Introduction

The Soul and the Body

• Paul Gauguin (1897)• Whence come we? What are

we? Whither go we?

Introduction

• Naturalism: the philosophical claim or belief that the physical, natural world is all that exists: there is no supernatural or nonnatural reality

• Materialism: the belief that everything can be adequately explained with reference only to matter

• Physicalism: the philosophy that the human mind is fully explainable with reference only to the biological brain and the laws of physics and chemistry

• Determinism: the philosophy that everything that will ever happen has already been determined

Naturalism Today

• The Mind = The Brain• Pinker and Hood

• The Brain is a complex biochemical computer• Kurzweil

• Naturalism mainstreamed

Naturalism Today

I'm going to discuss an idea that elicits wildly opposite reactions. Some people find it a shocking claim with radical implications for morals and every value that we hold dear. Other people think that it's a claim that was established a hundred years ago, that the excitement is only in how we work out the details, and that it has few if any implications for our values and ethics. That is the idea that the mind is the physiological activity of the brain, in particular the information processing activity of the brain; that the brain, like other organs, is shaped by the genes; and that in turn, the genome was shaped by natural selection and other evolutionary processes. I am among those who think that this should no longer be a shocking claim, and that the excitement is in fleshing out the details, and showing exactly how our perception, decision-making, and emotions can be tied to the activity of the brain.…

Steven Pinker

…It should now be clear to any scientifically literate person that we don't have any need for a ghost in the machine, as Gilbert Ryle memorably put it. Many kinds of evidence show that the mind is an entity in the physical world, part of a causal chain of physical events

Steven Pinker

The self is something that is central to a lot of psychological questions and, in fact, a lot of psychologists have difficulty describing their work without positing the notion of a self. It's such a common daily, profound, indivisible experience for most of us. Some people do manage to achieve states of divided self or anatta, no self, they're really skilled Buddhists. But for the majority of us the self is a very compulsive experience. I happen to think it's an illusion and certainly the neuroscience seems to support that contention.

Bruce Hood

Simply from the logical positions that it's very difficult to, without avoiding some degree of infinite regress, to say a starting point, the trail of thought, just the fractionation of the mind, when we see this happening in neurological conditions. The famous split-brain studies showing that actually we're not integrated entities inside our head, rather we're the output of a multitude of unconscious processes.

Bruce Hood

Ray Kurzweil

•Creativity• Actions that appear creative are really physically

determined

•Heroism• Actions that appear heroic are actually physically

determined

•Reason• Reason is not evidential, but the operations of a pre-

programmed biochemical brain

Implications of Naturalism

• The scientific method is often used as a philosophic worldview rather than as a source of knowledge• Hidden Premise: The natural world is the only thing that

exists.• Premise: The scientific method studies the natural world.• Conclusion: The scientific method studies the only thing

that exists.• Implication 1: All explanations must be naturalistic.• Implication 2: All supernatural explanations or

considerations are categorically dismissed.

Scientific Evidence

Christians, however, need to challenge relativistic postmodern anti-realist naturalism just as much as the older objectivist naturalism. Both these parties start with purely naturalistic assumptions and make these normative for good scholarship. Christians need to challenge these assumptions and to suggest that scholarship might just as responsibly take place within the framework of the assumptions that God has created an ordered reality. Far from being relativistic, this is a claim that our experience makes best sense if we realize that we are in a universe of truths sustained by God, even if humans can glimpse these truths only imperfectly.

George Marsden