By: Shafer Parker

About modern Biblical Archaeology someone once said, “Every time a shovel full of dirt is turned over in the Middle East, another skeptic bites the dust.” Similarly, a growing mound of scientific discoveries make it difficult, if not impossible to maintain a purely materialistic model of existence. To put it simply, materialism as a useful explanation for life, the universe, and everything has been exploded by 150 years of research. And I’ve got the articles to prove it. Click on the links and read them for yourself. Then ask, with such overwhelming evidence against materialism, why is it so difficult for modern man to admit that God exists?

Evolution’s shortcomings

“Do we need a new theory of Evolution?”, by Stephen Buranyi, reports that a new movement within the scientific community is raising questions about core evolutionary assumptions. The movement notes, for instance, that neither classic nor Neo-Darwinism can explain many common aspects of biological life, including the first eye, the first placenta, or the first wing. Recognizing that commonplace evolutionary ideas, such as natural selection, mutation, and random chance can never explain key principles of biological development, these scientists have introduced a new framework called the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES), which they hope will arrive at a “whole new causal structure for biology.” At the risk of sounding too self-satisfied, and with full acknowledgment that scientists hate it when people talk this way, I will say this; EES scientists can try all they want, but they will never develop a “whole new causal structure for biology” until they admit that earth’s astounding variety of plant and animal life finds its origin in the fertile imagination of our Creator God (John 1:1-3).

Three articles on consciousness

“Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious”, a new book by Antonio Damasio, argues that consciousness is much more than the product of sophisticated neuron nets within the brain. It depends upon the brain’s connection to the rest of the body, from which arises feelings of hunger or thirst, pain, well-being, desire, and other emotions. In other words, however effective Artificial Intelligence may become, its failure to be connected to the experiences of a living body will prevent it from ever achieving a human level of self-consciousness. Damasio’s realization helps prove the Biblical boast that man alone will ever be made in God’s image, but it must be noted that Damasio still sees consciousness as a product of evolution. The next article, however, uses consciousness to make belief in evolution more difficult than ever.

“Consciousness cannot have evolved,” by Bernardo Kastrup, who points out that no matter how you slice it, matter cannot create consciousness. For proof, he notes that even though you can mathematically explain the colour spectrum to a blind person, including the differing oscillations of the different colours, you can never explain the psychological effect of a sighted person seeing the colour red. That reaction comes from somewhere other than pure materialism. In the same way the vibration frequencies of violin strings cannot explain the effect of hearing a Vivaldi sonata. Kastrup concludes that the material world is always quantitative, made of things that can be measured, while consciousness deals with qualities that cannot be measured, and therefore could not have evolved from the material world. Kastrup has some far-out ideas, and I am certainly not endorsing all that he has written, but his argument that consciousness could not have evolved is sound.

“The empty brain”, by Robert Epstein, is perhaps best explained by the subheading, “Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge, or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer.” Epstein persuasively rejects the modern tendency to treat the brain as a computer. He points out that historically, humans have used six different metaphors to describe human intelligence. Originally, as preserved in the Bible, human beings were created by God, who infused a “spirit” within each person (Gen. 2:7). Later on, Greek philosophers attributed intelligence to the flow of various fluids, or “humours” throughout the body. By the 1500s thinkers envisioned humans as complex machines, like clocks, and as electricity and chemistry advanced, the metaphors to describe human intelligence marched alongside them. By the mid-1800s, intelligence was being compared to the telegraph, and by the 1950s, comparisons to computers took over and remain dominant to this day.

But, Epstein argues, the human brain neither processes nor stores information, and thus the computer metaphor for the brain should be deleted. Among other implications, Epstein notes, it means no one will ever be able to download a human mind and store it in a computer. There will be no faux eternal life. Epstein is great at telling us what the brain is not, but he has no idea where the source of human intelligence is located. I hope you won’t think me too forward to suggest that Epstein is wrong to reject as primitive the Biblical idea of the spirit of life being breathed into Adam. It is still the right metaphor. And while it doesn’t explain everything, humans made in the image of God are a fact of existence. Your existence is proof there is nothing at all metaphorical about what God did at the beginning.

The Answer that Scientists Avoid at all Costs

The Positive Case for Intelligent Design (series), by Casey Luskin, is a fitting way to end this blog post. Written and published this year, Luskin’s 12 blogs argue persuasively for the very thing so many scientists continue to tiptoe around, i.e., that only intelligent design can explain the world as it is. The whole series is worth reading (bonus: the articles are short), but considering the links above, let me focus on his 11th entry, entitled “Can Materialistic Models Accommodate the Scientific Data?” In it Luskin addresses materialist efforts to accommodate recent scientific discoveries never predicted by their approach, such as the lack of transitional fossils, or the fine-tuning of the physical laws of the universe.

To somehow explain these unexpected challenges to their theories, materialists literally make things up that can never be tested or proven, such as “punctuated equilibrium, ” in which biologist Stephen J. Gould argued that evolution took place “in small populations over relatively short geological periods . . . too rapid for transitional forms to become fossilized,” and multiverses “to account for the life-friendly fine-tuning of physical laws.” Luskin explains that the problem with both approaches is that neither is supported by the slightest trace of actual evidence, nor can they ever be. “Simply because materialists make outlandish proposals to explain away data that was positively predicted by intelligent design does not mean that those materialistic ideas actually work,” Luskin concludes. It’s an excellent series and I can only hope you will click on the link and enjoy the depth of his thinking.

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