Human Consciousness

Mark Dunagan
03/04/12 - Sunday Evening

Human Consciousness

“Why should a bunch of atoms have thinking ability?  Why should I, even as I write now, be able to reflect on what I am doing and why should you, even as you read now, be able to ponder my points, agreeing or disagreeing, with pleasure or pain, deciding to refute me or deciding that I am just not worth the effort?  No one, certainly not the Darwinian as such, seems to have any answer to this…The point is that there is no scientific answer” (Michael Ruse, Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? P. 73).

The Naturalist Answer

According to those who believe in Evolution, the physical world is all there is.  At some point the human brain evolved, its processing increasing over time.  When the brain reached a certain level of structure and complexity, consciousness arose, that is, suddenly people developed such things as subjectivity, feelings, hopes, a point of view, self-awareness, and introspection.  This is why some believe the same thing will happen one day to computers, which also will eventually reach a point when they will become so powerful they will start thinking for themselves. Yet  John Searle, a professor of mind at the University of California at Berkeley disagrees, “You can expand the power all you want, hooking up as many computers as you think you need, and they still won’t be conscious, because all they’ll ever do is shuffle symbols” (“Do Brains Make Minds?”, on Closer to Truth). 

The Biblical Answer

Christianity is not the only religion that teaches that man has a spirit or soul, yet there is a difference between the Biblical perspective and that of other religions.  For example, the ancient Greeks believed that man has a soul and yet the soul and body are alien to each other, that the body is something to be escaped.  The Bible does not teach such.  Rather, the Bible teaches that God is the creator of both the body and the soul, and that the body is not an enemy to the soul, but rather something absolutely wonderful (Psalm 139:13-16).   There are many passages that teach that man is much more than a wonderful physical body, that we also have a spirit:

• “The dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:7).
• “And forms the spirit of man within him” (Zechariah 12:2).
• “Do not fear those who kill the body, but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28).
• Jesus clearly taught that man survives the death of the body when He accurately noted that when God spoke of His relationship with such deceased men as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, He spoke of having a continuing relationship with them (Matthew 22:32).
• “Piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit” (Hebrews 4:12).
• “For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead” (James 2:26).

Defining the Spirit

The Bible says that we are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26), that we have an inner man, a spirit (2 Corinthians 4:16-18).  Here is what one writer said, “So we have self-reflection and self-thinking.  Animals have thoughts, but they don’t think about their thinking.  And while we have beliefs about our beliefs, animals don’t” (The Case for a Creator, Lee Strobel, p. 263).  We see the same difference between ourselves and computers.  The computer may be very powerful and able to beat me at chess every time, but a computer has no awareness.  It has no first-person point of view.  It does not think about being a computer.  It never demands, “Hey, I think it's about time someone pays me for all this work I'm doing”. 

Evidence for the Spirit

Scientists have been spending a lot of time exploring the question of human consciousness. 

• Wilder Penfield, the father of modern neurosurgery, performed surgery on thousands of epileptic patients. “Penfield would stimulate electronically 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 was under the control of the electrical current and the other hand under the control of the patient’s mind” (Lee Edward Travis, “Response”, in Arthur C. Custance, The Mysterious Matter of Mind, pp. 95-96).
• Interestingly enough, Penfield also found that no matter how much he probed the cerebral cortex, he said, “There is no place…where electrical stimulation will cause a patient to believe or decide” (Wilder Penfield, The Mystery of the Mind, pp. 77-78).  That is, the brain deals with information, but the mind decides what to believe. Someone said the brain is like a library, while the mind is the librarian. Or, the brain is like a computer, while the mind is the person using it.  This means that the Bible is right in yet another aspect:  Freewill and honesty are involved in believing—and are not simply some sort of chemical reaction. 
• Scientists can know about the brain by studying it, but they cannot know about the mind without asking the person to reveal it.  The brain is not private, but the mind is.  The brain is not invisible, but the mind is. 
• Even unbelievers treat themselves and other people as if they have freewill.  On a daily basis individuals are held accountable for their actions and even sent to prison for the rest of their lives.  Yet if all we are is just physical matter, then no one would have free will.  “That’s because matter is completely governed by the laws of nature...For instance, a cloud, it’s just a material object, and its movement is completely governed by the laws of air pressure, wind movement, and the like.  So if I am a material object, all of the things I do are fixed by my environment, my genetics, and so forth” (Case for a Creator, pp. 255-256). Such thinking has perilous implications:

Problems for the Naturalist

• If our mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of the atoms in my brain—then I should not be held accountable for anything this mere biology does. Nor should I be praised for anything I do.
• I find it interesting that those who believe in Evolution argue that they only look at the facts, yet if their brain evolved by pure chance and if their thoughts, logic, reasoning ability and conclusions are only the results of random processes in their head, then it is truly impossible to discover any “facts”, for there is no guarantee that their brain is working correctly. I have no guarantee that anything that I believe is true, or that anything I am saying or someone else is saying makes any sense.
• Only the Christian “knows” for certain whether or not they are being honest with the facts and that they have come to the right conclusion (1 Timothy 2:4-6).

Important Developments

“Scientists have done studies of the brains of people who worried a lot, and they found that this mental state of worry changed their brain chemistry…So it's not just the brain that causes things to happen in our conscious life; conscious states can also cause things to happen to the brain” (Case for a Creator, p. 267).    No wonder the Bible cautions us about what we choose to believe, what we allow into our brains (Proverbs 4:23; Philippians 4:8), the value of cleaning the inside (Matthew 23:25), and avoiding any hardening from happening and keeping a tender spirit (Hebrews 3:12).  Thus, before you or I mentally allow ourselves to wander down a destructive mental path, remember we are blazing a mental trail in our heads.

Mark Dunagan | mdunagan@frontier.com
Beaverton Church of Christ | 503-644-9017
www.beavertonchurchofchrist.net