A difference is never so strange as when it appears as complete identity. As brain research advances by leaps and bounds, mental functions appear to be ever more intimately tied to very specific areas of the brain. Does this development entitle one to predict that eventually references to the soul will be meaningless? This booklet begins with such a prediction as recently made by Francis Crick, who fifty years ago became the codiscoverer of the double-helix structure of chromosomes. It remains, however, a fact that neither evolutionary, nor molecular biology, not even brain research have diminished a whit the enormous difference between biophysical processes in the brain and the conscious mental experiences tied to them. This difference, being the strangest of all differences, will forever bespeak the reality of a soul at least for those who are alive to differences. These, let it not be forgotten, are the basis for registering reality, the basis of all intellectual discourse. The baffling difference of mental experiences from scientific data about the brain should remain a powerful reminder that there has to be a mind, a soul, which is immensely more than man's brain.

The Spanish translation of this booklet is available here.

By Fr. Stanley L. Jaki

ISBN 978-1-892548-40-5 •  32 pages  •  softcover