The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [134]
Said William Dembski of the Conceptual Foundations of Science at Baylor University: “Kurzweil is peddling science fiction and bad philosophy.” 8
As fascinating as this debate over futuristic computers has been, there still remains a much more important controversy over human consciousness. Amazingly, many scientists and philosophers are now concluding that the laws of physics and chemistry cannot explain the experience of consciousness in human beings. They are convinced that there is more than just the physical brain at work, but there also is a nonmaterial reality called the “soul,” “mind,” or “self” that accounts for our sentience.
In fact, they cite its very existence as strong evidence against the purely naturalistic theory of Darwinian evolution and in favor of a Creator who imbued humankind with his image.
THE CONTROVERSY OVER CONSCIOUSNESS
One scientist whose opinions were reversed on the issue is Wilder Penfield, the renowned father of modern neurosurgery. He started out suspecting that consciousness somehow emanated from the neural activities in the brain, where synapses can fire an astounding ten million billion times a second. “Through my own scientific career, I, like other scientists, have struggled to prove that the brain accounts for the mind,” he said. 9
But through performing surgery on more than a thousand epileptic patients, he encountered concrete evidence that the brain and mind are actually distinct from each other, although they clearly interact. Explained one expert in the field:
Penfield would stimulate electrically the proper motor cortex of conscious patients and challenge them to keep one hand from moving when the current was applied. The patient would seize this hand with the other hand and struggle to hold it still. Thus one hand under the control of the electrical current and the other hand under the control of the patient’s mind fought against each other. Penfield risked the explanation that the patient had not only a physical brain that was stimulated to action but also a nonphysical reality that interacted with the brain. 10
In other words, Penfield ended up agreeing with the Bible’s assertion that human beings are both body and spirit. “To expect the highest brain mechanism or any set of reflexes, however complicated, to carry out what the mind does, and thus perform all the functions of the mind, is quite absurd,” 11 he said. “What a thrill it is, then, to discover that the scientist, too, can legitimately believe in the existence of the spirit.” 12
Similarly, Oxford University professor of physiology Sir Charles Sherrington, a Nobel Prize winner described as “a genius who laid the foundations of our knowledge of the functioning of the brain and spinal cord,” 13 declared five days before his death: “For me now, the only reality is the human soul.” 14
As for his one-time student John C. Eccles, himself an eminent neurophysiologist and Nobel laureate, his ultimate conclusion is the same. “I am constrained,” he said, “to believe that there is what we might call a supernatural origin of my unique self-conscious mind or my unique selfhood or soul.” 15
But is it really rational in the twenty-first century to believe in John Calvin’s sixteenth-century claim that “the endowments we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves,” but that they must have a divine source? 16 Is the Bible’s insistence that people consist of both body and spirit—a belief called “dualism”—a defensible assertion? 17 Or is the human brain simply, in the famous words of MIT’s Marvin Minsky, “a computer made of meat,” with conscious thought as its wholly mechanical output?
Consciousness, declared Searle,