuance things and say it very sober. And I'm like, "Okay, I I understand." Yet, in your book, you talk about the overwhelming scientific evidence for the soul. Now, I know you use that word intentionally. tell me why and just kind of sum up if you were going to say to somebody why do you think the science is overwhelming towards the reality of this all?

Sure. Uh well the the the reason it's overwhelming um is because when you look at the at the the really seinal experiments done in cognitive neuroscience over the past century. um many of them point very directly to the existence of of the soul and none of them uh provide any evidence to think that the soul does doesn't exist. I mean, you can certainly study the brain um from the standpoint of of of ordinary activity of the brain, action potentials, neurotransmitters, and that's perfectly good science, but that doesn't disprove the soul by any means, but there's tons of evidence. A very a very good example was Wild Wilder Penfield's experiments stimulating the surface of the brain. I actually recently had a debate about this with a with a neuroscientist and um Penfield did again over a million individual stimulations of the surface of the brain in 1100 patients and not a single time stimulated any kind of abstract thought at all. I you have to admit that abstract thought probably doesn't come from the brain. You science doesn't get much better than that. you have a million trials of an experiment and a a a a glaringly clear answer.

Um the um the the split brain surgery work which is utterly fascinating. The idea that a person can compare images that are presented separately to the brain hemispheres which are disconnected and the capacity to compare the images cannot have come from the brain itself because there's no part of the brain that sees both images. uh the idea that a person in the deepest level of coma whose brain has been functionally destroyed can do mathematics and can talk to you about their family and even talk about philosophy using functional MRI imaging. All of these things obviously point to the existence of a set of powers of the mind that are unlin to a substantial degree from the physical brain and that's the spiritual soul. And frankly, if you want somebody who describes the spiritual soul in a way that is neuroscientifically the most accurate, I'd go back to St. Thomas Aquinus. You know, the the the psychology of St. Thomas Aquinas very very closely fits what we're learning in neuroscience.

Dr. Michael Edgar, your book is so fascinating. I give it my highest recommendation for a book of its kind. It's sophisticated, but it's very readable. I'm not a scientist and I was able to track with some of the nuances about the brain. Uh to me when people ask me for evidence for the soul, I'm going to point towards the substance of consciousness. Brandon Rick, JP Morland, I think the most sophisticated philosophical case right alongside your new book, The Immortal Mind, as more of what you might call a scientific case for the soul. Of course, those certainly overlap. Really appreciate your work. uh in due time we will definitely have you back to probe into some more of the depth of these. But I want to encourage folks to pick up the immortal mind. It comes out in June. So if you're watching this before you can pre-order it. Uh you're going to enjoy it. It's fascinating. Believer or not. To me, this is the kind of evidence worth wrestling with because quite a lot is at stake.

Before you click away, make sure you hit subscribe. This is a topic we're going to come back to. The soul, the afterlife, near-death experiences. is you have a whole chapter in your book on near-death experiences. We didn't even discuss that. Uh so there's much more in the book, but make sure you hit subscribe because these are topics we are coming back to. In fact, I'm going to do a show soon on big lies about Satan. I've wanted to do that show for a while. That one is coming up. Uh so don't miss it. Make sure you hit subscribe if you thought about studying apologetics at Biola. We have some of the leading philosophers of mind in the world and experts in intelligent design. We have a distance program and would love to have you be a part of it. See information below. Uh Dr. Agner, this has really been a joy. Thanks for writing a great book and thanks for coming on. Thank you, John. It's been a real privilege. Thank you.