Is God dead?| A mind and body

Last week, we posed a series of questions designed to make us think about a unique capacity common among human beings but nonexistent in the rest of the animal kingdom. That excellent characteristic is termed the duality of man. The 18th-century philosopher Gottfried Leibnitz said, “If we liken the human brain to a factory, we could see any number of movable parts, but we could never see the thinking itself.” Unsurprisingly, the Darwinists have no answer as to where self-consciousness comes from. Although all people, believers and non-believers alike, agree that there is an immaterial mind, the problem for the Darwinist seems to be that there is no logical, scientific way to explain where self-consciousness comes from or how it could have evolved from inert atoms in the animal brain. Yet self-consciousness very much exists all the same.

If the First Cause, Designer and Creator of all creation, was purposeful in his design and creation, and if humans were created with both a body and a soul (or mind), what can be the purpose of that? If the soul is the footing and foundation for the continuity of personhood, why do humans alone possess these characteristics? From a Darwinian perspective, there is no benefit to survivability obtained by humans having both a body and a soul. The concept of human mind/body dualism is quite interesting, considering all the other animals have survived exceptionally well without the attribute of true self-consciousness, or we might say, without a soul. Some animals, such as the apex predators and the higher primates, have no doubt excelled in their particular environments. Orthodox Christian doctrine holds that human beings, on the other hand, have a material body created from the “dust of the ground” and an immaterial “spirit breathed into them” by the direct agency of God, who is Spirit (Gen 1:7). So, there is a certain level of inferred complexity here in mind/body dualism. Thinking back a few weeks ago on Michael Behe’s work concerning Irreducible Complexity, we can say that human composition, being of both a material body and an immaterial soul, is an irreducibly complex design.

From this idea of mind/body dualism, we can add a few more brush strokes to our Christian Worldview Portrait. As we have moved along in our back-porch conversation with the Bible skeptic Michael, we have been attempting to paint him a picture in order to display some of the “things that can be clearly seen” in nature that suggest the existence of a Creator (Rom 1:19ff). These are some of the crucial things (aside from the Bible) in which the Christian worldview is grounded. We have looked at the cosmos and determined it appears to have been created with intentionality. The same holds for the design and incredible fine-tuning of Earth itself. Now, here, we observe that humans are constituted of both a body and a soul, which also speaks to the intentionality of the First Cause. Remember, a worldview must answer three big questions: “How did I get here?” “What does it mean to be human?” and “What will happen to me when I die.” Mind-body dualism is what it means to be uniquely human. The human beings that God freely chose to create consist of two substances: one material and one immaterial; one body being uniquely human, and one spirit being similar in substance to God, who is Spirit. It is

only because of this design that man stands at the apex of the animal kingdom. He stands at the apex by exclusive virtue of his capacity to know that he is a knower; he knows what it is like to know what it is like to be himself. Anthony O’Hear is helpful here, writing, “The presence of thought, reflection, and self-conscious belief is what makes human activity different from the conscious but unreflective behavior of non-linguistic animals.” Undoubtedly, the human species has been gifted with many unique attributes of which body/soul dualism is both primary and foundational. Humans are truly blessed and have been gifted with this phenomenal and unique composition, a composition that the Darwinists cannot explain—a composition that is so radically different and so radically distant from the next lower species.

One additional reason we know human beings are blessed with mind/body dualism is that there are things that undeniably move our souls, things taken in as stimuli through the senses that stir deep emotions within us. Of these stimuli, it is beauty that reigns supreme—not only natural beauty but man-made beauty from the arts, music, literature, sculpture, painting, and a host of other mediums. Join us next week as we investigate beauty as soul food in order to reaffirm mind/body dualism as uniquely human and purposeful. All of this and more with an ever-steady eye toward the ever-present question: Is God Dead?

Gloria in excelsis Deo!