God on the Brain

What Cognitive Science Does (and Does Not) Tell Us about Faith, Human Nature, and the Divine

Brad Sickler

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781433564468
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión y ciencia

The human brain is incredibly complex. Both Christian and secular scholars alike affirm this fact, yet the traditional view of humanity as spiritual beings made in the image of God has come under increased pressure from humanistic and materialistic thinkers who deny that humans are anything more than their physical bodies. Christians have long affirmed that humans are spiritual beings made by God to know and fellowship with him, while the humanist position views humans as merely evolved animals.

Bradley Sickler provides a timely theological, scientific, and philosophical assessment of the human brain, highlighting the many ways in which the gospel informs the Christian understanding of cognitive science. Here is a book that provides a much-needed summary of the Bible's teaching as it sheds light on the brain, with careful interaction with the claims of modern science, arguing that the Christian worldview offers the most compelling vision of the true nature of humanity.

1

The Nature of Humans

While visiting a bookstore recently, I was browsing the magazine racks, looking for something to flip through while I sipped my coffee and waited for my family to finish shopping. What I saw jumped out at me, even though it was typical of the trending topics in science today. On the rack were three science magazines in a row, each advertising its lead article. All three were about the brain. Popular Science featured “Your New Brain: When Humans and Computers Merge.” National Geographic showcased an essay “Your Brain—100 Things You Never Knew.” Scientific American offered “How the Brain Reads Faces: Cracking the Neural Code.”

My first reaction was “That’s interesting.” Then I thought: “But my brain doesn’t read faces, or anything else, for that matter. My brain is surely involved, but it doesn’t read faces—I read faces, and I am not merely my brain.” My third reaction was “There sure is a lot to say about brains!”

It has been said that the nineteenth century was dominated by the science of chemistry, the twentieth century by physics, and the twenty-first will be the century of the brain. Our understanding of that three-pound lump in our skulls is growing rapidly. Our mastery of medical and imaging techniques has progressed apace, along with a growing library of experimental knowledge.

These advances are both interesting and helpful. But, as so often happens with scientific progress, a host of philosophical and theological issues have been dragged in too, often with upsetting consequences. The message from many quarters is that you are just your brain. Programs on public television, radio shows on science topics, magazine articles like those just mentioned, books upon books—all declare a decidedly reductionist, materialistic, anti-spiritual, anti-supernatural perspective that depicts humans as nothing but complicated machines. You are not made in the image of God but are a walking, talking, conscious bag of dirt. While we can all be grateful for how advances in understanding have helped alleviate suffering from a range of maladies—everything from brain tumors to some serious psychoses—there is a lot more to the conversation than just the science. There is a wide array of philosophical and theological issues as well, though they are rarely even recognized.

In this book, we will look at recent scholarship on brains to see how it provides orthodox Christian anthropology with some serious food for thought and, hopefully, develop a framework to think through what it all means. By “anthropology” here we mean theological and philosophical anthropology. Whereas “anthropology” usually refers to the social science study of past and present human societies, what we mean in this context is the nature of humanity: what it is to be human, how we got to be that way, and how that relates to God. It is the metaphysics of the human person. We will cover a wide range of topics from cognitive science, neurophysiology, evolutionary morality, and evolutionary psychology. All of these fields have in common the tendency to treat the brain as the totality of who we are and the story they tend to tell about how we got the brains we have.

How We View Human Nature

To help frame where we will be going, consider the core, traditional, biblical set of beliefs about humanity taught as central aspects of a Christian worldview. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex field, a traditional Christian anthropology holds that we possess an immaterial soul and were made to know God. It teaches that we have the moral law written on our hearts, and that ultimately we will survive the death of our bodies to face judgment for what we do with the power of choice we have. If we are made right with God by turning from sin and embracing Jesus Christ, we will—like Jesus—be raised from the dead and given eternal life in his kingdom. All of these conclusions are drawn from an indispensable concept: humanity is made by God the Creator in his own image. Image bearing is a complex notion, and there are many expositions of what it means, but regardless of the particulars, Christians have always affirmed that it includes being brought into existence intentionally by God in a way that connects our nature to his own. Those ideas—being created intentionally in a way that connects us to God—are central to a biblical understanding of the nature of humanity.

The trend, supposedly based in science, has been to reject this entire description on the grounds that recent discoveries in science have shown it to be false. We have no soul, they say. Belief in God is a fluke of evolution. Freedom and morality are illusions. After the death of our bodies there is simply nothing. In other words, the picture painted by many advocates of the new anthropology could not differ more sharply from the biblical perspective. But do those conclusions actually follow from the evidence, or are they superimposed as a result of materialistic, naturalistic presuppositions? And, maybe even more importantly, does it even matter?

It is worth spending a little time saying why Christian anthropology developed the way it did. Some writers have argued that the Christian view of human nature developed out of an uncritical acceptance of Greek philosophy; they say the Bible itself never urges those beliefs on us. Still others argue that Christian anthropology emerged from ignorance as an attempt to explain humanity by inventing a metaphysic based on the Hebrew mythology of the Old Testament. They say Christian thinkers were trying to understand the phenomenology of human experience but were limited by their lack of scientific insight. We will not explore those lines much further here, because those conclusions seem completely wrong to me. It is my view that Scripture directly affirms the traditional positions we outlined above, and that is what accounts for their prevalence in our philosophy and theology. They are the biblical perspective shared by the patriarchs, the prophets, the apostles, and even Jesus Christ himself.

Let us briefly examine three of these basic elements of Christian anthropology by looking at a few relevant passages of Scripture. In the pages that follow I will explore these issues in much greater detail, so for now we will content ourselves with a very cursory survey.

We Have Souls

First, we will see why the doctrine of souls has been so important in theology and how it emerges from the Bible.

Admittedly, sometimes the teaching about souls is implicit—it is not directly asserted but seems to be implied by what the biblical authors state while directly teaching about something else. The view that we have an immaterial, spiritual aspect to our person is known as dualism, and it has been the majority view of the church based on the teachings of Scripture. For example, when Jesus says in Matthew 10:28, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell,” Jesus is warning his audience about sin, not teaching on metaphysical anthropology. Even so, this passage displays his belief that each of us has a soul, the soul is distinct from the body, and the soul survives the death of the body. A similar assumption is demonstrated during the transfiguration of Christ, when Moses and Elijah appear and speak with Jesus (Matt. 17:3)—and moments later they are no longer present (v. 8). Regular human bodies, especially those that have been dead for centuries, do not behave like that. Clearly, their consciousness extended past the death of their bodies while their souls continued on.

At other times the teaching is more direct. Consider this passage, one of the apostle Paul’s most explicit on the subject:

For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.

So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. (2 Cor. 5:1–8)

As I have already acknowledged, some theologians try to argue around the evident implication of passages like this, but it seems preferable to take it as a plain indication of what Paul thought: we have a soul, it is distinct from our body, and it will survive our death. The body is the residence of something essential to the real us—our spirit. The spirit or soul is housed in the body (and, no doubt, in meaningful ways united with it), but the body is not all we are. We transcend it and will continue to endure after it dies. As James says, “The body apart from the spirit is dead” (2:26).

In theology and philosophy there are several different schools of thought about souls, but we may endorse one of the varieties of dualism without specifying which approach is best. That we are a union of body and soul has been the overwhelming conclusion of Christian thinkers through church history despite their differences over the particulars. As theologian Hans Madueme says,

Some form of soul-body dualism was overwhelmingly the consensus of the church—Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant—either as substance dualism which casts soul and body as distinct substances (with the soul permeating every part of the body) or as hylomorphism which holds the soul as the form of the body (the soul organizes matter to be a living body).1

Among the things I will affirm about the soul, again in keeping with Christian tradition, are that the soul is a basic, unified, continuing, property-bearing immaterial existent with causal powers. That is, it cannot be reduced to something simpler (it is basic) but is a metaphysically fundamental entity. It continues through time (it endures). It has properties and the power to cause things to happen. In particular, its properties are mental properties—the stuff of minds like desires, affections, beliefs, sensations, memories, deliberations of reason, and so on. Souls are immaterial, not made of physical stuff, and they are ultimately the core of who we are. The soul continuing through time as the same substance is what provides us with personal identity in this life and beyond. Whether we use the term “soul,” “spirit,” or “mind,” in this book I will always be referring to the same thing: the immaterial aspect of our being.

We Are Meant to Know God

The second element to introduce and offer a very brief biblical justification for is that we are made to know God—belief in God is a natural part of our nature as creatures made in his image. A more robust development of this point will come in the following chapters, but it is important for us to get oriented to the biblical teaching that we were made to know God. We do not discover God in the same way we dis...