God on the Brain: What Cognitive Science Does (and Does Not) Tell Us about Faith, Human Nature, and the Divine

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"A number of philosophers and scientists argue that humans are nothing more than their physical bodies, yet God on the Brain shows why this view lacks grounding. Compelling, eloquent, and accessible, this book upholds the case for a traditional view of humans as both physical and spiritual. I highly recommend Sickler’s volume to all who are interested in the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy with the Christian faith."

Sharon Dirckx, Senior Tutor, Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics; author, Am I Just My Brain?

"In a world where our very humanity is called into question and redefined, Brad Sickler offers truth and hope in a well-reasoned manner. God on the Brain takes the Bible and religious experience seriously and views science as a partner rather than an adversary. Sickler offers a theologically reliable way forward through the dangers of materialism, naturalism, and many other ‘-isms’ that try to steer us away from living a fully Christian life. If the church takes Sickler’s work seriously, we will be extremely well prepared to love God with our entire being in a much deeper and more profound way. Highly recommended!"

J. Scott Duvall, J. C. and Mae Fuller Chair of Biblical Studies and Professor of New Testament, Ouachita Baptist University

Brad Sickler covers a lot of ground in this short yet punchy book. He writes wonderfully and elegantly distills complex discussions. Readers coming at these questions for the first time will find his insights richly illuminating and their minds stretched in helpful ways. This book is a delight to read. You’ll end up more informed, a good deal wiser, and ever more confident in the biblical story!

Hans Madueme, Associate Professor of Theological Studies, Covenant College

This is a really great book! Brad Sickler is able to explain complex ideas in a readable, enjoyable style. Pulling from several academic disciplines, this book is full of new, refreshing, and insightful ideas. Sickler’s treatment of the relationship between science and religion is alone worth the price of the book. I highly recommend this treasure of learning.

J. P. Moreland, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University

God on the Brain

God

on the

Brain

What Cognitive Science Does (and Does Not) Tell Us about Faith, Human Nature, and the Divine

Bradley L. Sickler

God on the Brain: What Cognitive Science Does (and Does Not) Tell Us about Faith, Human Nature, and the Divine

Copyright © 2020 by Bradley L. Sickler

Published by Crossway

1300 Crescent Street

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Micah Lanier

First printing 2020

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture references marked NLT are from The Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, IL, 60189. All rights reserved.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-6443-7

ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-6446-8

PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-6444-4

Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-6445-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sickler, Bradley L., 1972– author.

Title: God on the brain : what cognitive science does (and does not) tell us about faith, human nature, and the divine / Bradley L. Sickler.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019059574 (print) | LCCN 2019059575 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433564437 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433564444 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433564451 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433564468 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Mind and body—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Theological anthropology—Christianity. | Cognitive science—Moral and ethical aspects.

Classification: LCC BT741.3 .S53 2020 (print) | LCC BT741.3 (ebook) | DDC 261.5/15—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019059574

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019059575

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2020-06-22 04:09:15 PM

To Alisha,

my loving partner in all things,

and to Abby and Ben,

my joy and the strength of my right hand

Contents

Abbreviations

1  The Nature of Humans

2  Science and Christianity (1): The Conflict Thesis

3  Science and Christianity (2): Strangers or Friends?

4  Evolutionary Explanations for Belief in God

5  Is Everything Just Brain States?

6  Doing Away with the Soul

7  Mind-Body Interaction and Simplicity

8  The Question of Freedom

9  Reason, Science, and Morality

10  Reformed Epistemology and the Naturalness of Belief

General Index

Scripture Index

Abbreviations

1

The Nature of Humans

While visiting a bookstore recently, I was browsing the magazine racks, looking for something to flip through while I sipped my coffee and waited for my family to finish shopping. What I saw jumped out at me, even though it was typical of the trending topics in science today. On the rack were three science magazines in a row, each advertising its lead article. All three were about the brain. Popular Science featured Your New Brain: When Humans and Computers Merge. National Geographic showcased an essay Your Brain—100 Things You Never Knew. Scientific American offered How the Brain Reads Faces: Cracking the Neural Code.

My first reaction was That’s interesting. Then I thought: "But my brain doesn’t read faces, or anything else, for that matter. My brain is surely involved, but it doesn’t read faces—I read faces, and I am not merely my brain. My third reaction was There sure is a lot to say about brains!"

It has been said that the nineteenth century was dominated by the science of chemistry, the twentieth century by physics, and the twenty-first will be the century of the brain. Our understanding of that three-pound lump in our skulls is growing rapidly. Our mastery of medical and imaging techniques has progressed apace, along with a growing library of experimental knowledge.

These advances are both interesting and helpful. But, as so often happens with scientific progress, a host of philosophical and theological issues have been dragged in too, often with upsetting consequences. The message from many quarters is that you are just your brain. Programs on public television, radio shows on science topics, magazine articles like those just mentioned, books upon books—all declare a decidedly reductionist, materialistic, anti-spiritual, anti-supernatural perspective that depicts humans as nothing but complicated machines. You are not made in the image of God but are a walking, talking, conscious bag of dirt. While we can all be grateful for how advances in understanding have helped alleviate suffering from a range of maladies—everything from brain tumors to some serious psychoses—there is a lot more to the conversation than just the science. There is a wide array of philosophical and theological issues as well, though they are rarely even recognized.

In this book, we will look at recent scholarship on brains to see how it provides orthodox Christian anthropology with some serious food for thought and, hopefully, develop a framework to think through what it all means. By anthropology here we mean theological and philosophical anthropology. Whereas anthropology usually refers to the social science study of past and present human societies, what we mean in this context is the nature of humanity: what it is to be human, how we got to be that way, and how that relates to God. It is the metaphysics of the human person. We will cover a wide range of topics from cognitive science, neurophysiology, evolutionary morality, and evolutionary psychology. All of these fields have in common the tendency to treat the brain as the totality of who we are and the story they tend to tell about how we got the brains we have.

How We View Human Nature

To help frame where we will be going, consider the core, traditional, biblical set of beliefs about humanity taught as central aspects of a Christian worldview. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex field, a traditional Christian anthropology holds that we possess an immaterial soul and were made to know God. It teaches that we have the moral law written on our hearts, and that ultimately we will survive the death of our bodies to face judgment for what we do with the power of choice we have. If we are made right with God by turning from sin and embracing Jesus Christ, we will—like Jesus—be raised from the dead and given eternal life in his kingdom. All of these conclusions are drawn from an indispensable concept: humanity is made by God the Creator in his own image. Image bearing is a complex notion, and there are many expositions of what it means, but regardless of the particulars, Christians have always affirmed that it includes being brought into existence intentionally by God in a way that connects our nature to his own. Those ideas—being created intentionally in a way that connects us to God—are central to a biblical understanding of the nature of humanity.

The trend, supposedly based in science, has been to reject this entire description on the grounds that recent discoveries in science have shown it to be false. We have no soul, they say. Belief in God is a fluke of evolution. Freedom and morality are illusions. After the death of our bodies there is simply nothing. In other words, the picture painted by many advocates of the new anthropology could not differ more sharply from the biblical perspective. But do those conclusions actually follow from the evidence, or are they superimposed as a result of materialistic, naturalistic presuppositions? And, maybe even more importantly, does it even matter?

It is worth spending a little time saying why Christian anthropology developed the way it did. Some writers have argued that the Christian view of human nature developed out of an uncritical acceptance of Greek philosophy; they say the Bible itself never urges those beliefs on us. Still others argue that Christian anthropology emerged from ignorance as an attempt to explain humanity by inventing a metaphysic based on the Hebrew mythology of the Old Testament. They say Christian thinkers were trying to understand the phenomenology of human experience but were limited by their lack of scientific insight. We will not explore those lines much further here, because those conclusions seem completely wrong to me. It is my view that Scripture directly affirms the traditional positions we outlined above, and that is what accounts for their prevalence in our philosophy and theology. They are the biblical perspective shared by the patriarchs, the prophets, the apostles, and even Jesus Christ himself.

Let us briefly examine three of these basic elements of Christian anthropology by looking at a few relevant passages of Scripture. In the pages that follow I will explore these issues in much greater detail, so for now we will content ourselves with a very cursory survey.

We Have Souls

First, we will see why the doctrine of souls has been so important in theology and how it emerges from the Bible.

Admittedly, sometimes the teaching about souls is implicit—it is not directly asserted but seems to be implied by what the biblical authors state while directly teaching about something else. The view that we have an immaterial, spiritual aspect to our person is known as dualism, and it has been the majority view of the church based on the teachings of Scripture. For example, when Jesus says in Matthew 10:28, Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell, Jesus is warning his audience about sin, not teaching on metaphysical anthropology. Even so, this passage displays his belief that each of us has a soul, the soul is distinct from the body, and the soul survives the death of the body. A similar assumption is demonstrated during the transfiguration of Christ, when Moses and Elijah appear and speak with Jesus (Matt. 17:3)—and moments later they are no longer present (v. 8). Regular human bodies, especially those that have been dead for centuries, do not behave like that. Clearly, their consciousness extended past the death of their bodies while their souls continued on.

At other times the teaching is more direct. Consider this passage, one of the apostle Paul’s most explicit on the subject:

For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.

So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. (2 Cor. 5:1–8)

As I have already acknowledged, some theologians try to argue around the evident implication of passages like this, but it seems preferable to take it as a plain indication of what Paul thought: we have a soul, it is distinct from our body, and it will survive our death. The body is the residence of something essential to the real us—our spirit. The spirit or soul is housed in the body (and, no doubt, in meaningful ways united with it), but the body is not all we are. We transcend it and will continue to endure after it dies. As James says, The body apart from the spirit is dead (2:26).

In theology and philosophy there are several different schools of thought about souls, but we may endorse one of the varieties of dualism without specifying which approach is best. That we are a union of body and soul has been the overwhelming conclusion of Christian thinkers through church history despite their differences over the particulars. As theologian Hans Madueme says,

Some form of soul-body dualism was overwhelmingly the consensus of the church—Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant—either as substance dualism which casts soul and body as distinct substances (with the soul permeating every part of the body) or as hylomorphism which holds the soul as the form of the body (the soul organizes matter to be a living body).¹

Among the things I will affirm about the soul, again in keeping with Christian tradition, are that the soul is a basic, unified, continuing, property-bearing immaterial existent with causal powers. That is, it cannot be reduced to something simpler (it is basic) but is a metaphysically fundamental entity. It continues through time (it endures). It has properties and the power to cause things to happen. In particular, its properties are mental properties—the stuff of minds like desires, affections, beliefs, sensations, memories, deliberations of reason, and so on. Souls are immaterial, not made of physical stuff, and they are ultimately the core of who we are. The soul continuing through time as the same substance is what provides us with personal identity in this life and beyond. Whether we use the term soul, spirit, or mind, in this book I will always be referring to the same thing: the immaterial aspect of our being.

We Are Meant to Know God

The second element to introduce and offer a very brief biblical justification for is that we are made to know God—belief in God is a natural part of our nature as creatures made in his image. A more robust development of this point will come in the following chapters, but it is important for us to get oriented to the biblical teaching that we were made to know God. We do not discover God in the same way we discovered electrons or the strength of the gravitational constant. We did not have to devise clever arguments like the cosmological, ontological, teleological, moral, and anthropological arguments to learn of God’s reality. In fact, it may be that arguments give us entirely the wrong impression—they may entice us into thinking we can discover whether God exists just by thinking carefully. The Christian doctrine, however, emphasizes the extent to which God has gone in creating both the external world and our own internal constitution so that we would know him naturally. He has shown himself through many marvelous ways: his word, his special and miraculous actions, and his internal witness to us by his Holy Spirit. We were made to be in relationship with him, and that requires having an inclination to believe in his reality.

The account we will see later in this book from secular authors will tend to paint religious belief as an unfortunate by-product of blind evolutionary forces whose only purpose has been to promote our survival and reproduction—not to tell us the truth about spiritual realities. To these authors, our propensity to believe in God is not rooted in a divine design or God’s intention to be in relationship with us, but is an error forced upon us by processes indifferent to the truth about ultimate reality. Where