New York, 7 September 2025 (MIA)

Branka D. Najdovska 

Michael Egnor is an American neurosurgeon and professor of neurosurgery at Stony Brook University in New York. He is known for his work in the field of pediatric neurosurgery, especially for surgical treatments of congenital malformations, tumors, and epilepsy. 

In addition to his medical career, Egnor is also known for his public stances on debates about science and religion. He is a fellow at the Discovery Institute, an organization that promotes "Intelligent Design" (ID). Leading proponents of intelligent design believe that the designer is the Christian God. ID attempts to redefine science in a fundamental way by encouraging supernatural explanations, a view known as theistic science. 

Doctor Egnor, thank you very much for accepting this interview. 

It is a privilege to be here and I thank you so much and I love your questions. I was reading them over. They're very, very thoughtful questions. 

Professor Egnor, in your work with patients, especially in cases of clinical death or severe brain damage, have you witnessed experiences that have led you to believe that the mind exists separately from the brain? 

Yes, I have. I've been practicing neurosurgery for about 45 years and I've seen a lot I've seen a lot of things that happen to people and what has struck me is that how much the real life practice of neurosurgery and really working on people who have brain surgery how it differs from what was in my textbooks.  

For example, it's a very common experience when people are in deep coma in the intensive care unit that you have to be very careful about what what you say in their presence. And the nurses who work in the units know this that people's heart rates will go up and their vital signs will become unstable if you say something frightening or their vital signs become much much more calm if you say something reassuring.

Even though they're in the deepest level of coma and there's no sign that they're conscious at all, there's an aspect of them that seems to know what's going on. I've had a number of patients um who have had very serious things wrong with their brains and actually missing significant parts of their brains who are perfectly normal people.  

I have a young lady who was born missing probably two thirds of her brain. And we actually have a picture of her brain scan in our book, The Immortal Mind. And when she was born, I told her family, I was very concerned about how she would do, but she grew up completely normal. She's now in her in her 20s. She's a perfectly normal young woman, missing a lot of her brain. I have another young woman who's a musician who's missing a major part of her brain.  

I have a little boy who is now just graduated from high school, missing major parts of his brain. And there's even a kind of a brain defect that's some children are born with called hydranencephaly where they're missing all of their brain hemispheres. Their brain hemispheres have been destroyed because of strokes that happened inside the womb. And even missing all of the brain hemispheres, the kids are still conscious. They have a lot of disabilities. They can't walk. They often can't talk, but they're fully conscious. So, it's became pretty clear to me that there's more to the mind than just the brain.  

And what really kind of iced it for me was I was operating on a woman, a number of years ago who had a brain tumor in her left frontal lobe. And the tumor was invading a lot of her frontal lobe and I could cure her by getting all the tumor out, but it meant taking out a lot of her left frontal lobe. And we had to do the surgery with her awake during the surgery so I could map where her speech area was in the left frontal lobe to make sure that I didn't damage her speech. And this is an operation that is done relatively routinely. And we use local anesthesia so the surgery doesn't hurt. 

And during the surgery I was taking out a lot of her left frontal lobe as I was talking to her and realizing I'm removing major parts of her brain that the textbooks say are critical. We're having a normal conversation talking about her family, about the weather, about the cafeteria of food. And I came away from the surgery thinking the brain does not explain the mind completely. There's more to the mind than just the brain. 

If the mind is immaterial, how do you explain the fact that changes in the brain – such as tumors, injuries, or medications – so drastically alter a person's personality and thinking abilities? 

That's a great question and I think it's important to see the brain for what it is and that is an organ. So it's an organ analogous to the heart or to the kidneys or to the lungs. It has a job to do.  

There's no question that the brain has five basic jobs. Its first job is to maintain what's called homeostasis, which means it maintains your blood pressure. It maintains the oxygen in your blood. It kind of it's the big controller that controls how your body works. It initiates movement. If you move your arm, that comes from your brain. There's no question about that. It mediates perception. It allows you to see, to hear, to smell, to taste, to touch. It mediates memories. That is, there's no question that the formation of memories is intimately involved in brain function. 

There are parts of the brain where if you damage them, you lose the ability to form new memories. And the brain mediates emotion. There's no question. And if you have a lot of adrenaline in your blood that circulates through your brain, you have a heightened emotional state. So the brain does real things. But there is very strong neuros neuroscience evidence as well as logical and philosophical evidence that the brain is not the source of our capacity for reason, for having concepts, for abstract thought, or for free will. That those abstract things, the kinds of things we're doing right here, talking about these abstract concepts are abilities of our soul and our brain helps us explain them, helps us convey them, but they don't come from the brain itself. Whereas movement, emotion, perception, memory do come from the brain. 

What is it specifically that you think evolution cannot explain? Can you give an example of where Darwinism "stops"? 

I don't think evolution explains anything. The problem with the theory of evolution and by theory of evolution I think we mean Darwinian evolution. Is that it is really not much more than a tautology. That means that it doesn't really say anything meaningful. Darwinian evolution basically says that living organisms change in each generation in a way that's heritable so their offspring can inherit that and those organisms that survive and they come to populate and those that don't survive don't survive. So if you boil that down and you get rid of some of the technical words, what Darwinian evolution says is that things change and survivors survive. And that's not really a theory. I mean, that's pretty obvious and it's really pretty bad science.  

There are two strong reasons to doubt evolution besides the fact that it just doesn't make much sense. 

The first is an observation by Michael Behe who's a scientist from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania who many years ago proposed a theory called irreducible complexity. And what he pointed out is that and Darwin himself said this for evolution to work there have to be little changes that build up gradually over a period of time that give you a functional enzyme or a functional part of your body or an organ or something and Behe pointed out that there are countless things in the body that are too complex to have formed that way.

A very good example that he used was the bacterial flagellum which is a little tail that that bacteria have that help them swim. The flagellum is built actually like an outboard motor on a boat. It's got all kinds of components that really is almost exactly analogous to the way an outboard motor works. And the problem is the flagellum doesn't work at all unless everything is present.  

And there's like I don't know 20 or 30 different parts to it that have to fit together, right? So it can't happen by little tiny changes that accumulate in a Darwinian way. That is too complex to happen that way. And Darwin himself, who knew nothing about molecules or molecular biology, said in Origin of the Species that my theory will fail if we can find things that are too complex to have formed by natural selection. And what Dr. Behe he points out is that there are thousands and thousands of things that are too complex to have formed by natural selection. So that's one reason to doubt Darwinian evolution.  

The second reason is an argument made by Jerry Fodor. Jerry Fodor is a philosopher. He actually passed away a few years ago and he's a materialist and an atheist. So he doesn't have it's not like he's a creationist. But he says that natural selection which is a cornerstone of evolutionary biology is empty. He said it's basically a garbage theory. He said that if you take a living thing an organism and you want to understand how it came to be the way it is there are two kinds of questions that you have to ask about it.  

One is what are the internal constraints in the in the organism, that is how is it built internally. That explains why it is the way it is. And the second question is what are the external constraints. What are the factors in the environment that sort of make it necessary for it to be the way it is. And he said once you understand the internal constraints and the external constraints, then you understand why the organism is the way it is and natural selection offers nothing else. It doesn't add anything. So the theory of evolution, it's not that it's wrong. It's not even wrong. It's just kind of a meaningless statement that's sort of dressed up as a scientific theory. And obviously the purpose for Darwinian evolution ideologically is to get God out of the picture. It's an idea that's been pushed by atheists to try to make it seem as though living things can arise without God, but it's junk science. And so, I don't think Darwinian evolution explains anything. 

Do you think a machine could ever become conscious – or do you think consciousness is something that cannot be recreated artificially? 

No, no, I don't. The reason is well, first of all, I'll give an example and then and then kind of go into exactly why it can't become conscious.

The example is if you think of a sun dial, imagine a very primitive sand dial that's used for telling time you might have in your garden and you ask the question, well does the sand dial know what time it is? The answer is of course not. It's just this this this thing you have in your garden. It doesn't know what time it is.

Well, I have a Casio watch. I like this little watch. It keeps great time. It lasts forever. I love the watch. So, but if I ask, "Does my watch know what time it is?" The answer is, "Of course not. It's just a little watch. I know what time it is using the watch, but the watch doesn't know anything." Then you can say, "Well, yeah, but what if I bought a smartwatch? Would a smartwatch know what time it is?" Well, no. It's still just a watch. It doesn't know what time it is. Would an atomic clock, the most accurate kind of clock there is, know what time it is? The answer is no. It's still just a big machine. Does AI know what know what time it is? The answer is no. Of course not. It's the same as the sun dial and the watch and the clock.

Just because something gets more complex doesn't necessarily mean that it suddenly develops a mind. So no, no machine knows anything. Machines don't have souls. They don’t have minds. They're amazingly complex useful tools, but they're just tools. They're just tools like a sand dial is a tool. So that that is sort of an example of how kind of silly it is to think that a machine can have a mind. The more rigorous explanation for that is that computation is a specific concept.  

Computation means that you take a particular signal an input you put it through a system and you get an output which presumably differs somewhat from the input. And the system has a set of rules that dictate how the input becomes the output. And those rules are called an algorithm. And that's the process of computation. But if you notice there is no meaning in any of that. That is computation is blind to meaning. That for example if you use a word processor and you type an essay and you type an essay where you say I think AI can be conscious and you type that on your word processor and you get this essay but you can then take the same word processor and type I don't think AI can be conscious and you get another essay that that says it can't be conscious. Your word processor doesn't care. It doesn't make any difference to your word processor what you type in, it just responds to the keys. So, not only is computation not capable of creating consciousness. It in some sense is the opposite of consciousness. 

Consciousness always has a meaning. Whenever you think something, you think about something. I can think about a Zoom call. I can think about my hometown. I can think about the weather. AI never thinks about anything. It's just a tool and tools are not conscious. 

What happens to consciousness/soul after death?

Well, I'm a Christian. So I believe that we have immortal souls and I believe that our souls survive death. Our souls are immortal. And we go to an intermediate state where we have a soul but we don't have a body, but I think our souls are naturally made to have bodies so that in the afterlife we become resurrected and hopefully we all go to heaven and are resurrected to glory and to joy with God. I believe that we are eternal beings we were created by God to live forever and to live with him so that's what I think by my faith.  

Scientifically there are I think pretty strong reasons to believe in life after death. First of all when you look carefully at the nature of the human mind from a neuroscience standpoint we can talk about this more as we go on. There are aspects to the human mind that are spiritual and spiritual things can't die in the same way a physical thing can die.  

In addition, there's a science of near-death experiences, and there's been a lot of experience, that people have had over time with what happens when people have near-death experiences. And there's a great deal of evidence that these experiences are real. And that people continue to have consciousness, in fact, it's even enhanced consciousness after their brain stops working. 

Probably the most famous near-death experience in modern times was a woman named Pam Reynolds who um had a brain aneurysm that was operated on in Phoenix, Arizona back in 1991 and her neurosurgeon Dr. Robert Spetzler, someone I know. And what happened during the surgery was the aneurysm was huge, and they had to actually stop the blood flowing to her brain so they could fix the aneurysm because they couldn't have blood flowing through it as they were working on it. But obviously if you stop blood flowing to a person's brain that's catastrophic. So they cooled her body down to about 60° Fahrenheit once she was under anesthesia. Then they stopped her heart. Then they tipped her head up to drain the blood out of her brain and that gave them about 30 minutes to fix the aneurysm before permanent brain damage happened. They did. They warmed her body back up. They restarted her heart. They brought her back to life basically. And after the surgery, she said that as soon as her heart stopped, she felt herself pop out of her body, float up to the ceiling, and she watched the whole operation. She was actually over the surgeon's shoulder. She described the instruments he was using. She described in detail the conversations that they had in the operating room. All this was confirmed by the operating team.  

She described the music that was playing in the background. They were playing music in the operating room. She said that while she was watching the surgery, she was pulled down a tunnel. She went down the tunnel. She came to this beautiful world. She saw I think her dead relatives like grandparents I think who welcomed her and they said you can't stay here you have to go back and raise your children so she went back into her body she said it was like jumping back into ice water which is interesting because her body temperature was 60° so yes it really was ice water and the remarkable thing about this near-death experience besides the fact that it's verifiable that is she knew the conversations people had in the operating room when there was no blood inside her brain. I mean she was completely gone but also her body was completely monitored. That is, her brain waves were absent. There was no brain stem activity. Her heart was stopped. It's like the perfect experiment.  

So when I discuss this with people who doubt near-death experiences, I call this the Pam Reynolds challenge. Meaning anybody who wants to explain near-death experiences away, say that they aren't real, has to explain four things that are that that are typical of many near-death experiences.  

One is that they're very clear. People have a very clear mental state. They often have a life review. They see things beautifully, this beautiful vision.  

The second thing is that about 20% of near-death experiences are verifiable. That means that people see things that they could not have seen in their body. As Pam Reynolds, she watched the operation over the surgeon's shoulder.

The third thing, and I find this fascinating, is that people who have near-death experiences, as far as I know, and there's a large scientific literature on this. Many papers have been published on this. I don't think there's a single report of a near-death experienced person going down the down the tunnel and seeing someone on the other side of the tunnel who's still alive. That is when you meet people at the other end of the tunnel. They're always dead people. It's never living people. And often reported a number of times that people have met dead people at the other end of the tunnel that they didn't know were dead. They're people who had died and they didn't know they had died, but they meet them at the other end of the tunnel. 

And the fourth thing that has to be explained by people who doubt near near-death experiences is the fact that near-death experiences are transformative. People who have them are very different people afterwards. They usually lose their fear of death. So I think there's a lot of scientific reason to believe that the soul survives death. And of course, my Catholic faith leads me to believe that as well. 

And finally, Is there any scientific research or experiment that could convince you that you are wrong – either about the mind or about intelligent design? 

Yeah, that's a great question. It's a very important question and I think as it's not only an important question for me, it's an important question for anybody who's making claims like I like I'm making that that you're right. Is there anything that would convince you that you're wrong? And I believe that the immateriality of the mind the existence of the soul are evident just from logic. And in fact the great philosophers Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, all of them understood that the soul is immaterial and immortal and that it really exists before modern neuroscience. So there are strong logical reasons which I'm happy to talk about. But in terms of neuroscience, what would convince me that I that I'm wrong is if neuroscience experiments showed clearly that the brain is capable of generating abstract thought. And if you'd like, I can go into a little bit of detail on the experiments that do that. 

Some of the most interesting experiments were those of Wilder Penfield who was a neurosurgeon back in the mid-20th century who is probably the greatest neuroscientist in the neurosurgical profession and Penfield started out his career as a materialist, just as I did actually when I started out I thought the brain generated the mind completely. I didn't really think the soul was like a separate thing. And Penfield noticed two things that changed his mind on that.  

The first thing was he studied seizures and that that was one of his specialties was brain seizures. And he reviewed everything that was known about seizures and what he found then is still true today. And he found that with seizures there are only four things that the seizures can cause if a person remains conscious during the seizure. It can cause movement. You can have like shaking in a limb. It can cause a perception. You can see flashes of light, or you hear a sound or have a smell. It can cause a memory. There are some seizures that will make you have a memory of like when you were a kid in your mom's kitchen or something. And there are some seizures that can cause powerful emotions. Seizures can cause a sense of fear. There's even a rare kind of seizure called a gelastic seizure that makes you think everything is funny and just laugh.  

But Penfield said those are the only things that seizures ever cause. Seizures never cause people to do mathematics. They never cause people to think about logic. They never cause abstract thought. He said, "But much of the time that's what we're doing. We're thinking about abstract things. Why don't seizures ever cause that?" He said, "The obvious explanation is that maybe those things don't come from the brain."  

He then did experiments which were operations the kind that I did with that woman where I was mapping her brain because of that tumor. He did many more than I did. He did about 1100 of them over like 40 years. And he would map people's brains to find a seizure focus and remove the seizure focus to cure seizures. And these people were awake and he would stimulate their brains. And I calculated that he probably did probably about a million individual stimulations of people's brains over a period of years. And he never once was able to stimulate abstract thought. Nowhere on the brain that he stimulated would a person ever say, "Oh, I'm thinking of mathematics or oh, I'm thinking of logic or Shakespeare or I'm reasoning or having concepts." The only thing he uh he could stimulate were movement, perception, memory and emotion. The same thing with seizures.  

So he said if after all of these times I have never once stimulated abstract thought by stimulating the brain maybe it doesn't come from the brain. 

So that to me was very powerful evidence. There's other evidence that's very powerful as well. And it's found in split brain surgery.  

There's a kind of brain surgery that I've done and other neurosurgeons do to treat seizures where you cut the corpus callosum. The corpus callosum is a huge bundle of fibers. It's about the size of the palm of your hand that connects the two hemispheres of the brain and it has about two million axons in it. And there's some rare kinds of seizures that start out as little tiny seizures on one side of the brain and then they jump across the corpus callosum and cause a complete brain seizure which is really really disabling and sometimes medication doesn't work well for that. So we cut the corpus callosum that stops those seizures from spreading and people do much better. The brain is essentially cut in half but people who have had that operation are almost completely normal after surgery. They have a single consciousness. They're not two people. 

They do have some little perceptual disabilities because the brain is cut in half, but they're minor. And there are some experiments with that that are almost spooky. There is a researcher at MIT named Alice Cronin-Golomb who has done experiments where she's taken people who have had split brain surgery and she'll put a picture like a picture of a violin presented to one hemisphere. You can do that by using the visual fields and a picture of like a painters pallet to the other hemisphere. And she would say she would ask the person, "What concept unites both of these pictures?" And people with split brain surgery will say, "Well, they're both forms of art." You know, there's a violin, which is music, and there's a painters pallet, which is painting, which is true. But you keep in mind these people's brains are split in half and no part of their brain has seen both pictures. 

One half saw the violin, one half saw the painters pallet, but they can make a connection between them, but no part of the brain saw both. So what part of their mind can make the connection? And the answer is their soul.

Their soul can connect the two hemispheres even though the hemispheres themselves are physically disconnected. 

So you ask the question, what would convince me that I that I'm wrong? What would convince me that I'm wrong is if Wilder Penfield had found that he could stimulate the brain and get abstract thought. He could stimulate and people would do arithmetic or would do calculus or think of logic or even think of moral law. And when you have split brain surgery, if that made you into two distinct people, two different people, and that doesn't happen. Never. No.  

There’s no sign that people are two different people. There are some neuroscientists who have made that claim, but that claim is nonsense. There are never two different people. There can be one person who has perceptual confusion about things. There are people who will do things that work across purposes. There's a syndrome where one hand will try to button your shirt while the other hand is trying to unbutton your shirt. But that is a neurological disability. That's not two people. So no, there's in fact if you think about it, what even sense would it make to say that there are two people? I mean, how could I be two people? So, it's not even conceptually coherent and certainly does not happen in real life.  

If you met a person with split brain surgery, you could not tell the difference. And in fact, the person can't tell the difference. They're perfectly normal people.