The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [135]
SURPASSING THE BRAIN’S BOUNDARIES
It was a news dispatch from the front lines of the scientific investigation of human consciousness. Published by the journal Resuscitation and presented to scientists at the California Institute of Technology in 2001, the year-long British study provided evidence that consciousness continues after a person’s brain has stopped functioning and he or she has been declared clinically dead. 19 It was dramatic new evidence that the brain and mind are not the same, but they’re distinct entities.
“The research,” said Reuters journalist Sarah Tippit, “resurrects the debate over whether there is life after death and whether there is such a thing as the human soul.” 20
In their journal article, physician Sam Parnia and Peter Fenwick, a neuropsychiatrist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, describe their study of sixty-three heart attack victims who were declared clinically dead but were later revived and interviewed. About ten percent reported having well-structured, lucid thought processes, with memory formation and reasoning, during the time that their brains were not functioning. The effects of oxygen starvation or drugs—objections commonly offered by skeptics—were ruled out as factors. Later, the researchers found numerous cases that were similar. 21
While large-scale studies are still needed, the once-skeptical Parnia said the scientific findings so far “would support the view that mind, ‘consciousness,’ or the ‘soul’ is a separate entity from the brain.” 22
He speculated that the brain might serve as a mechanism to manifest the mind, much in the same way a television set manifests pictures and sounds from waves in the air. If an injury to the brain causes a person to lose some aspects of his mind or personality, this doesn’t necessarily prove that the brain was the source of the mind. “All it shows is that the apparatus is damaged,” he said. 23
Active research is continuing in this area and into other aspects of human consciousness. 24 Meanwhile, the scientists who are committed to finding a purely physical answer—appropriately called “physicalists”—are candid in admitting that they currently have no explanation for how the brain might spawn consciousness.
Conceded Searle: “We don’t have an adequate theory of how the brain causes conscious states, and we don’t have an adequate theory of how consciousness fits into the universe.” 25
Still, Searle and many others find refuge in their unshakable faith that science will eventually discover a completely naturalistic explanation. Given Darwinism as a non-negotiable starting point, there’s really no other choice.
“I am firmly in the confident camp—a substantial explanation for the mind’s emergence from the brain will be produced and perhaps soon,” predicted professor of neurology Antonio R. Damasio. “The giddy feeling, however, is tempered by the acknowledgment of some sobering difficulties.” 26
Eccles calls this kind of attitude “promissory materialism . . . extravagant and unfulfillable.” 27 Instead, many researchers are following Eccles’s example by pursuing the evidence of science and the logic of philosophy wherever they lead, even if they point toward dualism. Said anthropologist Marilyn Schlitz:
I would take the position of a radical empiricist, in that I am driven by data, not theory. And the data I see tell me that there are ways in which people’s experience refutes the physicalist position that the mind is the brain and nothing more. There are solid, concrete data that suggest that our consciousness, our mind, may surpass the boundaries of the brain. 28
As for the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments consistently teach that humans are “a hyphenate creature, a spirit/body dichotomy,” said anthropologist Arthur C. Custance. Then, quite