Evolution and Depression

In a prior post we dealt with the dark side of Darwin.

Evo Emo

evolution eliminates optimism

materialism killed mother-love

Darwin cheers when the black rabbit died

Evolution favors the power of “no”

Darwin shades the “tree of life” in darkness

Morbid self reflection is simply evolution inaction

Cosmic Evolution makes us all little people

Darwin-Love evolves into evil

Evolution brainwashing hurts the planet

my pet rock says “I believe in evolution”

Who's your Universal Common Ancestor?

Naturalism is not nice (no never)

Darwin has optimally extensive melancholy

extinction documentaries make my day

I just can’t go on ... Darwin is everywhere

Evolution is depressing, Earth is young

  - ice-j (3-20-17)

The characeter Rust Cohle, played by Matthew McConaughey, on the show True Detective really brings the miserable conclusion home: If evolution is true, then life has no purpose.

Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind.    For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief. (Eccl. 1:17, 18)

Do You Mind?!

The mind exists apart from the brain – as does the soul.  Yet atheists and materialists deny it.  We are not meat machines.  Do androids dream of electric sheep?  Are we truly nothing but brain?  Is there life after death?  I’m a SOUL man not a MineCraft calculator.  Saved, Originated by God, United with Christ and Life after Death (in heaven).

John Searle (Philosophy Prof., UC Berkeley) proposed the Chinese Room Experiment.  I’m in a room and I don’t know Chinese, but I’m given a series of questions in Chinese.  I have the rules in English on how to write answers to these questions using Chinese characters.  Those who get my answers think I understand Chinese, but I don’t.  In like manner, a smart computer has no real understanding, consciousness or mind.

Norman Geisler confronts the materialists who think they can explain the mind:

Also unwarranted is the assumption that, because the mind and brain function together, they must be identical.  A corollary assumption is that I am nothing but my brain.  This is reductionist fallacy.  Things that go together are not necessarily the same, any more than ideas expressed by these words are the same as the words themselves.  Mind and brain could interact without being the same. [1]

Brain is Mind advocates fall from logic.  As Geisler reveals:

Materialist arguments are self-defeating.  “Nothing but” statements assume “more than” knowledge.  How could I know I am nothing more than my brain unless I was more than it?  I cannot analyze my brain in a test tube unless I am outside the test tube. [2]

If the nonmaterial mind does not exist, how is it that most cultures have a sense of the afterlife?  In The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul by Mario Beauregard (neuroscientist) and Denyse O'Leary (science journalist) provide empirical evidence for a nonmaterial mind.  Edward Feser teaches Philosophy at Pasadena City College and wrote The Philosophy of Mind.  He provides a number of helpful links here.

“The purposes of a person's heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out” (Pr. 20:5).

Notes:

1) Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics by Norman Geisler (Baker

Books, 1999), “Materialism,” p. 445.

2) Ibid.

**Graphic source:  adapted from Bizarro by Dan Piraro.

Atheists Against Evolution

G. H. Harper is an atheist and opposes evolution.  Henry Morris quoted one of his articles published in the School Science Review.  Harper supported the fixity of species (essential types of life would be more accurate).  He was even published in the Creation Research Society Quarterly. [1]

Philosophy professor Thomas Nagel has written Mind and Cosmos:  Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.  Mainstream Darwinism cannot explain consciousness, intentionality, meaning or value.  Matter is not a mind and naturalism … … oh, never mind.  Nagel concludes that “psychophysical reductionism is false” (p. 5).

Nagel is brutally honest regarding the Origin Of Life (OOL), “The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account becomes” (p. 5).

Are these scholars read to accept ID?  Who is the Intelligent Designer?

Note:

1)  “Alternatives to Evolutionism” by G. H. Harper, CRSQ 17(1):49-55, June 1980.