By Abdu Murray
A recent television program promised to unlock the “The Secrets of Your Mind” by delving into the structural, chemical,and electrical makeup of the human brain. In focusing purely on the physical, the program assumed that our mind is equivalent to our brain. The program took the position that we act in conformity with chemical and electrical reactions that take place in certain structures of our brains. Our emotional states, our impulses, and even our motivations are all bound by the physical. Although the program's producers took this position, they never explored the profound theological and moral implications of such conclusions. Which is interesting because that particular program focused on whether certain people who had been convicted of serial murder and other violent behavior are physically “destined” to commit such crimes.
Theologically, the implications are huge. If our minds are nothing more than the result of mechanical processes and chemical reactions in our brains, then Christianity—and every religion that posits and immortal soul—are false. The Bible clearly teaches that we are not just physical beings and that our souls survives the deaths of our bodies (Matt. 10:28, 1 Cor. 15, Phi. 1:21-24). When Jesus returns, the souls of those who died believing in him will be joined with their bodies to be with Him forever, while those who died having rejected him will be resurrected to eternal damnation. Put simply, if our personalities and even our “personhood” are dependent on the survival of our brains, then Christianity’s teaching about the afterlife is just wrong.
But are our thoughts, feelings, actions, and motivations just the result of physical processes? Or does the human mind transcend the physical? The evidence points to transcendence. Research on Near Death Experiences (or NDEs) has uncovered remarkable evidence that human consciousness survives brain death. In their book Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality (Wipf & Stock, 2003), Dr. Gary Habermas and Dr. J.P. Moreland devote three chapters to evidence of people whose brains had died, but were able to recall remarkable details about conversations, events, and surroundings during death that they could not possibly otherwise know. If the mind survives brain death, it logically follows that the mind is not equivalent to the brain or at all dependent upon it.
But how do we reconcile this evidence with the evidence from the program showing confessed killers have different brain makeups than normal people? How do we explain the fact that our loved ones, once so kind and genteel, become belligerent and aggressive when their brains are afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease? If our once easy going and soft spoken grandmother becomes easily frustrated and uses horrible obscenities, is the woman we once knew gone? If someone’s personality—who they are—is so profoundly affected by brain chemistry, doesn’t this challenge to our Christian view that we are not just the sum of our chemical parts?
The answer is no. First, in light of the fact that the mind survives brain death, it must be the case that the mind survives brain injury (or malformation). After all, death is a more serious physical condition than injury. If the mind can withstand death, then withstanding injury should be no problem. Second, the fact that brain chemistry and structure affects how we feel and act doesn’t mean it determines who we are. Given that the mind is not the brain, we can think of the brain as merely the physical organ through which the mind expresses itself to the physical world. An analogy is helpful. Certain areas of the brain govern our ability to express language. Strokes can damage those areas of the brain, making it almost impossible to form words and sentences. It is not that the stroke victim can no longer understand language or have coherent thoughts, he can. He just can’t express those thoughts to us. The organ that allows him to translate his thoughts into words is damaged, but the mind that generates the thoughts and ideas is unimpaired. So our loved ones suffer from dementia, we need not despair that our loved one is somehow “gone” or that they have no soul. Their mind is still there, it just can’t express itself to us the same way it once did. This realization is bittersweet. It’s a tragedy that a person can be trapped this way, but it can give us comfort to know that we are not bound by the physical and that, for believers, our resurrected bodies will be free of the damage done and our mind and bodies will be in perfect harmony.
In fact, the program I’ve mentioned touched on the fact that our mind transcends our brain. In the program, a leading expert on brain scans found to his horror that his own brain chemistry and structure matched those of murderers. Yet, he wasn’t a killer; he was a cutting edge scientist with a loving family. When asked to explain what accounted for that, he said that it may just be that a lot of love and affection can overcome what he called “bad biology.” In one sense, we are all a product of “bad biology.” Our bodies, our brains, and even our souls have been corrupted by the Fall. In the same way that we are incapable of changing our brain chemistry, we are incapable of changing our spiritual chemistry. If the power of earthly love can help us overcome “bad biology,” how much more does the power of divine love, found in Christ, transform us from hopeless sinner to hopeful saint?