Dr. Michael Egnor spent decades trusting science to answer life’s deepest questions. As a neurosurgeon and professor, he believed the brain held the key to understanding everything — including who we are. But over time, he encountered things science couldn’t explain: children thriving with missing brain structures, moral truths that couldn’t be reduced to biology, and a growing sense that materialism had serious gaps.
Dr. Egnor shares how philosophical honesty, scientific curiosity, and a surprising moment of divine encounter opened him to a new possibility that God not only exists, but that the Christian story offers the best explanation for the human mind, moral law, and the universe itself.
Guest Bio:
Michael R. Egnor, MD, is a Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook, has served as the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery. He received his medical education at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and is an award-winning brain surgeon. His new book, The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul, explores the scientific and philosophical evidence for the soul, arguing that the human mind possesses faculties such as consciousness, free will, rational thought, and self-awareness that cannot be reduced to physical brain activity alone.
Resources Mentioned:
Check out our Sponsor: America’s Christian Credit Union (ACCU): https://americaschristiancu.com/jana/
- Blog: https://www.discovery.org/p/egnor/
- Book: The Immortal Mind: A neurosurgeon’s case for the existence of the soul (2025)
- “Mystery of the Mind” by Wilder Penfield
- “Witness” by Whittaker Chambers
- Works by Ed Feser on Thomistic philosophy
- St. Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways
- Augustine’s argument from universal concepts
- The Principle of Sufficient Reason (Leibniz)
- Immanuel Kant’s argument from moral law
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Episode Transcript
Michael Egnor
00:00 – 00:36
So I kind of promised him in this process that I would tell other people my story and I would help other people escape materialism and atheism, which are toxic, soul crushing ideologies. And they’re junk science, they’re bad science. They’ve degraded our science, they’ve degraded our culture. And we need the Lord. We need Christ, and He is the way, the truth and the life. And that’s not only a theological perspective, I think it’s a scientific perspective.
Jana Harmon
00:43 – 04:19
Hi, I’m Jana Harmon from the eX-skeptic podcast. Do you have intellectual doubts about God and Christianity? This kind of skepticism can come after years of belief or, or prevent you from ever believing at all. We’ve talked with over 120 former skeptics and atheists who’ve shared similar doubts. That’s why we’ve created playlists on our YouTube channel organized by themes like Is it rational to believe in God? Can you believe in science and God? There you can hear from many others who’ve wrestled with similar questions. Find us on YouTube at eX-skeptic and explore these places, playlists and others. Subscribe and share it because someone else might need to know that they’re not the only ones with questions. In a world where money often feels disconnected from meaning, it’s refreshing to find a place where your savings can actually reflect your faith and values. That’s why I want to share an opportunity with America’s Christian Credit Union. Right now, new members can lock in the nation’s top 12 month certificate rate, 4.75% APY on deposits up to $1 million. And you can get started with as little as $1,000. It’s called a term share certificate and it’s a safe and secure way to grow your savings. But here’s what makes it so much more than a financial product. Your money doesn’t just sit in an account. It helps fund Christian schools, strengthen churches, support adoptions and uplift pregnancy centers. Real lives, real families, real faith in action. All while your savings grows. This isn’t just banking. It’s stewardship, it’s impact. But it’s only available for a limited time, so don’t wait. Visit AmericasChristianCU.com/Jana to lock in your rate. Today. America’s Christian Credit Union is federally insured by the NCUA. Have you ever started to question the worldview you’ve always assumed was true? Maybe you were taught that science explains everything, that we’re nothing more than biological machines. But what if that story doesn’t make full sense of your experience of your observation, What if there’s something more, something deeper, something that explains reality, life, and even your own mind? Welcome to eX-skeptic, where we explore unlikely stories of belief – true accounts of former atheists and skeptics who came to embrace Christian faith. I’m your host, Jana Harmon, and today’s guest is Dr. Michael Egnor, a distinguished neurosurgeon who once fully embraced atheism and scientific materialism until his work with the human brain and a prior personal, powerful encounter led him to reconsider everything. In today’s conversation, you’ll hear how his view of the human mind was upended by neurosurgery itself and how his search for truth led him beyond the limits of biology and reason into a profound personal relationship with a loving God. His journey is captured in his compelling book, The Immortal Mind, where he makes the case for the soul and why consciousness points beyond the brain to something eternal. If you’re curious, questioning, or searching for something more, this episode is for you. Let’s get started. Welcome to eX-skeptic, Mike, it’s so great to have you with me today.
Michael Egnor
04:19 – 04:21
Thank you, Jana. It’s wonderful to be here.
Jana Harmon
04:21 – 04:36
Lovely. Let’s get started by having you introduce yourself. Mike, you have quite a resume. I’d love for everyone to know a bit about who you are, the kind of work you’ve done, the education you have, even the book that you’ve just released.
Michael Egnor
04:36 – 09:14
Sure. Well, I can start from the beginning. Well, first, just a quick summary. I am a neurosurgeon. I’ve been practicing neurosurgery for about 40 years and I work in Stony Brook, New York and Long island, and I’m a professor in the department of neurosurgery here, and I am the director of the Residency Training program here. So I train the young neurosurgeons. And my specialty within neurosurgery is pediatric neurosurgery. So I’ve been doing that for many years. And I started out my life as an atheist. And I was raised in upstate New York and my family was rather poor. My father was retired from the Air Force, but had a lot of post traumatic stress issues from World War II. And my mother was partially disabled. She had some brain damage from a ruptured brain aneurysm that happened when I was 2 years old. So we lived in a trailer park and we were on welfare for part of my childhood but it was a relatively happy childhood otherwise. I actually didn’t really think I was poor because I could just go outside and play with my friends and everything. I didn’t really think much about that. I had a younger sister and my family wasn’t particularly religious. My father never went to church. I think he believed in God, but I’m not really sure. I never talked to him about it. My mother would go to church once or twice a year and bring my sister and I along. And we weren’t baptized as far as I know. And so I was raised in a really secular environment. We were not hostile to religion, and I was never an angry atheist or anything like that. But as I grew up, I thought of the story of Jesus and the Bible and so on as a lovely story, but just a myth. It was just what people told themselves to feel better. And I fell in love with science as, as a young child. I was fascinated by the natural world, by astronomy. I was an astronomy fanatic. I was fascinated by biology and physics and my dream was to be a scientist, to understand that. You know, that was kind of my religion as a kid. And so after high school, I went into the army for three years to get the GI Bill so I could afford to go to college. And went to college. Undergraduate, I went to Columbia College in Manhattan, majored in biochemistry. I wanted to pursue my scientific dreams. I was also very, very interested in medicine. And when I was 12 years old, they did the first human heart transplant in South Africa. I remember watching it on TV and just being fascinated by it, thinking, that was so cool. So at that point, kind of wanted to be a heart surgeon, but I also was fascinated by brain surgery. So I wasn’t sure which I wanted to do. And so out of college, I got into medical school, also at Columbia in New York City. So I went to medical school there. And I fell in love with neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, about the way the brain worked. And I was intrigued by the idea that I could really understand myself and understand other people and what it meant to be human if I understood the brain well enough. To me, the brain was this tremendous mystery that if you unwound this mystery, we would understand everything there is to know about us. So it was the sort of the philosopher’s stone for understanding ourselves. So I decided to go into neurosurgery. I did a year of general surgery, internship at Mount Sinai in New York, and then trained in neurosurgery at the University of Miami at Jackson Memorial Hospital. And the training, Miami training was six years. I met my wife when I was in medical school. She was a nursing student. And we married just before we went down to Miami and we ended up having four kids and then that becomes part of the story.
Jana Harmon
09:14 – 09:34
So as you were moving through your scientific training and education, did you fully embrace the naturalistic, materialistic worldview that undergirded it? Did you understand what that meant, all the things? Did you even consider the God of your childhood, what little experience you had?
Michael Egnor
09:34 – 13:07
Yeah, I almost fully embraced it. Not quite. Two things struck me. One was that I was always dubious about Darwin’s theory of evolution. I remember even in high school, which I loved all my science classes and we’d learn about things, but when we came to evolution and to Darwinian science, I recall thinking that this is not the same as other kinds of science. That is, this is almost like I’m being indoctrinated. These were like stories I was hearing. It didn’t have the same kind of rigor, that as we would study physics, we would study chemistry, we would study molecular biology, we’d study all these, what one might call a hard science about how the world really works. And then we’d hear all these stories about natural selection and the sort of purposeless world of Darwinian evolution. And I recall thinking it just wasn’t particularly solid science. I always thought it was a little sketchy. When I was in college, one of my biology professors was an expert on bird evolution and he, in some of his lectures would just kind of stray off into talks about how creationists were crazy and they were anti-science. And there was almost like an indoctrination going on which I didn’t encounter in any other branch of science. So I didn’t have a particularly high view of Darwin, even when I was an atheist. The other thing that really struck me and this really gnawed at me and was one of the reasons, I think, why I didn’t go into pure basic science, why I went into medicine, was that as a biochemistry major we learned about all these biochemical pathways, something called the Krebs cycle, which helps you make energy and so on. And they’re very intricate pathways with molecules and enzymes interacting in very, very precise ways. But I couldn’t see how did this just happen by chance? I mean, how did you just get all these molecules in like a soup and they’re all swirling around and suddenly you get the brain and the heart and the lungs and all the biochemistry. It was like there was something missing in the explanation. It didn’t hang together for me, and I didn’t yet question it on a religious basis, but I was uncomfortable with it. I said, I really can’t, I don’t want to do this kind of science for a living, where I’m just studying and naming enzymes, but I don’t have any good explanation how the whole thing fits together in a rational way. And as time went on, I became a little more open to the idea of God. I still was dubious, but what really struck me then was that I felt that science could explain everything about life, about the universe, that God was superfluous to this. That is, one could have a perfectly adequate explanation for where the universe came from, for why the laws of physics exist, all that stuff, and particularly for how we could exist and how biology worked without invoking God. Because science, science nailed it all, you know, and the one part of science that I thought was the weakest was the Darwinian ideas.
Jana Harmon
13:07 – 13:28
Did any of those bigger questions in life were those brewing underneath the surface at all? I know you had some issues with Darwinism, but did any of those kind of more personal, more human issues, did they bump up against your kind of semi materialistic or naturalistic view of reality?
Michael Egnor
13:29 – 16:39
Yes, they did. And what would happen to me, particularly once I had a family. When my first son was born, I recall seeing him come out of the birth canal and thinking that my wife and I were given a gift. This was not something like my friends would say, ‘oh, you two made such a beautiful baby.’ And I would correct them. I said, no, we didn’t make the baby. You know, that the baby came through us. But I don’t know where he came from. I mean, this was something from outside of my world that was given to us as a gift. And so that kind of struck me. And it actually, I had read an autobiography of Whitaker Chambers called Witness. Whitaker Chambers was a journalist and quite a bit involved in politics in the mid 20th century, who started out as an atheist, as a communist, actually, and went on to be a Christian. And he had a moment when he was essentially transformed. And it was a very simple thing. He was feeding his young daughter, and she was a toddler, and she was in a high chair. And he started looking at her ear and he noticed how beautifully her ear was made. It was such a beautiful little structure. And he got thinking, somebody made this. This is so beautiful, and my child is so beautiful and life is so beautiful. This came from somewhere. Atheism is wrong about this. This is a gift. This is not just randomness and natural selection. And that led him to become a Christian. And I got thoughts like that. Could you really explain everything about the human body, everything about human life just based on natural selection and random heritable variation, stuff like that? And I just began to feel that that just wasn’t enough. The other thing that would happen to me, and it became increasingly intense, is that I would have sudden thoughts that I was missing the real big story in life, that is that we would go about our daily activities, do our jobs, be with our family, relax, do all kinds of things. But I didn’t know why I was here. Like, I don’t know where I came from or where I was going. I mean, life is a rather remarkable thing when you think about it. You know, we don’t really know where we came from in any experiential way. You know, just suddenly we find ourselves here. And what I thought of was like, you wake up one morning and you find yourself in this mansion with all sorts of beautiful things around you, and you have no idea how you got there or who made the mansion or where it came from. So you start going about your daily activities in the mansion. You make yourself some breakfast, you watch a little table tv. But you would be a fool not to ask, how did I get here in the first place? Like, what is this? What’s. What’s this all about?
Jana Harmon
16:39 – 17:15
Obviously, as a neurosurgeon, you were performing some pretty intricate procedures and you were making some observation about the brain and the mind and language and reasoning. Were there some things that you were seeing in the operating room that were causing you also to ask some bigger questions about whether or not science was fully explanatory or at least a reductionistic view was sufficient to explain what you were observing in the OR?
Michael Egnor
17:15 – 22:19
Yes. And this, in some sense, all these, these lines of thought were going on at the same time. When I was a medical student, as I mentioned, I was in love with neuroscience and really felt that I could understand what it is to be human by understanding the brain in detail. When I got out into practice and began doing surgery and saw a lot of things happen with people in the operating room before and after, I saw things that really didn’t fit the textbooks at all. The textbooks generally described the brain as if it were a computer. There’s all these interconnections between neurons. It’s extraordinarily complex. Virtually all the modern theories of how consciousness happens depends upon this notion of processing inside the brain. And I began to see patients of mine who had brains that were extremely deficient. The major parts of the brain’s missing, who were perfectly okay. They’re perfectly fine. One of the most dramatic ones, and I think there’s a picture of this child’s MRI in the book, is a baby who was born missing about two thirds of her brain. And I followed her through her childhood, and as she grew up, she’s now in her 20s, and at every stage of her life, she was perfectly normal. I had counseled her patients, her parents, rather early on that I, you know, couldn’t be too optimistic. I mean, she probably would have some very severe handicaps, and she never had any handicaps. She’s just a bright young woman, excelled in school. And her mother jokes with me that she’s too, that she’s actually too smart. I had another kid who was born with a condition called hydroencephaly, which I think is a very important condition for understanding how consciousness works. Hydroencephaly is a terrible birth defect where a child is born without brain hemispheres. So the only thing they have is their brain stem. And so probably 80 or 90% of their brain is missing. And this little boy, and it’s rare, but it does happen. There are thousands of people in the world with hydroencephaly. This little boy was quite handicapped. He had very severe cerebral palsy, but is perfectly conscious. He’d smile, he’d laugh. He was happy to see his family. He didn’t like to have medical procedures done. I mean, he was a perfectly conscious person with all the brain hemisphere is completely missing. And everything in my textbooks when I was a medical student said that consciousness is from, like, computational processing in the cortex or the hemispheres of the brain. He didn’t have a cortex or hemispheres, and he was quite conscious. So all of this really got me to thinking, so what does the brain do? Like, how does that work? And I began reading some of the work of a famous neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield, who’s one of the pioneers in neurosurgery. And he was a great scientist and great neurosurgeon, worked at Montreal back in the mid 20th century. And he began, as I did, as an atheist and as a materialist. And he started out with a question in his scientific career, which kind of became my question. And the question was, does the brain explain the mind completely? That is, can you understand what the mind is all about just by knowing what the brain is all about. And initially he thought the answer would be yes. So he spent his life studying the brain. He was a great neuroscientist, and he did a number of different things. He studied epilepsy in great detail, and we can talk about what he found there. He also did 1100 awake craniotomies. And what awake craniotomies are, and they’re still done today, is there are times when the surgeon has to explore the brain in terms of stimulating it to find out what parts of the brain are doing what things in order to protect them during the surgery. And Penfield did 1100 of these operations and made some amazing discoveries about what the brain actually does and what the brain doesn’t do. So at the end of his career, he reflected on this question. Does the brain explain the mind completely? In a book that he wrote that’s still available on Amazon, it’s called Mystery of the Mind, It’s a great book. And he said that, no, the brain doesn’t explain the mind completely. There are aspects of the mind that don’t come from the brain. The brain is in some sense necessary for their normal expression. But not all of the mind is from the brain. So I began to see things very, very differently and began kind of a systematic study of the mind, brain relationship. I looked at a lot of the great experiments in neuroscience over the past century and came to understand the mind and the soul in a very different way than I had when I was an atheist and when I was a materialist.
Jana Harmon
22:21 – 23:24
So when you were an atheist and materialist, before you embrace the possibility of a transcendent mind outside of this material universe, how were you curious of that question of why do things seem not to be adding up in terms of the story that I’ve been given, this naturalistic story that I’ve been given, it is not making sense. Was there a cognitive dissonance there? Was there attention there that caused you to think? Well, before you started doing all of your really, your amazing investigative work, was there something there that made you question, like, okay, this things aren’t adding up according to the textbooks like you mentioned they would. Did you feel that sense of openness towards, okay, there’s got to be a better or more full explanation from what I’m seeing here.
Michael Egnor
23:26 – 25:33
My feeling, quite candidly, was one of betrayal that I came to see that scientists could be very biased people, to be very blind people. It could even in some ways be kind of dumb, meaning that what I came to see in science is that many scientists are experts in a very narrow field and their perspective on things outside of that field is often very, very inadequate. For just as a simple example, the cerebellum, which is a back part of the brain that’s involved in many functions, including coordination. When you read the neuroscience textbooks, and there are entire massive textbooks written on the anatomy and physiology of the cerebellum, it’s all this intricate computer like thing that controls movements and so on. In neurosurgery, we can remove easily 80 or 90% of the cerebellum completely without any effect on the person whatsoever. There are people born with practically no cerebellar tissue who are perfectly normal people. And there are parts of the cerebellum that are very important that you can’t damage. That’s very, that’s critical. But most of it, you can remove. And we do it routinely. So I came to see that the scientists writing all these big textbooks, number one, they, they didn’t know what they were talking about. They, they were so lost in their, in their specialty that they didn’t have the perspectives. And for, for example, most, most neuroscientists have never seen a living human brain. They’ve never seen brain surgery. They’ve never seen a person before and after they’ve had brain surgery. Most of them don’t know anything about philosophy of mind, about all the philosophical questions that are raised that are very important about how the mind relates to the brain. So I came away from this with the idea that scientists really are often not that smart, that there’s a lot of truth that goes far, far beyond what goes on in a materialistic science.
Jana Harmon
25:34 – 26:39
So that was awakening your, or piquing your curiosity for something more, perhaps a better explanation. So when, by the time that you and your wife started having children and you were considering this is something qualitatively different than, you know, complex neurons firing, you know, giving me the emotion of love for my child, you know, that there is, or even seeing just the, or being awed at the wonder of creation, whether it’s an ear or just, you know, this amazing little baby that’s in your hand that was also, I guess, spurring you on towards thinking there may be something more. So it seemed like that there’s a, there were a few things in your life that were causing you to sit back and wonder whether or not what you had believed was true or whether indeed you were being betrayed by what you had been taught by authorities. And by the presumed position in science at the time.
Michael Egnor
26:40 – 27:45
Yes, yes. And, and I think the, the one takeaway that I got from that experience and I also got very much involved in debates, in public debates about Darwinian evolution, because once I came to see that scientists had gotten the mind brain relationship all wrong, I began to question other aspects of science. And obviously a very vulnerable aspect of science is Darwinian evolution, which I think is a bunch of nonsense. And I came to see that scientists were incredibly biased people. Very often, obviously there are some who are not. But the scientific profession as a whole is kind of a guild. It protects itself and it has a powerful materialistic bias which really degrades the science and leads people astray. And I felt very much like I had been led astray. And so I became quite a critic of materialistic neuroscience and materialistic and atheistic Darwinism.
Jana Harmon
27:45 – 28:02
Why, why do you suppose that there is such a strong bias? And I believe in your book you call it a methodological bias or an ideological bias or materialistic bias, whatever you want to call it. What do you think informs that?
Michael Egnor
28:03 – 30:44
Well, the first point about that, to kind of put it in perspective, is that historically there has been no relationship whatsoever between atheism and science. That is that all the great scientists are literally all, I mean, that I know of. And there’s been quite a bit of literature on this. All the great scientists of the Scientific Enlightenment were passionately religious people. Most were passionately devout Christians. Christianity played an enormous role in the development of science. Copernicus, Newton, I mean, Newton wrote more about the Book of Daniel that he wrote about mathematics and physics. He was a passionate Christian, a little unorthodox in his own way, but he was passionately Christian. If you look at the work of James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, who pioneered the understanding of electromagnetism, they were passionately Christian. These are people, their faith was the center of their life. Theoretical science, understanding the Big Bang cosmology, physics, chemistry, that’s almost entirely from the Christian West. So Christianity is the foundation of science. And atheism, particularly in the 20th century, and it rose somewhat in the 19th century, but particularly in the 20th century, has moved into the scientific world and taken over parts of it. So atheism, I see atheism as kind of, as kind of a foreign influence on science. And atheists have basically moved into the scientific profession and tried to get rid of Christians in the scientific profession, even though modern science is essentially a product of Christian theology and Christian philosophy. After all, why would you look for order and structure and purpose in the world if you didn’t believe that it came from a rational mind, from God’s mind? If you think the world, if you think that everything happened for no reason, why would you look for reasons? Why would you look at the natural that way? And the fact is that people who come from atheist cultures tend to look at the world that way, that there aren’t reasons, things just happen. And it was Christianity that made us say this came from a mind. And I want to explore how God’s mind was instrumental in creating this world.
Jana Harmon
30:44 – 31:26
It’s a bit ironic for me because the goal of science is to find answers and to be reasonable and to make sense of reality. And in your life it looks like you were looking to make sense of reality. You were looking to make sense of what was going on with the mind that seemed different than the brain or at least reduced to merely brain activity. You seem to want to make sense of what was happening as you were having children, you know, in this very human response. Walk us on from there in terms of how you continue to be open or it started to open you towards again other possible explanations for what you were seeing.
Michael Egnor
31:26 – 35:41
Well, I realized as I looked further into the neuroscience, into Wilder Penfield’s work, into research on epilepsy and on awake brain surgery and my own experiences with that research on split brain surgery, research on near death experiences, there are all sorts of fascinating science there. I realized that the materialist bias in the scientific community was leading us astray. It was really betraying real science. And I also realized that you can’t get away from philosophy, that is that every endeavor in life science is one good example, presupposes a philosophical framework, a way of understanding how the world works. And that scientists who claimed, oh no, we’re just doing science, we’re not doing philosophy, it’s not true, what you’re doing is materialism and atheism hidden in your science. So I really started to look at the philosophy in a much deeper way. And I read quite a bit of Aristotle, Plato, and I became very interested in Thomistic philosophy from St. Thomas Aquinas. And there’s an author named Ed Faser who’s a philosopher in California who’s written a great deal on this F E S E R S last name, who gives a wonderful introduction to this way of looking at things. And I realized that particularly Thomistic philosophy, which is the cornerstone of a lot of Christian theology, and philosophy explains science in a beautiful way. He explains neuroscience. He worked in the 13th century, and his perspective on the mind brain relationship is much, much closer to what we’ve discovered in modern neuroscience than any materialistic perspective. So I realized that you had to get the philosophy into this. You had to get your philosophy right. If you don’t have the philosophical or metaphysical framework right, you can’t get the science right. When I was a college student, I worked in a research lab, and my mentor there was a professor named Bob Pollock, who was a wonderful man, actually went on to be dean of the college. And Pollock was a molecular biologist. And he used to talk to me a lot about his philosophy of science. And one point he made, which I thought was absolutely fascinating, is he said, in science, by far, the most important part of science is to ask the right question. He said scientists tend to focus too much on the answers. But the problem is if you haven’t formulated the question right, you don’t know what the answer means. So if you ask, if you ask the question in a shallow kind of superficial way, the answers don’t mean anything to you. So he said, so be very careful of your questions. You know, spend most of your time thinking about what am I really asking here. And there’s a philosopher named Roger Scruton who made a comment about neuroscience that I think gets to the real heart of the problem in neuroscience, been the problem more broadly in science. And Scruton said that neuroscience is a vast collection of answers with no memory of the questions, that basically neuroscience is just philosophically illiterate, and much of science is philosophically illiterate. And when you’re philosophically illiterate, you tend to become a materialist because materialism is sort of the dumbest kind of philosophical perspective. And you just fall into this notion that, oh, the brain must be some kind of computer. I’m going to study it that way. And of course, there’s no meaningful sense that one could say the brain is a computer. Certainly the mind is not a kind of computation at all. It’s actually the opposite of computation. And so I came to see philosophy and theology, which of course that follows on philosophy as a cornerstone in good science. Basically, you have to understand the metaphysical framework of how the world works before you can make sense of any kind of science.
Jana Harmon
35:41 – 36:09
And yet you have to have the right grounding. So, so you were starting to realize that, that, that the science that was being fed to you, I guess, in a sense was insufficient. So there was a moment, I think, in your life, in your marriage, with your children, that brought you to a place. It was a very pivotal moment in your journey. Can you lead us there?
Michael Egnor
36:09 – 40:42
Sure. Well, all these different. I think of them as streams were kind of all coming together. That my feeling that I was missing some big story, my feeling that there was some betrayal by the scientific community, that the thing I loved, exploring nature, there was a lie at the basis of it and that there was something else going on. There was more to this that I didn’t understand and wasn’t being told. And when my youngest son was born, I have four kids, and my youngest son, when he was a few months old, we noticed that he wasn’t really smiling and he wasn’t really making eye contact very well, and he was otherwise developing all right. But he wasn’t interacting with people very, very much. And then I got concerned, my wife was concerned, too, that he might be autistic. And I found that very painful thought that I found that. And again, I was conceiving autism then as a severe disability. There are people who are kind of on the spectrum who are not as disabled. But I was fearing that he was going to be very disabled to the point where he didn’t, like he wouldn’t recognize me. He wouldn’t know that I was anything but just an object in his environment. And that terrified me. The idea that my son, who I loved, wouldn’t really know me or wouldn’t be able to love me and emotion was hard. It was hard to go to work. It was awfully difficult. At one point, when he was about six months old and we had taken him to a pediatric neurologist and got an opinion, and he said, it’s too early. You really can’t be sure about that. So when he was about six months old, one night I was seeing a patient in consultation at an outside hospital. It was a Catholic hospital, and I was particularly preoccupied with my son. And as I was leaving the hospital, there was a chapel there, and the chapel was open 24 hours a day. And I went into the chapel and decided, well, I’ll say a prayer. I didn’t really do much praying at that time in my life. So I got down in front of the altar and I said, God, I don’t know if you exist. I’ve got my doubts, but if you do exist, this is something that I can’t handle. This is something I can’t do on my own. I can’t have a son who doesn’t know me. And I heard a voice only the only time in my life I’ve ever heard a voice. And the voice said,”But that’s what you’re doing to me.’ And I, I kind of collapsed in front of the altar. And when I kind of got my senses back, I said, ‘Well, I won’t do it to you anymore, Lord, but please heal my son.’ And so the next day I called up the local Catholic parish and said, how do I get baptized like now? And so they said, ‘Well, you can’t really do it right now. You got to go through this RCIA thing.’ So we go through the whole process. And so a couple days later, we had my son’s six month birthday party and at the party he was completely normal. He was smiling and making eye contact and completely normal child. So I realized that what the Lord was doing to me, which he does a lot to me sometimes I wish he wouldn’t do it so much, but is that he shows me things. And I think of this as kind of an enacted parable that if you want to understand what it is to be the Lord and to have children who you love who don’t know you imagine what it’s like to be a parent who has an autistic child. And so he shows me things and he’s shown me a lot of things. And so I kind of promised him in this process that I would tell other people my story and I would help other people escape materialism and atheism, which are toxic, soul crushing ideologies. And they’re junk science, they’re bad science. They’ve degraded our science, they’ve degraded our culture. And we need the Lord. We need Christ, and He is the way, the truth and the life. And that’s not only a theological perspective, I think it’s a scientific perspective.
Jana Harmon
40:43 – 42:09
So this sounds like you had an amazing moment there. Not everyone has the gift really of hearing a voice and being so convinced and undone it sounds like. And at the moment that you knew that at that moment that God was real. Now again, you’re a scientist and I can think of skeptics who are saying, but, well, that was just, you know, a subjective experience that was convincing for you. How is it that you actually know that some kind of transcendent source exists over and be, over and beyond, you know, time, space, matter and energy in the universe. How do you know that? How do you know it’s true? Did you just, you know, all of a sudden? Obviously it wasn’t all of a sudden I think that was the culmination of a long process that then allowed you to actually then make sense of reality. Like you again mentioned in your book, you were able to take off the ideological blinders and perhaps see reality in its fullness in a fresh new way. When I am sure you have people and atheists and skeptics come up against you and say, but how do you know it’s true? You know, objectively so.
Michael Egnor
42:10 – 55:43
Well, that’s, that’s a good point. And the first thing I think we as Christians should do is we should not give up the label of skeptic and allow atheists to be skeptics. The least skeptical people I know are atheists. They believe all kinds of nonsense and don’t question it. Atheism itself is nonsense, as is materialism. And if you accept it, you’re no kind of skeptic. Christians are the skeptics. We’re the people who think deeply about things and who ask questions. And the greatest saints have been great skeptics. I mean, Kierkegaard pointed out that there is no higher form of faith than to struggle with God, that Jacob struggled with God, Christ struggled with his Father in the Garden of Gethsemane, and he struggled on the cross. So a real skeptic is a person who asks the real questions. Classically in theology, it’s been recognized that there are two ways we come to God. One is by faith and the other is by reason. And they work together. And what I found personally is something that goes back to the Scholastic theologians is that it’s best in some sense to begin with faith. It’s best to begin by opening yourself up to God and the reason part comes. That is that in my view, God’s existence and the characteristics that we ascribe to him of omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence is a scientific theory. I very much believe that that’s a scientific theory, just like the Big Bang is a scientific theory, just like relativity is a scientific theory. It’s a scientific theory in the sense that it’s a claim about reality for which we can have evidence. And in my view, God’s existence and knowing about God is the most thoroughly proven scientific theory there is. Nothing else comes close. Nothing comes close. And I can go into that in more detail if you want. But my own faith is strongly buttressed by reason. And the proofs for God’s existence are very powerful. They’re irrefutable, in my view. They’ve never been refuted in any successful way. I think there are at least 10 really solid proof truths for God’s existence that don’t rely on faith at all. They’re just proof. Now, if you add faith to it, and I read the Bible every day and there’s wonderful things in there. You put them together, it’s a powerful combination that gives you really certainty, which you can have. The 10 that I recognize and different people, some people say they were 20 or 25. The 10 that I recognize is the first five ways are Aquinas’s five ways. And several of them. The most important ones depend upon a very important concept. Thomas Aquinas’s Five Ways depend upon a concept that’s actually relatively simple. And it’s that you can’t go to infinite regress in a series of instrumental causes. And what that means is if one thing causes another, which causes another, which causes another. This chain of causation that we see all around us in the laws of nature and how things happen, you can’t go infinitely back. You have to at some point have something that started the whole thing. And what started the whole thing has to be something that is a far above and beyond any one of the causes. The example that Aristotle used when he used the same basic principle is if you see a stick pushing a leaf and you say, well, how is the stick pushing the leaf? There must be a hand on the stick pushing it. You can’t just say the stick is infinitely long and that explains how it pushes the leaf. Something has to get things started. And that’s a powerful argument for God’s existence, that God is the prime mover, the first cause. He’s the first cause of things. He’s the ground of existence. His existence is what makes every other kind of existence possible. He is the ultimate perfection and that you can’t have a scale of perfection unless you have a top, and he’s the top. And so Aquinas’s Five Ways depend upon that concept that you can’t go to infinite regress in a series of instrumental causes. The two ways that or actually three, that I find personally most compelling besides Aquinas’s Five Ways. The first was St. Augustine’s Way. And what Augustine said was that universal concepts like love and justice and goodness and things like that clearly exist. Clearly, love is something real and justice is something real, and goodness is something real. But it’s not in any thing in the physical world. I can’t pick up a cup of justice and show you how much justice I have in this cup but it’s real. It’s darn real, and we can’t evade that. And Aquinas says what’s real about it is that they’re thoughts in God’s mind. The reality of it is that we are thoughts in God’s mind. The entire universe is a thought in God’s mind. That anytime, if you take universal concepts realistically, if you acknowledge which you have to, if you’re realistic, that, yeah, they are real, well, what’s real about them is they’re God’s thoughts. And we have the privilege of participating in those thoughts. So that’s one way of looking at it. The other proof is a proof of Geoffrey Leibniz, who was a great scientist and mathematician back in the scientific revolution, who proposed what he called the principle of sufficient reason. And the principle of sufficient reason says that everything that happens in the world has to have a reason that accounts for it. It doesn’t mean that you know the reason. Most things we don’t know the reasons. But it makes no sense to say something happens for no reason. And if we accept that the universe happens for no reason, we can’t do science. If we say that the universe doesn’t have any reason for being the way it is, well, then why would we look for reasons anywhere? If you say the universe just exists for no reason, then why can’t you say that a particular animal just exists for no reason? So you can do away with Darwinian evolution? Or why wouldn’t you say that a particular atom is the way it is for no reason? So you do away with quantum mechanics. Or you can say that the universe or that space exists like it is for no reason. So we’ll do away with the theory of relativity. So you can’t do science unless you accept that everything has a reason, some kind of reason. And of course you have to say, well, then what’s the reason for the universe? And that’s what all men call God. So if you deny God, you’re denying ultimate reasons, and you can’t even do science. For me, what I think is the most powerful argument for God’s existence is what I call the 10th proof. And the 10th proof is the moral law. And this was Kant’s argument. Immanuel Kant made this argument. And when we think about right and wrong, there are two kinds of, you might say, good and bad. There’s a good and bad that is objective. That is, it’s something that we discover. It’s something that’s above us, that we all recognize and there’s a good and bad that’s subjective that we happen to feel. For example, I don’t like peppermint ice cream. Okay? Just doesn’t appeal to me. I think it’s kind of bad. But other people do, and there’s nothing wrong with them liking it and my not liking it. It’s just a matter of opinion. I also don’t like torturing children. I think torturing children is bad. But torturing children is bad in a way that’s different from peppermint ice cream being bad. Torturing children being bad is not just my opinion. Torturing children being bad is immoral. It’s part of the moral law. And it’s something that we discover that we all know. And because the moral law is real, and it’s real because we all know that certain things are wrong, killing innocent people is wrong. Torturing people is wrong. Cheating is wrong. Lying is wrong. Stealing is wrong. And it’s not just a matter of opinion. Nobody says, you know, I think rape is a terrible thing, but you’re entitled to your opinion. If you like rape, that’s okay with me. You know, I just think it’s wrong. Rape is not like peppermint ice cream. It’s not the same thing. So because there are objective moral standards that we can’t escape. And believe me, some of the most moralistic people around are atheists and materialists. I mean, they have all kinds of strong moral viewpoints. But if you hold a strong moral viewpoint, you have to acknowledge that there’s a mind outside of human minds from which those viewpoints come. The moral law has to come from somewhere. So every time I think, gee, you know, I’ll be watching TV and there’s something terrible that happens. If you think, for example, about those little girls who drowned in Texas in those flash floods a few weeks ago, that was a horrible thing. But why would I think it was horrible? Wasn’t my kids, wasn’t my genes, doesn’t harm me in any Darwinian way. If we were evolved by Darwinian mechanisms, the fact that other people’s children would die would mean that our children would have a better chance for success. In this world of competition, of spreading your genetics. So in a Darwinian world of dog eat dog, of a struggle for existence, that other people’s deaths should be good, we should be happy about that because we win. We didn’t drown. Our kids didn’t drown. But we all feel it’s a tragedy. Atheists no less than Christians, everybody’s heartbroken about that. And it’s because we recognize that there’s an objective standard of good and evil and that an innocent person dying like that is evil. It’s bad, and it breaks our hearts too. Which means that we are not Darwinian creatures. We are not evolved strictly by a process of struggle for survival. It means that we recognize that there is an external standard of good and evil. And for there to be an external standard of good and evil, there has to be a mind that holds that standard, and that is the mind of God. So I find the moral law to be inescapable proof of God’s existence. Every time I see something that I think is really good, somebody who shows heroism, somebody who shows courage or kindness, every time I see something that’s really bad, innocent people dying, people committing crimes, things like that, I think that proves that God exists. Because I wouldn’t recognize objective moral law unless there was a source for that moral law. Now, many people who are atheists doubt God’s existence because the problem of evil, they’ll raise the question, oh, yeah, but why would God allow things like that? And that’s a fair question. That’s theodicy. That’s a whole branch of theology. It’s a perfectly fair question. However, you’re acknowledging God’s existence if you ask the question, because if you recognize that some things are objectively evil, you are recognizing objective moral law which requires God’s existence. Now, explaining it is a whole other question. I don’t know why God allowed those little girls to die, I don’t know. But the fact that it bothers me that they died proves God’s existence, because I acknowledge good and evil. Personally, I think, and I don’t claim to know the answer to the questions of theodicy, but I think that those children are with God now and that we live eternal life in his presence, which is an immeasurable blessing. And that the tragedies in our life, as terrible as they are, and I know tragedy very well, they are very small compared to, to eternity and to God’s love. And so I leave it to him, I say, Lord, I don’t fully understand, but I trust you.
Jana Harmon
55:43 – 56:36
Yeah. And that leads me to one more question here, and that is that you obviously are a wonderful spokesperson. You’ve been convinced that God exists, but it’s not just something out there or something just reasonable or rational. It’s something very personal. You have, by your own words, just demonstrated an ongoing relationship of a personal, with a person, with the person of God. That seems very intimate. He speaks to you, you respond, and in ways that he calls you to. I wondered how your faith has affected you personally and perhaps with the person of Christ or just your own faith.
Michael Egnor
56:37 – 01:00:27
It’s a very interesting question. And I think that, as all Christians know, that Christian faith is a personal relationship. And because God is a person, God is actually three persons in one nature. And God walked the earth in the Holy Land 2,000 years ago. So this is a personal relationship, and it’s a complex relationship. There are times when I struggle. I say, God, why are you letting this happen? I need some help here. Or I have times when I say, thank you, God. Thank you so much for what you’ve done. And, you know, so we. I think of it as, it’s like a marriage. You know, you love each other, you question each other. It’s an ongoing, very deep relationship. And again, as Kierkegaard made that point very, very much, that the height of faith and the height of a relationship with God is that struggle is asking questions and getting answers. And so I find that’s the essence of Christianity. One thing that has moved me deeply, and there are many things in the Scriptures that I love and that move me deeply, but something that I think about a lot is John 18:8. It’s a passage in the Gospel of John. And this came to me many years ago. I was reading about Christ heading to Jerusalem the last time, knowing that he was going to be crucified, to sacrifice himself, to take our sins on his shoulders. And I was thinking as I was reading that about what an enormously frightening thing that must be. I mean, we don’t see crucifixion nowadays, certainly in our culture, but it was a horrendously torturous way of dying. In fact, the word excruciating for pain came from crucifixion. To be nailed to a piece of wood and left to die is an unbelievably horrible way to die. And the Lord knew that. He knew it in detail. When he set out for Jerusalem on his last journey, he knew what he was doing. And John 18:8 was a passage in the Garden of Gethsemane when the guards came to arrest him. And as they were arresting him, he said to them, well, you came for me. So let these men go. And he looked to his disciples who were there with him. And that floored me when I really understood what that meant, that he knew exactly what he was facing, and that no matter how courageous you are, there would be a temptation to say, hey, hey, I didn’t mean it. It was their fault. This is not about me. And the first thing that came to, to his mind is take me, but let them go. And that is a love and a courage and an integrity that took my breath away and still takes my breath away. So every time I struggle with God, every, every time I ask Christ, can’t you help me some more with this? I think of what he said in the Garden of Gethsemane. He said, take me to the cross. Take and let all, and, and let every, all of my people go. And what a beautiful, beautiful thing. So that has meant a lot to.
Jana Harmon
01:00:27 – 01:02:39
Me, that I think that’s a good place to end. You have been an extraordinary witness and guest. Your story really is phenomenal in so many ways. You’re sitting there as someone who is very esteemed, award winning neurosurgeon. You are, you’re the smart guy in the room and you are there though, you are there giving witness, giving testimony and evidence and good reason to believe in God and in the person of Jesus Christ in a very personal way. Thank you so much Mike for coming on. There’s no doubt in my mind that many will be blessed by the hearing of this. Dr. Michael Egner story reminds us that the journey, journey from skepticism, isn’t merely intellectual, it’s deeply personal. Through science, reason, and ultimately surrender, he discovered that the mind isn’t just a product of the brain and life isn’t just material. It’s meaningful, purposeful and loved. If you find yourself questioning the worldview that you’ve been handed, please know that healthy skepticism is not a barrier to faith. It can be a doorway. The honest search for truth, wherever it leads, is not something to fear, but to pursue. And sometimes that search just leads us to God, who is not only real, but relational. To dive deeper, check out Dr. Egnor’s book the Immortal A Compelling Case for the Soul and Limits of Materialism and Explaining Consciousness. You can find links to his work, related sources and more stories like his at exskeptic.org. if this episode challenged or encouraged you, please share it with a friend. Leave us a review and be sure to subscribe to our email list so you won’t miss what’s coming next. eX-skeptic is part of the C.S. Lewis Institute podcast network where we seek to thoughtfully explore questions of faith, reason and truth. A special thanks to our producer, Ashley Kelfer. Her excellent work helps to bring these powerful stories to life. Thanks for listening, and we look forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll explore another unlikely story of belief.
