One of the most powerful things in the world is the human mind. God created a marvel of inconceivable engineering that produces a phenomenon going well beyond the mere matter of the machine running it, the brain. These two things, the immaterial mind and the material brain, have been a topic of much debate in the history of modern philosophy. Or how is it that an immaterial mind interacts with a material brain. Atheist/materialist philosophers, those who believe only the material exists, believe the mind is the brain, or it is merely the mechanical processes of the brain accounting for what we call the mind. Yet, the thing this mind creates or reflects, consciousness, appears to be far more than the sum of its parts. Atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel wrote a short book titled, Mind & Cosmos, to grapple with this issue and concludes it is impossible for the mere matter of the mind to account for consciousness. Here is how he explains the issue:
Even if there is a residual problem of exactly how to account for consciousness in physical terms, the orthodox naturalistic (materialist) view is that biology is in principle completely explained by physics and chemistry, and that evolutionary psychology provides a rough idea of how everything distinctive about human life can also be regarded as an extremely complicated consequence of the behavior of physical particles in accordance with certain fundamental laws. This will ultimately include an explanation of the cognitive capacities that enable us to discover those laws.
Shazam! How convenient, and all this by chance. As I taught my kids growing up, and will now be teaching our grandchildren, when confronted with something insanely complex and amazing beyond human comprehension to grasp, they should proclaim out loud, Praise Chance! It’s a sly way to mock the pretensions of atheist/materialist claims.
Nagel raises the difficult question of where those “fundamental laws” came from, not to mention the material stuff that for no reason at all turned into the “extremely complicated” brain that somehow magically produces mind, or consciousness. Nagel admits the atheist/materialist has no answer in the subtitle of his book: “Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false.” Yet, Nagel is still an atheist! As I like to say, wanting to be your own God is a powerful motivator to deny the obvious.
One of the powerful aspects of apologetics, defending the veracity of Christianity, is called explanatory power, what best explains something, or is the most potent explanation for something. What Nagel is saying is that the atheist/materialist explanation for the brain, and the entire cosmos, is extremely weak. Yet he still rejects the obvious explanation, Almighty God. Whenever I have difficulty believing this whole God things is true, wondering if life after death is real, if the resurrection of the dead is actually going to happen, I look outside. That causes me to think to myself, or say out loud, there is absolutely no way the universe and the world and everything in it is a product of chance. Impossible! We must always consider the alternative when we’re wondering and doubting. Something has to be true. Either it is God who created everything, or nothing “created” everything out of nothing for no reason at all. In the title of the book by Norm Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be An Atheist.
There are several ways we can see and experience the evidence of how powerful the mind is specifically because we’re made in God’s image. We’ll address a couple of those below.
Mind Over Matter: Being Made in God’s Image
The Imago Dei, Latin for the image of God, is why our minds have such incredible power. Our minds are in some derivative way analogous, and similar to, God’s mind. It’s crazy trying to wrap our minds around the truth of that statement, but until we do, we’ll tend to think like the atheist/materialist, that the mind is simply a function of molecules and cells and synapses. We’ll miss the incredible spiritual, immaterial power the mind and consciousness have over the material world even though the evidence is all around us. What do I mean by power?
To give us the answer in a biblical sense we’ll look at the Apostle Paul who uses the word power three times in Romans 1. First let’s look at the Greek word Paul uses, δύναμις-dunamis. It’s the word from which we get our English, dynamite. The extended meaning from Strong’s is helpful:
force (literally or figuratively); specially, miraculous power (usually by implication, a miracle itself) — ability, abundance, meaning, might(-ily, -y, -y deed), (worker of) miracle(-s), power, strength, violence, mighty (wonderful) work.
Each use of the word is related to God. First in verse 4, he tells us God appointed Jesus in or with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead. Christ by the power of God defeated death, something that has haunted human beings since the fall, all of whom despise, hate, and fear it, and know it’s wrong, that somehow it shouldn’t be. God by his power took care of it, Christ being the first fruits, as Paul says in I Corinthians 15, and then the rest of us to follow in the resurrection.
Next Paul declares the gospel is “the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.” Our salvation from sin, our reconciliation to God, is a spiritual resurrection of going from being dead in sin to alive in Christ by the power of God. The physical reality of God’s bringing Jesus back to life is manifested in a spiritual reality of the resurrection of our souls, the center of our being. The reason the New Covenant is better than the Old according to Jeremiah (chapter 31), is that the law is no longer stuck on tablets of stone, but God himself now in Christ puts his law in our minds and writes it on our hearts. That supernatural spiritual reality now reflects itself out into the material world through us.
Lastly Paul uses the word power related to God’s creative power in the material world.
20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so they are without excuse.
The very essence of God’s divinity, his God-ness, can be seen in every material thing he created which as we know from Genesis he created out of nothing—now that is power! All he had to do was speak, and it was. Speaking of Abraham in Roman 4, Paul says in verse 16:
He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not.
The ESV translates that last clause as, “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” You can’t get more powerful than that! And while we can’t call things into existence that don’t exist, because we are made in God’s image, we can take the raw material he’s given us and transform it into new and marvelous things.
Mind Over Matter: Transforming the World
When I use the phrase, “mind over matter,” I mean that literally. Our minds are above matter, over it, superior to it. We, contrary to the atheist/materialist, are not the same as matter, merely a function of matter, but superior to it in a way the whole is superior to the sum of its parts. You can take the parts of a car and put them in a pile, but you’re not going to have a car. In a similar manner, our brains when put together by God produce something superior to just the material parts making up our brains. This was the plan from the beginning. When God created man, male and female he created them, he set them over his creation, to rule and have dominion over it, to fill the earth and subdue it. Got gave them the raw material, something out of nothing, now they were to take that and make something out of everything.
This was a slow process, but started happening right from the beginning, and often in ways that did not result in blessing. Early in the story, the people God had created built a tower, not in humility and gratitude to God, but to in effect be like God, so that “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” After God “scattered them over the face of the whole earth,” they built cities and places they could live that would protect them from the dangers of the wilderness and other peoples. This was just the beginning of the dominion mandate being fulfilled, most of it, however, not in humility and to the glory of the creator God. For that, God chose one man out of all the peoples of the earth through whom blessing would come to all those peoples. We know him as Abraham, and the people he gave birth to, the Hebrews.
The transformation process of this fallen world, paradise lost, would take 2,000 years before it could really begin in earnest and the possibility of paradise being restored become a reality. Unfortunately, the mindset of most Christians is Pietistic, otherworldly, focused more on heaven than on this material world. That, however, is a mistake. The gospel wasn’t an escape project from this world, but a transformation project of it.
The contrast of the earth and the peoples in it from BC to AD is stark, from law to gospel, from the letter to the spirit. Everything spiritually changed, man now reconciled to God, when Christ accomplished his mission and was coronated as King sitting at the right hand of God. The day he poured out his Spirit at Pentecost everything then materially changed. In other words, man’s spiritual transformation in his relationship to God would be manifest in the material world on this earth. Initially, it wasn’t apparent how radical that transformation would prove to be in passage of time, but the change was like coming across Mount Everest in a desert. The ancient world was a brutal place where the primary goal of existence was survival. In moral terms, might made right. Whoever had the biggest sword or the biggest army determined right and wrong, and there was no appeal to anything higher, no recourse to challenge the powerful. This unpalatable fact of existence was why so many of the poor and powerless were attracted to Christianity in the early centuries of the church—now their lives counted. They were no longer cogs to be ground down in a pitiless machine. Slowly, surely, inevitably, Christianity changed everything.
Mind Over Matter: The Body
The power of the mind over matter can also been seen in the material that makes up our bodies; the connection is a powerful one. The human body is an almost infinitely complex system that works in response to our environment, which includes our mind’s control over our bodies, again the immaterial controlling of the material. Most of that happens without our being aware of it, which is called the autonomic nervous system and is driven by the brain. But our minds, our conscious thoughts, can override the system as well, for good and for ill.
I have a good example of how this works from when I was in college. I went to Arizona State University, and my parents and little brother came to visit one time, and we went to the Grand Canyon. My dad decided we would take a ride on donkeys down a trail to the bottom of the canyon, and it was terrifying. I’ll never forget being on that donkey with a cliff to our immediate right, and it must have been hundreds of feet down. I could see the donkeys in front of me stepping within inches of the edge, and I asked the guide if it was dangerous. He said, “They don’t want to fall any more than you.” That was definitely not comforting. My stomach was gurgling all the way down, and I barely made it to the outhouse and immediately lost 10 pounds. I don’t think I’ll do that again! It was my mind driven by fear that caused my intestines to do what they did—that is mind over matter.
Our bodies are a marvel of divine engineering meant to respond to perceived threats in our environment, to stress or danger. We have adrenal glands that produce two hormones that flow into our bodies when we’re confronted by a threat, adrenaline and cortisol. These threats, like riding on donkeys on a narrow path, can be real, or just a figment of our imagination. For the guides who had probably done that trip down hundreds of times, there was no fear, and no need of an outhouse when they got to the bottom. There was no actual threat, but my fear was very real. Mind over matter means it doesn’t matter, no pun intended, if the threat is real or not, the response of the adrenal glands will happen anyway.
These hormones and our bodies that produce them are di. With adrenaline, our pupils dilate to let more light in to better see our surroundings. Our skin turns pale as blood vessels receive a signal to divert blood to areas more in need of our blood’s oxygen, such as our muscles, so we can fight or run away. Our heart pumps harder and faster to deliver more oxygenated blood to areas most in need, like our muscles, and our blood pressure also increases. It even affects our liver where stored glycogen is converted to glucose to provide more energy. Our breathing changes to help accomplish all these things as well. Our minds perceive threat, and all this happens immediately.
After adrenaline does its job, the hormone cortisol continues to respond to perceived stress in our environment or in us. Whether the threat is real or not, the result is the same, adrenal glands pouring cortisol into our bloodstream. When these are needed, they can be lifesaving, when they are not, they can be health destroying. Panic attacks are something I have a little experience with, and it’s disturbing what happens to your heart rate when you think something is wrong. Fear will do that to us. Or if we have something we have to prepare for, and little time to do it, stress and thus cortisol does its thing. For a limited time that’s okay, but living in perpetual stress or anxiety will mess up our bodies.
The good news is that God has given us the power of our minds over matter. We don’t have to live in constant stress because we can trust God. Jesus commands us not to worry, or to be anxious. Paul commands us not to be anxious about anything, which means we can trust God with everything in our lives, every moment of every day. The great struggle of my life is whether I trust God or not. My favorite verse in this regard comes from Isaiah 26:
3 You will keep in perfect peace
him whose mind is steadfast,
because he trusts in you.
Perfect peace is possible, but only in Christ, knowing God’s perfect love for us, and goodness to us, in all things. That is the path to true mental, emotional, and physical health.
Recent Comments