Kerby Anderson

“American physician Duncan MacDougall is known as the man who tried to weigh the human soul.” That’s how neuroscientist, Dr. Sharon Dirckx begins her column in World magazine. If you have read the latest book by Lee Strobel on Seeing the Supernatural, you will notice he quotes her work frequently.

She reminds us that scientists like Harvard professor Steven Pinker argue that the soul is merely the brain: “The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.”

She counters this idea with evidence. “Consider survivors of childhood hydranencephaly—water on the brain—who are missing vast quantities of brain tissue and yet function as normal human beings. Or callosotomy patients, whose brain hemispheres have been surgically disconnected to minimize epileptic seizures, and yet splitting the brain doesn’t seem to cause splitting of the mind.”

She also points to the thousands of accounts of near-death experiences (NDEs) from cardiac arrest survivors over the last 50 years. These patients claim that while their bodies were flatlining, they were conscious and able to observe what was taking place. If we were just brains, then consciousness should have ended.

She concludes that the biblical description of human beings supports the latest evidence in neuroscience. We are both physical (the dust of the earth) and spiritual (the soulish part of humans). This is the same picture surfacing today in neuroscience.

Once again, we can see that science is not contradicting a biblical view of human nature but reinforcing it.