SHOULD WE TRUST THE MONKEY’S MIND? – Is matter all that we are?

One year before his death, Charles Darwin, “father” of the Evolution theory, expressed doubts about the reason to trust the human mind if evolution is correct: “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has always been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”

Sometimes I think that the best argument for God is the fact that we can make an argument, that we are conscious creatures.

Some people think the only life we have is the life we experience in this universe: we are just matter, bodies, brains; we have no soul, we don’t live beyond the grave. But is that really all we are, material bodies, material beings?

Atheism recognizes we all have brains, but what about minds? We all seem to experience a conscious mind, but how do we get a mind, which is not material, if all we have is the material universe?

If our universe is just made of time, space and matter, material brains are easy to explain but can you get a mind? Are the attributes of the brain the same as the attributes of the mind?

There are big differences between brain and mind:

1. Brains are physical and therefore you can measure them, weigh them, but we cannot do that with the mind. This is a significant difference: brains are measurable, minds are immeasurable.  Measurable vs measureless

2. If I ask you to tell me memories of your mother, you can report those to me and even tell me how these made you feel .and their impact on your mental life today, because you privately know how you feel.  I could not open your head and look at your brain and find that information. Brains can be publicly accessed but your mental entities cannot be publicly accessed. Public vs private

3. If I sit in my bedroom one evening and I hear a noise of a burglar outside, my mental thoughts will become quickly obsessed with that burglar: “Did I lock my front door, is he going to get inside, where is my phone, etc.” But there is a difference between my thoughts about the burglar and the burglar himself, between the mental entity and the physical entity. My thoughts are dependant upon the burglar, the existence of my non material thoughts depends on the existence of a material burglar. Mental entities, mental states, are always about something else, but the something else just is. This is another difference between brains and minds: Mental entities are about, physical entities are. About-ness vs is-ness. (And I can be wrong about that burglar, he might not even exist.)

4. You can train me as a fireman and tell me how to act in the case of a fire, how to operate the water hose, the ladder, and teach me the physical process of saving lives. But that would only be the objective, material impersonal facts about how to react during a fire. Once I am involved in a fire, I am going to learn a bunch of stuff you cannot explain me in the physical point of view, subjective personal thoughts and feelings and beliefs. Physical entities are  impersonal vs mental entities are personal.  

So brains and minds are very different. Material brains are easy to explain, non material minds are not. The fact that you are presently even thinking about that point show that you have something that atheism cannot give you. You have got a mind. Atheists have difficulties reconciling mind with a physical only world. “How could it possibly arise from lumpy grey matter?”

On a purely materialist naturalistic understanding of biology, consciousness is an inexplicable fact… So there is only one explanation: We do have minds because we are the product of a Mind Who consciously creates us in His image.