Part two: 

What Would Societies Be Like If Our Brains Determined our Thoughts and Behaviors Instead of our Soul or Mind?

 Philosophical materialists—people who think nothing exists but physical matter and natural laws—believe all human mental activities can be reduced to chemical and neurological processes operating strictly within our brains. People are merely physical creatures, our brain only matter, and there is no such thing as an immaterial mind or soul existing distinct from our bodies. They postulate that all human thoughts and emotions, including consciousness, introspection, memory, religion beliefs, tastes in music, political opinions, feelings of fear, love, hate, and all other psychological states of mind are governed (determined) by our genetic makeup as it plays out within our physical brain. There is no immaterial reality. Thus, materialists claim what theists (people who believe in a God) think of as souls are merely the inventions of brain chemistry.

The most obvious consequence of this hypothesis is that what we think as free will, moral conscience, and the ability to reason and make appropriate decisions are merely illusions. Christian scholar and best-selling author, Dinesh D’Souza, describes where this philosophy leads if followed to its logical conclusion:

If determinism [as a feature of materialism] is true, then no one in the world can ever refrain from anything that he or she does [because it’s genetically predetermined]. The whole of morality . . . becomes an illusion.

Our whole vocabulary of praise and blame, admiration and contempt, approval and disapproval would have to be eradicated. If someone murdered his neighbor, or exterminated an entire population, we would have no warrant to punish or even criticize that person because, after all, he was simply acting in the manner of a computer program malfunctioning or a stone involuntarily rolling down a hill.(What’s So Great About Christianity?)

Christians, on the other hand, recognize that all mental activities and events are a product of an immaterial mind distinct from our physical brain.  Theologian and philosopher J.P. Moreland explains:

Substance dualism holds that the brain is a physical thing that has physical properties, and the mind or soul is a mental substance that has mental properties. . . . The soul and the brain can interact with each other, but they are different entities with different properties. While in the body, the soul’s functioning may depend on the proper working of the brain or other organs (e.g., the eyes). Since the soul is not to be identified with any part of the brain or with any particular mental experience, the soul may be able to survive the destruction of the body. (The Soul)

The materialist’s hypothesis not only contradicts what we intuitively sense about the real world, in particular, our understanding of emotions, free will, moral conscience, creativity, and an afterlife, but it has virtually no legitimate scientific, theological, or philosophical support. Recent studies in brain function suggest just the opposite. It’s been demonstrated that human thoughts can only be explained in terms of our immaterial mind existing independent of our physical brain. (See James Le Fanu, Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves.)

This isn’t hard to understand, and I’ll illustrate it a couple ways in next week’s blog post. I’ll start by explaining where our thoughts actually originate—our immaterial mind, not our physical brain. ©