Can the Brain Be Trusted if There is no Mind?

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There’s a former Christian who has written book about the best way to kill God. It seems if you don’t agree with him, you are brainwashed. I’ve seen this type of language. “My books are about killing God,” says Philip Pullman, the award-winning author of the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. For a critique of Pullman’s worldview, see Tony Watkins, Dark Matter: Shedding Light on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy His Dark Materials. Pullman wrote as the antithesis of C.S. Lewis. It seems that Pullman needed the Christians Lewis and John Milton for his works.[1] He borrows conceptually from Lewis and literarily from Milton’s use of “His dark materials” and “the golden compass,”[2] titles of two of his trilogy.

As anti-Christian as Pullman’s works are, he never could have written them if he had not borrowed from Christian literature, science, reason, art, the way the world works (and how fictional worlds do not work), and morality from the biblical conception of reality. Readers must suspend the stable nature of reality to enjoy fictional worlds, but we must always come back to reality.

In Pullman’s world and that of atheists, there can only be unaccounted for evolved brains but no mind since the mind is not material. How can an evolved brain be trusted? How do we ultimately know that the material substance of the brain and the firing of its electrical synapses is perceiving reality correctly? Lewis describes the problem well.

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It’s like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course, I can’t trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.[3]

Atheists cast the burden of proof to prove God’s existence, but what proof can be evaluated accurately by evolved bodily tissue encased in a bone cabinet called a skull? The following is from the television show X-Files:

DANA SCULLY: “Electrons chasing each other through a circuit—that isn’t life, Mulder.”

FOX MULDER: “Yeah, but what are we but impulses? Electrical and chemical through a bag of meat and bones. You’re the scientist. You tell me.”[4]

As J.B.S. Haldane famously stated, “It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motion of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”[5]

Lewis expanded on Haldane’s materialist logic.

If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on bio-chemistry, and bio-chemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions…. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself.”[6]

The April 2002 Discover magazine cover shows a red marble that’s said to be the “ACTUAL SIZE” of the universe. We’re told that this passes for science.

“The universe burst into something from absolutely nothing-zero, nada. And as it got bigger, it became filled with even more stuff that came from absolutely nowhere. How is that possible? Ask Alan Guth. His theory of inflation helps explain everything.”[7]

If the universe was once the size of a marble, then we are even less significant.

Atheism is a belief system—a faith. Atheists believe the cosmos spontaneously appeared.

Lewis gets to the point when he writes that laws “produce no events…. Bookkeeping, continued to all eternity, could never produce one farthing…. Bookkeeping needs something else (namely, real money put into the account) and metre needs something else (real words, fed into it by a poet) before any income or any poem can exist. If anything is to exist at all, then the Original Thing must be, not a principle nor a generality, much less an ‘ideal or a ‘value,’ but an utterly concrete fact.”[8]

There are consequences to such beliefs.

It is said that modernism is a blind man in an alley at midnight looking for a black cat that is there. Postmodernism is that you are looking for a black cat that isn’t there. The ultimate hell on earth is that no one made me, nobody cares about me, nobody loves me. I came from nowhere. I’m going nowhere, and nothing has any ultimate meaning. I am the center of the universe, and it’s all resting on me, and I will create my own meaning.[9]

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[1] See C. S. Lewis’s book A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942).

[2] Northern Lights was published as The Golden Compass in North America.

[3] C.S. Lewis, The Case for Christianity (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1951), 32.

[4] “Kill Switch,” X-Files (Season 5, Episode 11).

[5] Possible Worlds and Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927), 209.

[6] C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry,” delivered at the Oxford Socratic Club, 1944, published in They Asked for a Paper (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962), 164-165.

[7] Discover (April 2002).

[8] C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1947).

[9] Taken from https://www.facebook.com/reel/1790530011515962

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Source: https://americanvision.org/posts/can-the-brain-be-trusted-if-there-is-no-mind/