Mind vs. Matter

We’ve been talking lately about the Apostle Paul’s contention that Creation reveals the existence of God. In my previous post I argued that the existence of the universe and the existence of life are both good reasons to believe in God. Now I want to talk about another reason to believe in God that I find even more compelling, although it is much more subtle and easy to miss. This evidence can be seen by looking inward: the fact that I exist as a thinking, feeling, volitional and self-aware being. To paraphrase Descartes, “I think, therefore God is.” Cogito, ergo Deus est.

I mentioned earlier that we are so steeped in the secular scientific worldview we can look right at the evidence and not see it. But scientific naturalism, the philosophy of secular science, has a huge problem. It requires us to suppose that all our thoughts, ideas, feelings and choices are just an illusion. What’s real is the intricate arrangement of molecules in my brain interacting in complex, but purely deterministic ways. You and I, as individuals, don’t really exist. The life of mind is an illusion. We are nothing but chemistry. A temporary pattern of atoms that evolves and persists for a few years, then dissipates.

If you grew up going to public school, or watching PBS and Discovery Channel, or reading National Geographic, you’re probably saying right now, “So what?” You’re so used to this worldview being stated as fact that you can’t see what a breathtaking leap beyond the evidence it is. But stop and think about this for a moment. The most real, persistent, and intimate experience of reality I have is my own thoughts and feelings. When I talk about “I” it is not usually my protoplasm I’m referring to; it’s my mind. I experience this inner self in a different way than I experience anyone or anything else in the world. Everything else I experience through my senses as they respond to physical stimuli. But my mind is something different altogether. It is self-aware. It seems, at least, to have an independent existence apart from neural substrate that supports it.

Neural scientists are excited today because they feel they are finally beginning to “unlock the secrets of the mind” – to gain some insight into how physical brain function relates to mental processes. But just because a certain part of your brain lights up when you experience anger doesn’t give me any insight into what anger is. Even if I knew every tiny detail of what happens electrochemically inside your skull when you get angry, it would tell me nothing about how you feel. I only understand what anger is because I experience it myself in my own mind. It may correlate with certain brain activity. You may even be able to provoke me to anger by stimulating a certain part of my brain. But I believe it is a category mistake to talk about this mental feeling we call anger as being equivalent to the physical processes of the brain.

In a similar way, we all know what it is like to make a decision. We make decisions almost continuously every day. But the scientific naturalist must insist that my sense of free will is an illusion. Consider also our sense of right and wrong. If I am nothing but a deterministic physical system, then morality is just another illusion. The physical laws that govern the biochemical processes of my body are deterministic. There is nothing intrinsically different in applying those laws to my brain chemistry as opposed to a high school chemistry experiment.

What I am trying to help you understand is how utterly counterintuitive it is to suggest that our thoughts, our feelings, and our choices are an illusion. Some would argue that our intuition is simply wrong. It is true, of course, that science has discovered many counterintuitive theories, such as relativity and quantum mechanics. It’s easy to see how our intuition can be wrong when it comes to physical realms far outside our experience. When it comes to a theory of mind, however, we are all intimately familiar with the data.

But this theory is not just counterintuitive, it is illogical as well. It’s fine for me to contemplate the possibility that your mind is an illusion. But it is self-refuting for me to contemplate the idea that my own mind is an illusion. The problem is that we have been so completely indoctrinated into scientific naturalism that we fail to see the contradiction.

How does this relate to the existence of God? The connection is this: physical processes can only give rise to other physical processes. But my mind is a different type of thing, and it must arise from something different than a physical process. The source of my existence is a personal Creator God, who made me in his image as a thinking, feeling, self-aware and morally responsible being.

Hath God Wrought?

In my last post I talked about Paul’s famous statement in Romans that unbelievers are “without excuse” because God’s eternal power and divine nature can be clearly seen from looking at his Creation. The evidence for God is right before our eyes, so that he is justified in condemning us for rejecting him.

But some will object that we simply see what we want to see. You and I are watching a beautiful sunset. I believe in God; I see God’s glory in the sunset. You don’t believe in God; you see Nature’s glory. So how does nature prove God exists?

The short answer is, it doesn’t. If you’re looking for an airtight mathematical proof you will be disappointed, because we’re not dealing with mathematical concepts here. Very few things are actually provable in a formal, mathematical sense. Yet, there are still good reasons to believe in God.

The first reason is simply the fact that the universe exists at all. There is no reason to believe that the universe has to exist, but it obviously does. It makes sense that there would be a being whose existence is necessary, eternal and unchanging to explain the existence of a universe that is contingent, temporal and mutable.

An entire discipline of science, called cosmology, is devoted to studying the origins of the universe. It is fascinating that despite the triumph of secularism in academia, modern cosmologists came to the uncomfortable conclusion that the universe has not always existed and is in the process of “winding down” over the eons. This very inconvenient truth has caused many scientists to work hard at finding a new theory to avoid this conclusion. But to date there is absolutely no evidence for any of these new theories. The motivation for many of these scientists is pretty transparently to avoid the theistic implications of the current theory.

Another good reason to believe in God is the existence of life. There is currently no good scientific theory of abiogenesis, or how life formed from non-living matter by purely natural processes. You will no doubt caution me to avoid a “God of the gaps” mistake. Just because no good theory exists today doesn’t mean we won’t find one in the future. While that’s certainly true, in this case the gap appears to be pretty formidable.

The problem is that random processes would take essentially forever to produce something as complex as a single living cell. The simplest bacterium has about 500 genes. This is far less than humans or fruit flies, but it’s still a dern sight more than the goo at the bottom of Stanley Miller’s Erlenmeyer flask. Evolution doesn’t help you bridge this gap because mutation and natural selection can’t happen until a self-replicating organism exists on which they can operate.

Just as some scientists are busy looking for a new cosmology that avoids the need for a Creator, others are energetically seeking to prove that life will form spontaneously wherever the appropriate conditions exist. It may surprise you to learn that this is one of the main motivations and justifications for the U.S. space program. NASA spends billions of dollars looking for evidence of life, or even complex organic chemicals, in our solar system and beyond. That is the main goal of all the recent robotic probes and landers we have sent to Mars.

The irony is that, even if we find evidence of life on another world, it really doesn’t prove anything about whether God created life or it developed by natural processes. We would still be lacking a good theory to explain how you can get from a prebiotic soup of amino acids to a living organism without the intervention of deity.

There is yet another reason to believe in God that I find even more compelling than these two, but I will save that discussion for my next post.

No Excuses

As a former militant agnostic and devotee of scientific naturalism, I consider these verses from Paul’s letter to the Romans to be one of the most powerful passages in the Bible:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. (Rom 1:18-20 NIV)

In a nutshell, Paul is saying that nature itself is evidence enough for God’s existence, so that no one has any excuse for denying it. Before I became a Christian it seemed to me that just the opposite was true. I believed that the supernatural realm, if it existed at all, was beyond observation. Therefore I could only give credence to natural explanations. I was steeped in a secular scientific worldview. It seemed elementary to me that our eyes only give us evidence for the natural world. Surely all belief in God is just irrational superstition! When I looked at nature I saw the glory of Science, not the glory of God.

I remember when I first became a Christian and came across this passage. I had a hard time understanding it. I was still heavily under the influence of my former way of thinking about nature. It was only with considerable effort that I was able to appreciate what Paul is saying:

• When we see that the universe is vast beyond measure we know that the Creator is powerful beyond comprehension.
• When we see that the universe is orderly and understandable we know that the Creator is a rational being.
• When we see that the universe is intricate, varied, and exquisitely beautiful we know that the Creator delights in his creation.

In a recent sermon our pastor made the point that practically all cultures throughout history have shared two common ideas: belief in a god or gods and belief in life after death. The committed naturalist says evolution gave us these instincts. Is it not just as plausible that our Creator put them there? As our pastor said, we are all born to belief; it takes years of training to become an atheist.

Of course, our God-implanted instinct to worship the transcendent is not so easily eradicated. That is why even the committed secularists today tend to personify Nature, writing it with a capital “N” and speaking reverently of it. In his famous book and TV miniseries Cosmos, Carl Sagan personified and worshiped the universe in this way. His book opens with these words:

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us – there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

Paul warned us of this as well:

They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. (Rom 1:25 NIV)

But the glory of the heavens speaks to us of God’s glory so that, as Paul said, we are without excuse:

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. (Psalm 19:1-4 NIV)

People often ask, if God wants us to believe in him why does he hide himself? But Paul tells us that the evidence is right before our eyes. Indeed, it is written in our hearts.

The Jesus Family Tomb?

Recently the news, er, publicity broke that James Cameron (of Titanic fame) has made a documentary for Discovery Channel called The Lost Tomb of Jesus, presenting conclusive proof that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. No, it turns out he married Mary Magdalene, raised a family, and was buried in a large upper class family tomb in Jerusalem. When they opened it up in 1980, his bones were still in the box – right where he had left them.

The filmmakers express surprise that this might be a controversial claim. Why are Christians so up in arms? Well, let me quickly say that I think many Christians just need to calm down when stories like this hit the media. It’s no secret that the vast majority of the entertainment and media elites are not Christians – that many are in fact militantly anti-Christian. So should we be surprised or upset if they use their access to the mass media outlets for evangelizing their point of view? Mel Gibson did the same, and did it brilliantly, with his The Passion of the Christ. Whatever you think about the merits of his movie, per se, it generated a huge amount of publicity which he leveraged to promote his beliefs.

But, then, I am up in arms about The Lost Tomb of Jesus, at least a little bit. For one thing, it is hard not to be cynical about their intentions with this. Controversy means publicity, and publicity generates an audience, and large audiences mean big bucks for those involved. And nothing will stir up controversy like a story about the world’s biggest religion being a hoax. One suspects that they must have latched onto this project, at least in part, because of how lucrative they thought it would be. In contrast, Mel Gibson has a long established, passionate commitment to his Catholic faith, so I am prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt about his motives.

Another reason to be up in arms is the flimsy nature of the evidence given for such a spectacular claim. This is not just a partisan Christian criticism. There is good reason why the great majority of reputable archaeologists are repudiating the Jesus Tomb theory. It accords with basically nothing we know historically about Jesus of Nazareth. The tomb is in Jerusalem; his family was in Nazareth. Only the well-to-do could afford such a tomb; his family was poor. There is no contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous evidence that Jesus was married, or had children. All historical accounts agree that he was executed by the Romans. He did not live to a ripe old age to be buried surrounded by his extended family. The names on the ossuaries were all quite common in first century Israel. There is nothing remarkable about such a collection of names within one family. The connection with the alleged James ossuary is, to put it politely, tenuous at best. The “patina fingerprinting” test was invented for this project, strictly for the purpose of corroborating a conclusion reached without any other evidence.

Please notice that at no point do any of these arguments appeal to faith or any doctrinal argument. They are accepted by most mainstream archaeologists and historians. Those who dispute such statements generally have an ideological axe to grind. It’s typically theologians and philosophers, not historians, who dispute the basic outline of Jesus’ life as contained in the Gospels: a famous Nazarene whose brief public ministry as an itinerant rabbi was cut short by a brutal public execution. (The miracles, of course, are questioned by unbelievers. After all, people who become convinced of the historicity of the Gospel miracles almost always become Christians.)

On this last point, I must say a further word about the historicity of the New Testament. As I have examined all the arguments against accepting the New Testament as a reliable historical source, I have become convinced that they are all ultimately rooted in one core presupposition: the impossibility of miracles. The unspoken starting place of each analysis is this simple syllogism: “The New Testament contains miracle stories. Miracles stories cannot possibly be true. Therefore the New Testament cannot possibly be true.” Of course I oversimplify the argument by treating the New Testament as a single, monolithic entity. But you get the picture, I think. Now each of us is entitled to our presuppositions, but we shouldn’t try to misrepresent them. You are entitled to say the Gospels are a fairy tale. (You would be wrong, of course!) But if you claim to have proven they are a fairy tale and your argument depends on a presupposition against miracles, then you are guilty of circular reasoning.

Getting back to The Lost Tomb of Jesus, let me summarize by saying this show is simply another attempt to sensationalize a dubious attack on the legitimacy of Christianity. These attacks come with such frequency and regularity that I am disappointed they still gain so much attention for the perpetrators. Haven’t we just been through the Judas Gospel and the Da Vinci Code? The word for believers and unbelievers alike is: don’t put much stock in these latest claims. They’re just a way to sell air time on Discovery Channel.