MIND AND MATERIALISM

 

 

Is investigative or creative thought possible if we are simply a matter of biochemical reactions (materialism). These processes are predictable, formulaic, and cannot escape from their predetermined repetitive patterns into creative thought. Why? Because thought cannot be predetermined biochemically without automatically producing the same invariable patterns or results.

 

In contrast, vision, as amazing as it is, is the result of repetitive and precisely predetermined biochemical processes. They must be in order to precisely mirror the external world in real time. They cannot deviate or require thought, deliberations, and adjustments that are necessary for thoughtful discovery. Instead, seeing is a matter of precise formulaic repetitions of biochemical processes in predetermined sequences.

 

Thought is entirely different. We can command our mind to go where we want it to go. We cannot do that with sight. We cannot command our eyes to see what they do not see. They are accountable to a different system, as is our heartbeat, which is automatic.

 

In contrast, thought transcends biochemistry as does consciousness. Both require a level of freedom to perform.

 

These distinctions should discount materialism and open the door to something far grander. The many thousands of examples of ID pointing unmistakably to the existence of God, demonstrate the need for more than evidence, but a change of heart:

 

·       “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” (Romans 1:19-21)

 

When we harden our heart against God, it is hardened against the truth in general, as we condemn ourselves to live in the darkness of denial, eternally running from the Light of God manifested throughout His creation and even our minds (John 3:19-20).

WHO ARE WE? THE WAY WE THINK ABOUT OURSELVES WILL EITHER ENNOBLE OR DEGRADE US

Are our minds just complex bio-chemical machines – wet computers?

A computer can only see what it is programmed to see. Can our minds take us beyond our neuronal programming? Can we examine the paths that our thoughts take and go beyond them?

However, it seems that my mind is a tool at my disposal. It is my horse and I hold the whip. I can contemplate myself and make adjustments and corrections. I am free to choose against my impulses or for them.

Will my mind take me to where I want it to go, to investigate what has previously been uninvestigated, to think new thoughts, clearer insights, and to go beyond my present understanding? If my intuitions are reliable, I’d have to answer “yes!” If they are unreliable, perhaps I am just dreaming?

Instead, it seems that my mind is not locked into deterministic bio-chemical, formulaic circuits and patterns. It has taken flight and can go where it wills.

Who has given my mind its wings? The One who has created me in His likeness, the One who awaits me to join Him in His eternal home!

CAN IRRATIONALITY PRODUCE RATIONALITY?

This is precisely what atheistic, naturalistic evolution maintains -- that mindless natural selection produced a thinking mind with billions of neurons and trillions of neuronal connections.

Atheist turned Christian, C.S. Lewis, doubted that this was possible. He compared mindless evolution to someone with a damaged brain:

·       "Whenever you know what the other man is saying is wholly due to his complexes or to a bit of bone pressing on his brain, you cease to attach importance to it. But if naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes. Therefore, all thoughts would be completely worthless. Therefore, naturalism is completely worthless. If this is true, then we can know no truths. It cuts its own throat."

Although I sympathize with his reasoning, I think that it will leave the naturalist undaunted. Why? Because he already believes that our eyes are able to perfectly mirror the physical world because of a mindless process. If our eyes can picture this world, why cannot our thinking also capture this world?

However, our thinking seems to transcend what our eyes can do. While our eyes can see, possibly because of deterministic and invariable laws of biochemistry, which do not require freewill, it is much harder to conceive of our thinking in this way.

Thinking can only be of a very rudimentary nature if it is entirely determined by unvarying biochemical forces. This would mean that our thinking is determined by laws locked into predictable patterns.

However, this is precisely what human thought is not! Rather, for thought to discover truth, it needs freedom and flexibility that deterministic laws do not allow. These forces simply repeat the same patterns. Instead, thought has to be able to take wings and break out of its social, biological, and psychological bonds.

I had this experience as I began to grow into Christ. As a new Christian, I had the strange realization that there were thoughts I wanted to think, but could not, places I wanted to take my mind, where it refused to go.

Over the years I have experienced a greater mental freedom to explore and to discover. I think that this is the same freedom an artist experiences.

However, if all thinking is predetermined, then it would have been impossible for me to experience in such a tangible way the liberation from my mental prison.

Materialism, Atheism, and the Denial of Freewill

If we start with an impoverished worldview – one that can’t embrace all of the nuances of reality – it means that we have a faulty worldview and that our conclusions will be skewed.

The atheist starts out with the presupposition or worldview that there is no spiritual reality, just matter and energy – what you see is what you get. Accordingly, thinking and choosing must also exclusively be a matter of chemical-electrical activity.

This understanding leaves little or no room for freewill. Consequently, there is no basis for any thought, choice or decision somewhat independent of our steady stream of chemical reactions. Every thought and decision is therefore the result of prior brain chemistry.

Even as far back as 1871, Thomas Huxley, a zealous advocate of Charles Darwin, advocated for this position:

• Mind is a function of matter [and nothing beyond that], when that matter has attained a certain degree of organization.

Similarly, in his new book, “Free Will,” atheist Sam Harris writes, “Free will is an illusion.” What feels like freewill is nothing more than chemical processes.

With such an impoverished worldview, counter-factual and counter-intuitive conclusions quickly multiply. Here are several:

A denial of freewill goes against everything we intuitively know about ourselves and our lives. When I make any decision, like flipping through the TV channels, it seems that I am freely choosing one station over another. Of course, like anyone else, I am subject to powerful biological-genetic forces. Admittedly, I am biologically predisposed to not like loud and glitzy programming. Therefore, some will say, “Well, this proves you’re pre-programmed to make certain choices.”

Although there is truth in this claim, it falls far short of proving that pre-programming is the only factor involved in my choices.

Of course, Harris and the other atheists will respond, “Your experience of free choice is just an illusion.” However, if something that I experience with such clarity is illusory, perhaps my own existence and the existence of this world are also illusory. Perhaps I’m just someone else’s consciousness. Perhaps, as some Buddhists claim, we are just part of one universal consciousness and lack any individual existence.

However, if our intuitions and perceptions are simply part of this great delusion, then science and all reason are also part of this same delusion, along with Harris’ thinking. If our thinking and perceiving are illusory, so too are Harris’ challenge and the entirety of his book.

The extent of freewill differs among people. The heroin addict is more constrained in his free choices than before he became addicted. Christians report that, in Christ, they have come to enjoy a greater measure of freedom. They are not as constrained by their psychological needs for approval and success as they had been. If these observations of relative freedom are true, then the narrow, unvarying materialistic view of the atheists is invalidated. From their view, everyone is equally and completely controlled by brain chemistry. Consequently, there can be no room for varying degrees of freewill – the very thing we find!

We can perceive a distinction between purely chemical determination of our behavior and our relatively free responses. Wilder Penfield, the father of modern neurosurgery performed experiments demonstrating that brain activity doesn’t seem to account for all of our mental experience. Lee Edward Travis sums up his findings this way:

• Penfield would stimulate electrically the proper motor cortex of conscious patients and challenge them to keep one hand from moving when the current was applied. The patient would seize this hand with the other hand and struggle to hold it still. Thus one hand under the control of the electrical current and the other hand under the control of the patient’s mind fought against each other. Penfield risked the explanation that the patient had not only a physical brain that was stimulated to action but also a nonphysical reality that interacted with the brain. (The Mysterious Matter of the Mind, 95-96)

There appears to be a distinction between brain chemistry and a nonphysical reality – the home of freewill. J.P. Moreland commented on another interesting aspect of Penfield’s findings:

• No matter how much Penfield probed the cerebral cortex, he said, “There is no place…where electrical stimulation will cause a patient to believe or to decide.” (The Case for the Creator, Lee Strobel, 258)

If our mind is no more than a physical brain, then we should expect that electrical charges could stimulate every kind of response. However, this isn’t the case. It seems that our choices and beliefs cannot be entirely accounted for by the physical brain. Meanwhile,

atheism bases its non-freewill claim on the “observations” that everything is material. However, this does not seem to be the complete story.

There seems to be a nonphysical basis for thinking. Strobel writes:

• In their journal article, Sam Parnia and Peter Fenwick, a neuropsychiatrist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, describe their study of sixty-three heart attack victims who were declared clinically dead but were later revived and interviewed. About ten percent reported having well-structured, lucid thought processes, with memory formation and reasoning, during the time that their brains were not functioning. The effects of oxygen starvation or drugs – objections commonly offered by skeptics – were ruled out as factors. (Strobel, 251)

This contradicts the atheistic narrative that thinking and choosing depend exclusively upon brain activity. In order to maintain their narrow materialistic worldview, the atheist is forced to discount this kind of study along with the many accounts of extra-body experiences.

If our brain chemistry compels all of our choices, then we cannot truly be culpable and responsible moral agents. This idea is humanly demeaning. This is very significant because it will affect how we view ourselves, our fellow humans and also how we treat them. If humans are no more than sophisticated chemical machines, there is a greater likelihood that we will use them like machines.

The atheist might agree that their view of freewill seriously compromises our estimation of humanity. However, he often retorts, “I’m more interested in truth than in what feels good.”

However, the denial of freewill goes far beyond the question of a lower estimation of humanity. This denial undermines everything upon which civilization is based – justice, right and wrong, reward and punishment.

If biology alone made the rapist rape, then it is not just to punish him. After all, he could make no other choice. Consequently, no punishment is just and no reward is deserved. It’s just a matter of chemistry not morality.

These ideas mean the destruction of civilization, and the atheists recognize this. Consequently, they are scrambling to resurrect the concept of moral responsibility, which they have undermined. Professor of Philosophy, Chad Meister, writes about Harris’s muddled scrambling:

• While in Harris’s view we lack free will and moral culpability for our actions, he nonetheless believes that we can still be “blameworthy” for our actions. How so? “Because,” he says, “what we do subsequent to conscious planning tends to most fully reflect the global properties of the our minds” (Christian Research Journal, Volume 35, Number 4, 59)

 

Oddly, Harris claims that we can be “blameworthy” without being morally culpable. This is a blatant contradiction. If our “conscious planning” and what we do subsequently are strictly the products of brain chemistry, then there still can be no basis for either “blameworthiness” or moral culpability. They die a common death with the denial of freewill.

Some atheists are candid enough to admit that this is a real problem for their worldview. However, they continue to bring charges against the burglar who tore up their apartment. In this, their actions contradict their worldview. While they seek justice, they admit that they lack any possible basis for this concept in their pre-determined chemical world.

The denial of freewill seems to also constitute a denial of any meaningful thought. All brain chemistry is subject to the laws of nature. Consequently, all thinking and choosing are the result of formulas. However, formulas and laws produce repeated and predictable patterns, not information, not the nuances of thought. Clearly, the books that we write and the discoveries that we make don’t reflect repeated, formulaic. Instead, these creations reflect something greater – reasoning, the weighing of evidence for and against various paradigms. All of this requires something beyond what chemistry can offer. It requires the subtle and gloriously nuanced ability to freely choose among various thoughts and ideas.

Why are people atheists? Why do we trap ourselves in narrow boxes, which effectively obstruct our vision? One atheist friend explained to me the great relief he had experienced once he adopted the no-freewill position. He was no longer responsible for his behavior, and his sense of guilt became greatly diminished. He is what he is. Who can blame him!

While I can sympathize with this, Christ offers another way – a way to not only diminish guilt but to obliterate it. Besides, Christ obliterates our guilt in a way that doesn’t infringe upon moral responsibility. He replaces gratitude for guilt, gladness in service for gutless, going-with-the-flow biological determinism.

When a worldview fails to work, when it can’t be coherently lived out, we should be free to discard or modify it. This represents sanity, but sanity has no place within biological determinism.