Can We Believe in God in an Age of Science? Are Humans Merely Material? - Peter S. Williams

let let's look a little bit at anthropos that humans and particularly mind and body as an issue anthropology again from the Greek anthropos and logos literally means knowledge of humans philosophical anthropology seeks to answer essential kind of first order question questions about humans including are humans merely material things or do they have a a nonphysical a a supernatural aspect to them beyond the human body would be a key question in this area the belief that the human mind is nothing but the brain if you like is called physicalism you're just a physical object uh Owen Flanigan for example Embraces physicalism when he says there are no such things as souls or non-physical Minds the mind is the brain here is a a song on this theme that I'll I'll play you in a few moments um written by the musician Stuart John Wilston home uh it's a song called Blood and Bones he went to an exhibition uh called The bodyw Works exhibition that has people who've donated their bodies to science uh and those bodies have been preserved and in this exhibition are set up in various kind of uh Tableau of everyday life as it were and you can go around and kind of see the the inner workings and different levels of the of the human body and reflecting upon this exhibition uh John wrote uh this song um it's kind of a a lament or a recum for the traditional understanding of human beings as creatures who have souls or Spirits or Minds that are something above and beyond the purely physical reality on display in this kind of exhibition and he says in the chorus in the orange here that he keeps coming back to it seems to me seems to me there's more to this than meets the eye something more than just the life we're living without a soul where nothing more than Blood and Bones seems to him but in the face of the the the cultural authority of the kind of naturalistic scientific materialistic physicalist description pervade in our culture through such exhibitions and TV documentaries and so on and so forth he feels he has to give up on that traditional View and towards the the end of the song it turns into after an instrumental that I won't play you because it's quite a long song he gets into the the Latin words of the requium requim atern and requ eternum the death of that traditional view of humanity belief that the mind is more than just the brain that we're more than just Blood and Bone is often called dualism because it recognizes the existence of dual reality types the mental and the physical there different types of reality now there are of course different types of dualism that we have uh not the time to go into but all dualist believe that physicalism is false and that persons are or include something nonphysical Theologian John Cooper argues that the biblical view of human Constitution is what he calls some kind of holistic dualism that is it's it's not like the platonic Greek View that we're just these Souls who are kind of imp rised in these bodies that we should kind of long to be free of this gross bodly physical life and go off into the sort of disembodied afterlife forever and that'd be great our souls are kind of in some way intended to be integrated with bodily life so he calls that holistic dualism that is that the Bible presents humans as naturally embodied beings unlike Angels say who are naturally speaking non-embodied although they seem to be able to take on bodies when they appear and looks forward to human re-embodiment at the resurrection so there's something positive about the physical aspect of humanity in the biblical accounts that you don't get in the ancient Greek philosopher Hugo Manel observed that the principal hope of Christians from the earliest times has been in the resurrection of the body though they have generally also expected an interim stage of survival as disembodied Souls respects to Arguments for dualism that's a large area of literature and I'm sure I've recommended some readings for that in the handouts that have been provided again through the Forum alongside the the Powerpoints but to quote uh British philosopher Keith Ward uh materialism or physicalism is immensely counterintuitive it conflicts with our Common Sense view that all human knowledge begins from personal experience that we have thoughts and feelings that know one else can experience that we are free to plan the future and that our intentions make a real difference to the world in short materialism has a major problem with Consciousness it looks as though there is a clear distinction between the spiritual and the material and that they are different in kind uh and I think that's a kind of um not an end to the discussion but an important starting point for the discussion the agnostic philosopher Michael Ruth says I don't think a naturalistic account of the Mind Body problem has been offered and I'm frankly doubtful as to whether one could be offered you could view this as a failure to rebutt the the on the face of it the primary facia case for dualism if you want more on the case for dualism and this kind of primer faer approach there's a couple of relevant chapters in My Philosophy textbook a faithful guide to philosophy what does science say well as agnostic Anon o' Hair Says evolutionary biology and psychology can give partial accounts of particular mental functions but these explanations such as they are assume that we do have Consciousness thought and experience what they do not explain and what we have hardly any handle on at all is how Consciousness thought and experience can be produced by material processes at all the most we can do is to correlate these mental phenomena with brain activity but however fine grained these accounts get they do nothing to solve the basic Enigma which is how mental States and experience can emerge from physical matter brain Imaging scientist Sharon Dirks in her book am I just my brain says the view that there is no soul comes largely from voices within neuroscience and philosophy who believe that we are living in a solely Material World in other words that view is coming from a philosophical worldview perspective not from the actual kind of empirical science as it were she says the scientific method offers third person observations whereas conscious experience is encountered in the first person a decision about the nature of Consciousness cannot ultimately be reached on the basis of science it really comes down to a personal world viiew we come to a point that was made earlier CS Lewis famously argued that acts of thinking are no doubt events but they're a very special sort of event they are about something other than themselves and can be true or false however he argued physical events are not about anything and cannot not be true or false hence thinking and reasoning events in our minds cannot be reduced to nothing but physical events in our brains because the former possessed qualities that the latter cannot the quality of being about something and the quality of being true Lewis argued we're compelled to admit between the thoughts of a terrestrial astronomer and the behavior of matter several light years away that particular relation we call truth but this relation has no meaning at all if we try to make it exist between the matter of the star and the astronomer's Brain considered as a lump of matter the brain may be in all sorts of relations to the star no doubt is in a spatial relation in a Time relation and but to talk of one bit of matter as being true about another bit of matter seems to me to be nonsense as atheist Raymond Talis acknowledged intentionality tears the seamless fabric of the causally closed material Universe it it points in the direction opposite to causation indeed Alex Rosenberg argues trenchant that no chunk of matter can just by itself be about another chunk of matter without a mind to interpret the first chunk of matter as being about the second chunk says the brain can't have thoughts about Paris or about anything else for that matter says piling up a lot of neural circuits that are not about anything can't turn them into a thought about stuff out there in the world one clump of matter can't be about another clump of matter he's a materialist he said you don't have your soul you just are your brain didn't he yes he did he also says we have thoughts about things he says Consciousness tells you in no uncertain terms what the content of your thought is what your thought is about it's about the statement that Paris is the capital of France that's the thought you're thinking it just can't be denied you can't be wrong about the content of your thought how does he hold these two perspectives together well you can't hold them together they're contradictory they form this argument one purely physical realities cannot have thoughts about anything two we have thoughts about things from which you deduce the conclusion that must be true if both of those premises are true that therefore we are not purely physical realities and Rosenberg argued for both premise one and premise 2 the idea that one species is unlike all the others orientated not just towards its own increased propensity but towards truth with the capital t is as UND darwinian as the idea that every human being has a built-in moral compass said Richard Roy Thomas Nagel who I mentioned earlier evolutionary naturalism provides an account of our capacities that undermines their reliability and in so doing undermines itself he points out so in general if materialism is true then physicalism about people must be true and if of course if dualism is true then physicalism and materialism must be false and indeed that would give us at least some reason to think that theism is true to start answering the question we had from the gentleman one Ray back there as philosopher JP Morland argues it's it's hard to see how finite Consciousness human consciousness could result from the the rearrangement of brute matter that as Rosenberg argues can't have thoughts about things for example it is easier to see how a conscious being with a capital B could produce finite consciousness so there's there's a a worldview disagreement a philosophical argument going on here which is really the main issue um rather than actually the the debate really taking place at the scientific level as much as that might have to to contribute

Channel: FOCLOnline

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Keywords: scientific apologetics, Christianity and science, arguments for creation, is God real, intelligent design, worldview

Id: 0Guusfwopwk

Length: 15min 28sec (928 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2024