Over the past two years I have been on a journey to find answers to questions posed by science regarding my Christian beliefs. For the most part I am comfortable with the answers I have found, even if they have led to a change in several of the beliefs I previously held in relation to the Christian faith.
For example, in terms of God, I no longer believe in the traditional Christian image of God as a personal being who is the creator, sustainer, and active governor of the universe; immanent and involved in human history and nature. I do, however, believe in a God that was the agent of Creation, and who is present in Creation as the very essence of Being.
I won’t go into any more detail regarding that, and I also won’t discuss the other beliefs of mine that have changed as a consequence of my questioning those beliefs, although I have commented on several of them at different times in previous blogs on the parish website, but the one area that I did want to elaborate on is my belief in the existence of a soul. Now my belief hasn’t changed; I’ve always believed that every person has a soul, and that the soul is what makes each of us who we are, and that makes each of us unique from one another. It is what makes me “me,” or to put it in biblical terms, “I AM WHO I AM.” In saying this I am not claiming to be God (!) but, if you think about it, it does make sense to say I AM WHO I AM in the same way that God is I AM WHO I AM because the Bible tells us that human beings are created in the image of God. This is then one way to understand that. But I digress.
Recently I’ve been grappling with how to maintain my belief in the existence of a soul in the face of medical conditions such as dementia which seem to totally change the identity or personhood of the person affected. As these conditions progress, the person affected no longer appears to be the person they were. They seem to support the general scientific view of the soul as a non-observable, non-empirical concept rather than a biological reality, with no scientific evidence supporting an immaterial entity that survives bodily death. Modern neuroscience tends to treat consciousness as a product of brain function, concluding that mental operations like memory and emotion are neurobiological systems rather than a separate, nonphysical essence.
But then I came across a wonderful video on YouTube of a presentation at the 2025 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith by Michael Egnor, an American paediatric neurosurgeon and professor of neurological surgery at Stony Brook University who has performed more than 7,000 brain surgery operations in his career.
The video itself is almost 30 minutes long, and in the presentation Dr Egnor goes into an incredible level of detail that I won’t even attempt to summarise in this blog. What I will do though, is reproduce information he talked about in relation to “split-brain procedure”—which is technically called corpus callosotomy. This procedure involves the splitting of the corpus callosum, the massive bundle of millions of nerve fibres that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, in half. It is used to treat epileptic seizures, which are random uncontrolled electrical discharges in the brain, that can jump from one side of the brain to the other through the fibre bundle, causing many catastrophic convulsions each day.
The very first time Dr Egnor performed this procedure, he was concerned the trauma involved in cutting the brain in half would be too massive for the patient he was treating. He was worried that the effect on the mind would be dramatic and disabling. The corpus callosum connects most regions of the brain like a massive telecommunications relay station in the middle of a great city. Cutting through the middle would sever these critical connections and, he supposed, might radically damage the mind—that is, impair the patient’s ability to think, to reason, to choose, and even the patient’s sense of himself as a unified person. Dr Egnor thought it might even result in two centres of consciousness—the surgery would make one person with one mind into two persons with two minds!
He discovered after six hours of surgery, that despite the patient having his brain severed, he moved his arms and legs normally, his vision was normal, and so was his speech. In fact, the only thing different about the patient, was that he was no longer having major seizures. And he certainly seemed like a single, unified person.
Dr Egnor’s experience and research prove that our minds continue to exist and function even when our brains are severely damaged. He has also been able to show how the personal identities of loved ones continue to exist even if they are in a coma or have dementia. And he believes there is overwhelming scientific evidence that human souls exist, that some abilities of the mind are actually something separate from the brain, and that our souls do not cease to live when our bodies die.
I am currently reading Dr Egnor’s book – The Immortal Mind – and I would recommend both it and the YouTube video to anyone who might also be interested in understanding more about the existence of the human soul.
