Thinking About Thinking

Romans 1: 18 and following: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.”
Have you ever wondered, what does He mean, “…evident within them.”? I think at least one thing he means by this has to do with human thinking, reasoning, decision making. Let’s ‘think about thinking’.

If we consider human thought in relation to the human body, and we ask what part of the body is involved with thinking, one usually answers ‘the brain’. Of course, the brain is involved with thinking; it’s certainly not the pancreas or the kidney that does our thinking! But is the brain, can the brain be, the only thing that does our thinking? Most of the modern world, including most physicians, psychiatrists, researchers, etc, claims that it is. Oh, they’ll point out that the brain is influenced in many ways, and certainly it seems to be. Certain diseases can influence the brain and seem to cause alterations in thinking. One can imagine a variety of other outside influences. But they would still maintain that it is the brain that ‘does the thinking’. They would even claim that if we ever become clever enough to be able to scan and map out the exact position and function of every molecule, atom, wave of energy, etc, in the brain, we would be able to completely understand human thinking.

But they’re wrong. In fact, according to the Bible, ‘deep down’ they know they’re wrong (see the Romans citation above). Now these are clever, educated, sophisticated people. How do I know they’re wrong?

Let’s think about the brain for a minute. The brain, like everything else in the universe, is made of molecules. We could break it down to subatomic particles if we wanted to, but let’s stick with molecules; most people have some sense of what a molecule is like, perhaps they’ve seen a picture of some tinker toy-like structure. Now, don’t panic: this is as ‘scientific’ as we’re going to get. All you need to know is that the brain is made of molecules, and the molecules do things. You don’t have to know exactly what they do; perhaps they jump across synapses, or flow here or there, or bump into other molecules; the details don’t matter.

Now let’s consider just one molecule in a human brain; we’ll call this molecule Fred. Now Fred is about to do something; jump across a synapse, or whatever. When Fred, this one little molecule, is about to do this thing, does Fred think to himself, “Hee hee, I think I’ll jump across this synapse!”? Hopefully everybody will immediately realize that, no, a molecule does not think, or decide what it’s going to do. Yet Fred does jump across the synapse. So why does he do this? Presumably it’s because some other molecule, call it Wilma, bumps into Fred. But why did Wilma bump into Fred? Because Barney bumped into Wilma. And Betty bumped into Barney. And Pebbles and Bam-bam got into the act.

In other words, it’s a chain reaction. It’s like dominoes on the table. Most people have done this: lined up dominoes, pushed the one on the end, and down they all go, one after another. Perhaps you’ve made, or seen someone make, a very complex series of dominoes, going up and down stairs, or with multiple intersecting lines, or forming a picture, or whatever. No matter how long or complicated the line is, it’s still a chain reaction. When any domino falls, it doesn’t fall because it decided to: it falls because it was pushed. It’s the same way with molecules.

Now, according to what we all know, or ought to know, about the universe, this is all that could be going on in the brain, in terms of the position, motion, and function of all the parts of the brain, no matter how large or small. That means that whatever’s going on in my brain right now must have been caused by whatever was going on right before that. And that situation was caused by what was right before that. And right before that, and right before that, all the way back through my whole life, my birth, my parents’ lives, their births, etc, all the way back to the dawn of time. If this is all that’s happening in terms of my thinking, if it’s just my brain doing my thinking, or just my brain plus anything else in the entire natural universe, then I’m a robot. I’m not really deciding to write all this, I’m just programmed to do it because of all these molecules bumping into each other since the dawn of time.

Believe it or not, there are actually some people, some of them quite sophisticated, who maintain that this is the real state of affairs. We don’t really make decisions; we just think we make them. Love is just a matter of chemistry, etc.

But here’s the point: we all know, with a deep and absolute certainty that cannot be denied, that we are not robots. We make real decisions, we think real thoughts. We are really morally responsible for our actions, which would make no sense if we were only programmed to do whatever we do.

Allow me to digress for a minute to point out a very important principle of ideas. If someone tells you something, no matter how sophisticated, educated, or learned they may be, and that something directly contradicts something you know to be true with a deep and absolute certainty, then you must conclude that the idea they hold forth as true is actually false. They can’t both be true. In this case, either our brains (or our brains plus anything else in the entire natural universe) do our thinking, or we make real decisions. They can’t both be true. We know we make real decisions. Therefore our brains must not be the only things that do our thinking. There must be something else, and that something else can’t be made of molecules. It can’t be a part of the natural universe. If it were, it would likewise be controlled by the natural order of things, the laws of nature, of physics, of chemistry, etc.

If something is not part of the natural universe, we usually refer to it as ‘supernatural’. So what are to call this supernatural something, this thing that is part of the me that’s me, the you that’s you, that does our thinking? Oh, it relates to the brain, it uses the brain in some way, and effects on the brain certainly can affect our thinking. But what is the thing beyond the brain?

Most people would refer to this thing as the soul, or the spirit. Do you see what we’ve done? We have just reasoned from what we all know, or ought to know, to be true, that we must have a soul, a supernatural ‘something’, in order to think as we do. Now hopefully you can see that this is a great blow to any idea that there is no God. Your average atheist will completely deny the very possibility of anything supernatural, and with good reason: it’s fatal to his atheism.

But if we acknowledge the existence of a supernatural soul, then there is no particular reason to think that it will cease to exist when the body dies. Combine this with the moral responsibility that we all know we have, and we have, apart from the sacrificial work of Christ on the cross, some real bad news! Or, as Paul puts it:

“Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”