MIND OVER MATTER

Mind Over Matter

Today’s Darwinian Evolutionists, because they have taken Darwin’s Theory to its logical conclusion, have had to adopt an Atheist position. However, for Charles Darwin (1809-92), and his forerunner Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), the problem of the origin of mind, though irreconcilable to their respective theories of Evolution, was somewhat mitigated by their belief in God as the First Cause. Regarding Lamarck and Darwin, wrote Charles Hodge in 1872:

Maid of the Loch, Loch Lomond

God, says Lamarck, created matter; God, says Darwin, created the unintelligent living cell; both say that, after that first step, all else follows by natural law, without purpose and without design. No man can believe this, who cannot also believe that all the works of art, literature, and science in the world are the products of carbonic acid, water, and ammonia.[29]

In the penultimate sentence of his following summary Hodge makes the further point that Darwin’s theory assumes an impossibility. Says Hodge:

Mr. Charles Darwin... accounts for the origin of all the varieties of plants and animals by the gradual operation of natural causes. In his work on the Origin of Species, he says... all animals and plants are descended from some one prototype....

Darwin refers the origin of species mainly to the laws of nature operating ab extra – killing off the weak or less perfect, and preserving the stronger or more perfect.... Darwin holds that they [new species] arise by a slow process of very minute changes....

It shocks the common sense of unsophisticated men to be told that the whale and the hummingbird, man and the mosquito, are derived from the same source... The theory in question cannot be true, because it is founded on the assumption of an impossibility. It assumes that matter does the work of mind....[30]

Thus, it is the opinion of Hodge that the Materialist confuses mind with matter. But, what is mind? Where is it from? First off, mind and brain must not be confused as synonymous terms (e.g., as does the Materialist). For the mind is more than a series of random thought-producing sequential electro-chemical-impulses firing off in the grey matter! Properly understood, the brain with its electrical impulses or chemical-exchanges only accommodates thought. It does not originate thinking. This is because production is not the same as origination. Whereas production simply describes a process of replication, origination points to its creator – it points to its originator.

In the final analysis, to replicate anything there first needs be an original to copy. Thus biological life is able to accommodate biological functions – such as human thinking – only because there exists beforehand a thinking being able to originate and then sustain that biological life. We refer to the eternal Triune God of the Bible as that original thinking Being who is able to originate. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) while doing scientific research said that he was ‘thinking God’s thoughts after Him.’ Simply put: as creatures of His creation we are to think God’s thoughts after Him.

Since God thinks, and is Spirit (without a body or parts), a mind doesn’t necessarily need matter (such as a brain) to think. E.g., created angelic beings have no bodies, but are able to think rationally. The disembodied spirits of men in the present intermediate states of Heaven and Hell are also able to think. Thus at the back of all thinking is the great originator of thinking, the Triune God of Christianity. Thus rational man – in thinking God’s thoughts after Him – is merely replicating or (re)producing that which originated in the very mind of God.

We see something of God’s general upkeep of His creation expressed by the Psalmist who, thinking God’s thoughts after Him, says of God: ‘He causes the grass to grow for the cattle, and vegetation for the service of man, that he may bring forth food from the earth’ Psalm 104:14. Also thinking God’s thoughts after Him, the Prophet Isaiah writes, ‘As a beast goes down into the valley, and the Spirit of God causes him to rest, so You lead Your people to make Yourself a glorious name’ Isaiah 63:14. Therefore, God (who is Spirit) by His Spirit acts upon matter – causing grass to grow and animals to rest. Thus we are reflecting God on a creaturely level when we too act upon matter (i.e., when our immaterial minds work with and through our material bodies).

Paul Garbett is helpful in the area of mind and brain where he says,

Whilst our brains process information received from the world, it is the mind that chooses what to do with that information. Whilst the mind uses the brain as a processing unit, the mind is more than just a brain. This is, in fact, a provable hypothesis: Scientists have discovered that it is possible to electrically stimulate part of the brain to cause the involuntary movement of an arm, for example. When the patient was asked to control the arm, they struggle to hold it still using their other arm. This demonstrates that whilst one arm was under the control of the electrically stimulated brain, the other was under the control of the mind. Thus, this experiment demonstrates that the mind is something in addition to the physical brain. The best explanation for this, and a host of other human functions already mentioned, is that a person is an immaterial being that inhabits a physical body (including the brain) – as the Bible suggests. The interaction between material brain and this immaterial soul is what we understand the ‘mind’ to be. It is where our true self engages with the world we perceive through the senses.[31]

Though the reflection of God can be seen in the Biblical revelation of angels and, to a lesser extent, can be seen in animals, man alone is the image of God. And, since that image became distorted by the fall of man, our thinking also replicates or produces the corruption that originated with Adam disobeying God by eating the fruit forbidden him by God. God cursed the ground when Adam sinned against Him. Man is subject to futility and frustration due to his bondage to corruption and decay. Thus things go wrong. And as our thinking has, through our sin, become disconnected from God (who is Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of man, and, by extension, creation), so too our minds have become somewhat out of sync with our bodies. We have to train hard to get our bodies to perform to the peak of their ability. The peak of fitness is invariably frustrated through disease, injury and/or old age. 

The disconnection of mind and body is fully realised at the point of physical death. Before that we may experience anything from full paralysis of the body to the less severe loss of one or more of our senses. In both of these physical conditions the mind fails to receive from the body data required to function properly and in turn the body with its senses fails to execute the tasks ordered by the mind.

Says Dutch Calvinist Herman Bavinck (1854-1921),

Though human persons are not merely physical beings, all their activities are bound to the body and dependent on it, not just the vegetative and animal functions, but also the intellectual ones of thinking and willing. Although our brains are not the cause of our higher faculties of knowing and desiring, they are nevertheless the bearer and organ of these faculties. Every malfunction in the brain results in the abnormal functioning of the rational mind.[32]

Arguably the greatest of American theologians, the Calvinist Jonathan Edwards in the 18^th century made the following comment about the union of the mind with the body,

The mind is so united to the body, that an alteration is caused in the body, it is probable, by every action of the mind. By those acts that are very vigorous, a great alteration is very sensible; at some times, when the vigour of the body is impaired by disease, especially in the head, almost every action causes a sensible alteration of the body.[33]

In his fallen state man is prone also to all sorts of mental disorders. However, just as God causes the grass to grow and the beasts to rest in the valley, so God also can cause madness in human beings for His own purpose – as the mighty king Nebuchadnezzar learnt: ‘This is the decree of the Most High, which has come upon my lord the king, they shall drive you from men, your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field, and they shall make you eat grass like oxen. They shall wet you with the dew of heaven, and seven times shall pass over you, till you know that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whoever He chooses’ Daniel 4:24&25.

We see that God, by His Spirit, is active in His creation, causing even the grass to grow, moving the beasts of the field, and directing the thoughts of fallen men – even in their madness. Of course, the Materialist would deny all of this! He would deny that the Most High, with His Supreme Mind, is behind all thought-processes of angel, man, and beast. Thus by denying the mind and by restricting his study only to matter the Materialist leaves himself unable to explain the origin of thought, whether that thought is rational or other.

Hodge again points at the heart of Materialism’s problem:

Materialism is that system which ignores the distinction between matter and mind, and refers all the phenomena of the world, whether physical, vital, or mental, to the functions of matter.[34]

              Materialism is extremist in that it denies spirit, and is the antithesis of Idealism. Says Francis Nigel Lee,

Materialistic philosophy presupposes that the universe is basically matter, and idealistic philosophy presupposes that the universe is basically spirit. Each of these philosophical isms or heresies precludes the other and attempts to give a complete account of the universe in terms of its own basic presuppositions.

                            It is obvious that the Bible is opposed to both materialism and idealism.[35]








Excerpted from my book The Nexus: The True Nature of Nature.
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