By Eli Garcia-Mendez –
As neurosurgeon, Dr. Michael Egnor didn’t believe in God. But when his fourth son exhibited signs of autism up to his sixth month, Egnor dropped into the hospital chapel to plead with God.
“If you do exist, could you take this away from me, please? This is something I can’t deal with. I can’t have my son be autistic and not know me.”
God responded: “But that’s what you’re doing to me.”
Egnor collapsed. The answer had not come from his mind; it confronted his mind – with a reality he had never considered. He was treating God as someone he didn’t acknowledge, as if he were autistic towards God.
“Okay, I won’t do it to you anymore. I won’t be autistic to you.” Egnor said. “But please make my son not autistic to me.”
Egnor’s son turned out fine; when he grew up, he studied to be a lawyer. For his part, Egnor became a Christian. It was a long way from where he started.
Born into a non-religious family, Egnor fell in love with science at an early age. He wanted to be a brain surgeon because he wanted to fathom the mysteries of life.
As a surgeon, however, he stumbled across things that couldn’t be explained by his textbooks: a girl with half a brain who exhibited no abnormal personality or intelligence whatsoever, a lady who had a brain tumor removed and held normal conversations with major parts of her brain removed.
“After that operation, I thought, my goodness gracious, we don’t understand what the brain does there,” Egnor said. “There’s something deeper here because none of my textbooks said you could take out most of the left frontal lobe and have a person be perfectly normal.”
The Darwinian science, he said, wasn’t squaring away with what he saw in his practice.
Since God healed his son (apparently) of autism, Egnor has been serving God, trying to undo years of affirming there is no God.
“I want to convey to people that atheism and materialism are wrong,” he says. “God exists and he’s real. We really do have souls.”
Related content: MIT prof finds God, man with world’s highest IQ believes in God, Iranian engineer found God in Canada. Sources: Sean McDowell, others.
