Is Your Brain Out of Tune?

Kevin Harris: Mind-body dualism comes up next. And here's the clip.

Dr. Carroll: When you talk to a person, they have thoughts and feelings and responses. When you talk to a dead person, a corpse, I hate to be morbid here, but you don't get those same responses, those same thoughts and feelings. It's very natural, very commonsensical to think that a living person possesses something that a corpse does not, some sort of spirit, some sort of animating soul or life force. But this idea, as it turns out, does not stand up to closer scrutiny. And a big step toward realizing this was made back in the 1600s by a remarkable woman named Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. They made princesses differently back in the 17th century. Elizabeth carried on a years-long correspondence with Rene Descartes, who famously tried to develop a theory of mind-body dualism. And Elizabeth said, "I don't understand what you're saying, because if you really believe that the mind is in a separate realm from the body, my mind makes a choice to lift my arm, but it's my body that does it. How does the immaterial mind that you say doesn't exist at a location in space, how does it act causally on the body? How does it interact with the stuff out of which you are made?" And Descartes never came up with a reliable, believable response to this objection. Of course, these days the objection is enormously stronger. We would say you are made of atoms. You are made of cells, which are made of molecules, which are made of atoms. And as physicists, we know how atoms behave. The laws of physics governing the behavior of atoms are completely understood. You put an atom in a certain set of circumstances, if you tell me what those circumstances are, as a physicist, I will tell you what the atom will do. If you believe that the atoms that are inside your brain in your body act differently because they are in a living person than if they are in a rock or a crystal, then what you're saying is that the laws of physics are wrong, that they need to be altered because of the influence of a spirit or a soul or something like that. And that may be true. Science can't disprove that, but there is no evidence for it. And you get a much stronger explanatory framework by assuming that it's just atoms obeying the laws of physics. That kind of reasoning is a big step toward naturalism.

Kevin Harris: That's interesting about Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and Descartes. But Carroll thinks we can pretty much rule out mind-body dualism even if we can't totally disprove it.

Dr. Craig: I think that he's mistaken here. What's the objection to dualist-interactionism supposed to be here? He seems to think that the problem is that the soul is not located in its body and therefore cannot affect it. But, in fact, Descartes did believe that the soul is spatially located in its body, and so the objection would not apply to Descartes. And for those of our listeners who are interested in learning more about mind-body dualism and philosophy of mind, I want to recommend highly this little book by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro called A Brief History of the Soul. And this book will describe the views of people like Plato, Descartes, Locke, and others, as well as survey the principal objections to mind-body dualism. So Taliaferro and Goetz's little book, A Brief History of the Soul, is accessible to the layperson, a really good book that I can recommend.

Now, in terms of what Carroll says, it's question-begging to assert "you are made of atoms," as he did. Just ask yourself, what is referred to here by the pronoun "you"? Carroll just assumes that it's your physical body, which begs the question that you are your physical body. But while it is true that your body is made of atoms, that in no way demonstrates that you – the person – are made of atoms. So it's simply question-begging. Moreover, it's completely wrong to say that scientists can predict on the basis of atomic matter what you will think or feel or do. Everything is not determined by the laws of physics. An excellent book on this was written several years ago by Sir John Eccles, who holds a Nobel Prize in neurology, and Sir Karl Popper, one of the most eminent philosophers of science. They wrote a book called The Self and Its Brain. And you notice in the title, the self, or person, is distinguished from the brain – the physical organ or material that sits in your skull. And the view of dualism-interactionism is that while the mind and the brain are distinct, the mind uses the brain as an instrument for thought. Eccles once put it to me in the following way. He said, "The relationship between the mind and the brain is like the relationship between a pianist and the piano." The pianist uses his piano as an instrument to make music. Now, if the piano is damaged in any way, then the pianist will be unable to produce the beautiful music. And in exactly the same way, the self uses the brain as an instrument for thought, and if the brain is damaged, for example, through drugs or cancer or Alzheimer's disease, then the self will be impaired in its ability to use the brain as an instrument for thought. So the brain and the self are not the same thing, but they work together to produce mental states of awareness, self-consciousness, and intentionality. The evidence for the reality of the mind is not physical evidence. Rather, it is what is called phenomenology – our inner experience of mental awareness, intentionality, self-conscious states, mental causation, a first-person perspective. And the naturalist or physicalist or materialist is wholly unable to give an adequate account of these phenomenal mental states. They, I think, are plausibly explained by positing the existence of a mind or self.

Kevin Harris: And next up, the unmoved mover. Here's a clip.

Dr. Carroll: Another big step also happened in the 1600s when Galileo came upon the idea of conservation of momentum. And you might say, why does conservation of momentum get in the way of my belief in the existence of God? But it does because before Galileo came along, physics was described by Aristotle. And Aristotle said something very obvious and commonsensical, that if you want something to keep moving, you need to push it. Things naturally come to rest left to their own devices. But if you look at the world, you realize that things are moving all over the place. So Aristotle very logically eventually concluded that you need to invoke the existence of an unmoved mover, which can be identified, of course, with God. But then of course Galileo comes along and says actually the natural behavior of matter is to keep moving at a constant velocity. Motion is perfectly natural. When things stop, it's because you are acting on them through friction or air resistance or dissipation. And then Isaac Newton comes along and builds an elaborate edifice of mechanics, which explains the world beautifully in purely material principles. And it's very, very interesting, once that happened you realize that the prime mover argument doesn't work as well, and you can actually see a change in the theological literature of the time.

Kevin Harris: I need a lot of help in the area of unmoved mover. There's some more reading I need to do. I always think about the unmoved mover in terms of when something began to move, but there's also the question of why things are moving, maybe a sustaining force and things like that. And Carroll brings up that matter, when left to itself, tends to keep moving. Galileo said that. Talk to us about all the physics and theological implications he's bringing up.

Dr. Craig: This clip really brings back memories for me. I discussed the argument for the unmoved mover in my very first book, The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz. And if you want to learn about the unmoved mover, I'd refer you to that book which includes a chapter on both Aristotle and on Thomas Aquinas. Now, Thomas enunciated five ways of proving the existence of God, and the first of these was an argument from motion. This argument relied upon Aristotelian physics which had no concept of inertia. So Thomas thought that anything that is moving needs to have a cause of its motion. The argument wasn't about beginning to move. It was simply about things in motion. The replacement of Aristotelian physics by Newtonian physics undermined the argument from motion because any object in motion will continue in motion in a straight line and with a constant velocity unless acted upon by some external force. So the argument for the unmoved mover that Thomas articulated was undermined by the transition from Aristotelian to Newtonian physics. But this concept of inertial motion had absolutely no effect upon Thomas's other arguments, such as the argument from contingency, the design argument, and the moral argument. Neither does it have any effect upon the kalam cosmological argument, which deals with the fact that the universe began to exist.

Kevin Harris: Let's look at some more of this opening statement from Sean Carroll. Here's the next clip – the argument from design.

Dr. Carroll: Before Newton and Galileo, there was emphasis put on ideas of prime movers and first causes, arguments from cosmology and contingency and so forth. After Newton and Galileo, the argument emphasized something else, the argument from design. People would say, well, sure, you can explain the planets moving. That's easy. But all of the life forms, the marvelous diversity of life here on Earth, that had to be made by some guiding external intelligence. In fact, in the 1700s, Immanuel Kant said, "There will never be an Isaac Newton for a blade of grass." Then, of course, in the 1800s, we got an Isaac Newton for a blade of grass. His name was Charles Darwin. Darwin showed how material – matter – all by itself, without guidance, without purpose, without an aim, just by the natural motion of ordinary things, can lead to the marvelous diversity of organic life that we see here on Earth. That was another huge step in the direction of naturalism.

Kevin Harris: So Darwin filled in a big step on the stairway to naturalism. Bill?

Dr. Craig: Without in any way wanting to trash Darwin, I have to say in all honesty that Professor Carroll greatly exaggerates the significance of Darwin's accomplishment. People need to understand, I think, that the theory of evolution itself has evolved. If we ignore theories of evolution prior to Darwin, what Darwin's theory postulated was two theses. First was the descent of all living organisms from a handful of common ancestors, and second, the natural selection of variable traits as the explanation for the adaptedness of organisms to their environment. Now, the first thesis – the thesis of common descent – was almost immediately very widely accepted in the scientific community. But for 70 years after Darwin, the scientific community remained acutely skeptical of the adequacy of Darwin's theory because natural selection could not explain the origin of biological complexity. In a nutshell, Darwin's theory could explain the survival of the fittest – natural selection will weed out maladaptations – but it said nothing to explain the arrival of the fittest. What was the source of the variable traits that organisms exhibit that natural selection then acts upon? This question was entirely unanswered in Darwin's theory.

Now, this deficit of Darwin's original theory was largely remedied by the eventual marriage in the 1930s and 40s of Darwin's theory with the genetics of Gregor Mendel, of which Darwin was completely ignorant. This has come to be known as the Modern Synthesis. In the Modern Synthesis, variability could be explained through random genetic mutations that natural selection could then act upon to weed out the deleterious mutations. And this is the theory as most of us learned it in high school. But by the late 1980s the inadequacies of the Modern Synthesis became apparent to evolutionary biologists. The theory did not, in fact, provide a causal account of the development of biologically complex structures, and several other tenets of the Modern Synthesis were also called into question. So the Modern Synthesis has now been superseded by the so-called Extended Evolutionary Synthesis which seeks to augment the explanatory mechanisms of the Modern Synthesis in an effort to make the theory more explanatorily adequate. But, in fact, there is no consensus among evolutionary biologists concerning what shape the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis should take. An adequate explanation of biological complexity still remains a pipe dream. And when the next anniversary, 50 years from now, of Darwin's book will be celebrated, evolutionary biologists say we have no idea of how different that theory is going to look from the Modern Synthesis.

In any case, the contemporary articulations of the argument from design, as I'm sure you're aware, don't appeal to biological complexity but rather to the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe that make the origin and evolution of life possible in the first place. Scientists have been stunned by the discovery of how delicate and complex a balance of initial conditions, of constants and quantities, must be given in the very beginning of the universe in order for the universe to permit the evolution of embodied conscious agents like ourselves. And therefore the argument from design remains today very robust and very much a subject of discussion both by philosophers and evolutionary biologists.

Kevin Harris: Two more clips to look at from Sean Carroll. In this one, Carroll declares the current state of naturalism.

Dr. Carroll: Of course I could go on. We could talk about modern cosmology and the origin of the universe. We could talk about neuroscience and what consciousness is and so forth, but I don't want to do that right now. We can maybe talk about it later, but I don't want to do it right now basically because it's kind of boring. And the reason why it's kind of boring is because the argument is finished. The debate is over. We've come to a conclusion. Naturalism has won. If you go to any university physics department, listen to the talks they give or the papers they write. Go to any biology department, go to any neuroscience department, any philosophy department, people whose professional job it is to explain the world, to come up with explanatory frameworks that match what we see, no one mentions God. There's never an appeal to a supernatural realm by people whose job it is to explain what happens in the world. Everyone knows that the naturalist explanations are the ones that work.

Kevin Harris: Well, he didn't say naturalism is currently winning. He said naturalism has won and the debate is over. It's ironic to me that the things he calls boring are among the very things that are calling naturalism and materialism into question, like cosmology, the origin of the universe, the hard problem of consciousness, things like that. If naturalism has won, in what way has it won?

Dr. Craig: Carroll is just bloviating here. Remember earlier in our podcast I said that he commits the fallacy of equivocation with respect to the word “naturalism.” The task of natural science is to provide natural explanations of phenomena in the world. So scientists are by and large committed to methodological naturalism. They look for and only consider natural causes. But that does absolutely nothing to establish the truth of metaphysical naturalism – the philosophical claim that the physical world is all there is. So Carroll's claim is simply based on an equivocal confusion of methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism.

Kevin Harris: One more clip. Carroll says, "Even though naturalism has won the day, we're still having this debate." Here's a clip.

Dr. Carroll: And yet here we are. We're having a debate. Why are we having a debate? Because clearly religion speaks to people for reasons other than explaining what happens in the world. Most people who turn to religious belief do not do so because they think it provides the best theory of cosmology or biology. They turn to religious belief because it provides them with purpose and meaning in their lives, with a sense of right and wrong, with a community, with hope. So if we want to say that science has refuted religion, we need to say that science has something to say about those issues. And on that, I have good news and bad news for you. The bad news is that the universe does not care about you, qua universe. Don't take up my time. I'm in a hurry here. The universe is made of elementary particles that don't have intelligence, don't pass judgment, do not have a sense of right and wrong. And the fear is, the existential anxiety is, that if that purpose and meaningfulness is not given to me by the universe, then it cannot exist. The good news is that that fear is a mistake, that there is another option, that we create purpose and meaning in the world. If you love somebody, it is not because that love is put into you by something outside. It's because you created that from inside yourself. If you act good to somebody, it's not because you're given instructions to do so. It's because that's a choice that you made. This is a very scary world. You should be affected at a very deep level by the thought that the universe doesn't care, does not pass judgment on you. But it's also challenging and liberating that we can create lives that are worth living. I have never met God. I've never met any spirits or any angels, but I've met human beings. Many of them are amazing people. And I truly believe that if we accept the universe for what it is, if we approach reality with an open mind and an open heart, then we can create lives very much worth living. Thank you.

Kevin Harris: Okay. Meaning and purpose. It caught my ear at the end when he said to approach these things with an open mind and an open heart. I'm sure he's just using heart in the current vernacular, but I think it's rather telling that he acknowledges something of a duality, that mind and heart should work together.

Dr. Craig: I think Carroll is absolutely correct that religion speaks to people for reasons other than explaining what happens in the physical world. I myself have insisted on that point. Moreover, I agree that the physical universe does not care about you. And I've argued that if God does not exist, it then follows that there is no objective meaning, value, or purpose in life. And so Carroll and I are in complete agreement on that. Now, Carroll's alternative is to say that we create meaning and value and purpose in life. Now, this is just to say that those things are person-relative and therefore wholly subjective and arbitrary. The values that you choose are no better than the values of the fascist or the racist. The person who dedicates his life to the purpose of humanitarianism is no more correct than the person who gives his life to the exploitation of young girls on a pleasure island. Carroll speaks of lives worth living, but on his view there is no objective standard that determines what is a life worth living.

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