This piece ran on Feb. 20 on
All Things Considered.
The American media (especially TV and radio) has an unfortunate penchant for assuming that any issue worth covering has at most two "sides," and therefore competent reporting must consist of approximately equal parts of those two sides in a kind of sparring match, so that the reader, viewer or listener can be left to decide . . . .
Well, this is one issue where maybe there
are only two sides, and only one can turn out to be right.
It's unfortunate that NPR chose Michael Egnor as the spokesperson for the "Mind must exist apart from the brain's functions and is the product of special creation" camp. Sometimes Egnor seems willfully, even arrogantly ignorant of areas of science outside his field of medicine. Other times he seems intellectually dishonest.
But this piece is worth listening to. And intelligent, thoughtful religious people -- such as Rabbi David Wolpe -- have wondered long and hard about their belief in an essential, immaterial soul (as the mind and personality of a specific loved one) where a brain injury such as a tumor or stroke can profoundly change or wipe out that mind.
For some reason unknown to me, I could not replay this piece with the NPR media player at the time I am writing this post (less than 8 hours after it aired live). Maybe NPR will fix this later.