A Contemporary Introduction to the Debate over Neurophilosophy and Theological Anthropology

As many of you (don’t) know, my Master’s thesis for Bethel Seminary is about how the advances of neuroscience are challenging Christian theologians, law makers, and apologists’ understanding of what it means to be human, to make choices, and to bear God’s image (due February of 2011). My first ultimate academic goal, Lord willing, is to publish a 700-900 page dissertation entitled “Systematic Christian Neurophilosophy,” divided up into seven major sections. It should be a highly developed and scholarly theological anthropology with a slant towards the nitty-gritty neuroscience and cognitive psychology. My original contribution to the subject of neuroscience and neurophilosophy are unique because it won’t be written from a naturalistic, Arminian, or Darwinian perspective, which is almost always the position of the scholars on this subject. Thus, it will be written from an evangelical, Reformed, non-evolutionist and non-theistic evolutionist perspective.

Like God, the immaterial entity of the mind is dismissed from the outset because of the dominance of both philosophical and methodological naturalism in most academic institutions. The reason God, logic, and the soul/mind of human beings don’t exist is simply because they can’t. Non-material entities don’t exist in a naturalistic (and atheistic) world. There are only atoms and physical entities. Consciousness, the mind, and that the invisible mind can affect the physical brain is all an illusion. Everything is cause and effect. The world is a closed system of moving atoms with no intervention or determinacy beyond classic physics.

The problem is, the science (notably orthodox quantum physics) in sync with the Christian Scriptures challenges this old-school paradigm (classical mechanics). Something non-physical can affect and change the physical and scientifically observable biology of the brain. Scripture teaches this – namely, that God, who is immaterial, is sovereign over the universe, over science, and over the immaterial minds/”hearts” of men; there is more than physical objects that comprise the entire universe (i.e. 2 Cor. 4:18). Moreover, something that is dependent upon the brain and emergently arises from the brain can still, indeed, turn around and affect that same physical entity (the brain).

Jeffrey Schwartz M.D., who is familiar to many for being interviewed on Ben Stein’s “Expelled,” gives another provocative speech (that’s the way he rolls) at the 2009 University of California at San Francisco Postdoctoral Scholars Association (05/05/09). He’s an active neuroscientist, active psychiatrist, and the author of The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. Schwartz has more than once opened a can of anti-materialist, intellectual whoop-ass. Take for example the 2008 Mind-Body Symposium (United Nations) where he said with great passion:

There are some points that I want to say that are directly relevant to the United Nations and to world culture. And maybe the most concrete way of saying it is to say that this is probably the first time – in fact it is the first time – in my entire life that I have ever sat on a panel outside of specialty conferences…the first elite location that has probably ever occurred where people like this can sit in front audience like this and say what we’ve said about how materialism is not true, and that the mind as a non-material force through focused attention can change the brain…it has never happened before. And Leonardo DiCaprio, who I am extremely close with…he so immersed himself into that role, and there’s another 15 minute video after this one that you saw…he was dedicated…that for three months after the filming was stopped he could not stop having obsessive compulsive disorder. So he actually induced in his own brain a transient case of OCD which took several months for him to recover from. And if that doesn’t tell you how powerfully the mind can affect the brain and how much an actor can immerse himself in a role, that it takes three months after the shooting is done to get out of the role and to get out of OCD, thoughts, feelings, and the symptoms…

Everyone has paid serious career prices for the choices that we’ve made to say that the materialist paradigm needs to change…Henry’s view of quantum physics which is the orthodox view, the view that the founders of quantum mechanics had…is the only way that quantum mechanics can actually be done, it’s the only way that you can collect data in physical experiments that’s ever been known and that has ever been practiced – and yet for all of that, very very few physicists will sign on to what Henry just said. It’s extremely controversial. And why? Because everybody in the scientific establishment is so dedicated [to the materialistic paradigm]…we are still as a community a small minority of scientists who want to overcome this materialist paradigm, struggling with our lives, our careers suffer, our incomes radically suffer, we don’t get anything like the kind of the media recognition that the materialist community gets…there is huge resistance among the mainstream scientific elite…

Theology will never be reduced to science. There’s a lot of scientists who think theology is something that doesn’t matter, it doesn’t make sense and that we’re way past that. I’ve spent the last few years of my life specifically studying theology and particularly Deidrich Bonhoeffer, and I want to tell you: Science has a lot to learn from theology. And I think we’re now entering an era where science can maybe pull back its horns a little bit, maybe get a little bit of institutional humility…yes we’ll collect data, and yes we’ll explain things. But I think the time has come for science to say ‘we’re going to stop being confrontational against other disciplines and accept the fact that it’s not the ruler of the roost when it comes to the truth.’

During that Symposium, and also in this 2009 video at UCSF, Schwartz was sitting next to quantum mechanics physicist Henry Stapp who’s a co-publisher with Heisenberg (who founded the Heisenberg uncertainty principle). (Note especially the climactic assertions at 31:00-35:00, and 54:00-55:30).

You can also download for free the two major publications on this subject that turned the world of neurophilosophy and naturalistic science upside down: Stapp’s Quantum Interactive Dualism: An Alternative to Materialism and Schwartz’s, Stapp’s, and Beauregard’s Quantum physics in neuroscience and psychology: a neurophysical model of mind–brain interaction.