I love this question! Everything that I have read points to all debriefing of our experiences being a product of the organic functioning of the human brain. Whatever concepts we might have about what came before and what comes after, are creations of the human brain. The human brain is wondrous - in its capacity for imagination and story-telling. It seeks to comfort us. It can contemplate "what might be." It's a point of wonder to me, what the human brain has created.
Agreed! This kind of thing is what leads many of us to conclude that there must be a God who made the human brain, why we Christians often ask how people can look at natural beauty and not believe in God. After all, if an archaeologist finds a stone tool in a cave, he concludes that some intelligent being made the tool. The brain, as you clearly know, is far more complex than a stone tool, so why wouldn’t that mean an intelligent being made the human brain too?
I like the sentiment but . . . if all conceptions are creations of the human brain and its capacity for imagination and storytelling, how does that contribute to what one [chooses to] [believes] is an afterlife, if any? We can think and we can imagine, but we can never really know. IMHO.
Then I have to ask, if an intelligent being created the human brain, why did they make it susceptible to mental and physical illness?
Humans are fearful creatures. We fear the unknown. We fear death. We evolved the ability to believe. By this, I don't mean religion, but the ability to make inferences from observations. Each and every one of us forms beliefs every day. It's impossible to know everything at all times. It's impossible to know what happens when we die. So the human brain creates stories to make it less fearful, and to make it all mean something.
Interesting question! Religions have different answers, but the Christian answer is that God made man perfect, but gave him the free will to obey or disobey (otherwise he would just be a biological robot), and when the first man chose to disobey, he became imperfect and passed the imperfection to his descendants—that’s the short version, anyway. I understand that stating this doesn’t prove anything, but that’s the Christian answer to your question. To me, the idea that man made himself imperfect by cutting himself off from the source of perfection makes more sense than the idea that the first human brain somehow assembled itself from a single cell that somehow assembled itself (have you ever seen what a cell looks like?) in a universe that somehow assembled itself, all through an algorithm that somehow wrote itself. As a programmer, that makes no sense to me; I have to test my code very carefully to get it to work, and sometimes that takes hours, so the idea that a random text generator could write a more intricate program than the ones I write without even having a person to program the random text generator doesn’t make sense. Does it make sense to you? Or, an analogy from my friend: she says she can’t understand how anyone could see design in her baby granddaughter’s crib but random assembly in the baby, since the baby is so much more complex!
To play devil's advocate (no pun intended?), a stone tool is something that is create rather quickly with a specific purpose by someone that already has a brain (I'm not saying that development of tools isn't significant. I think it's actually one of the thing that sets us apart but maybe I'm influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey too much). The human brain, at least according to evolution, is something that developed gradually over millions of years, and if we are talking about nerve nets, beginning about 500 million years ago. This is an extremely long time for us to fathom. It still seems incredible that something so complex could arise from something so simple by natural selection and survival/procreation being the main driver of that development (e.g., an organism that can detect the location of something that touches it could be a precursor to the sense of touch and would have an advantage over time over an organism that can simply detect the outside stimuli but not the location and through natural selection might replace them, but this might take millions of years to happen). I'm really not knowledgeable on this, of course. Forrest Valkai has a good youtube channel but I can't find a good video where he discusses the development of the human brain. But as amazing at it is, I believe it makes sense and is the most plausible explanation.
I understand and respect this version, I just don't believe in it. Mental and physical illnesses are caused by malfunctioning of cells. Life did not evolve to be perfect, just good enough to produce the next generation. Yes, I understand your position. It's difficult to imagine a single cell becoming a brain. But it didn't happen overnight. It took about 700 million years, and happened by random mutation, selection and advances in the biochemistry. And it's the biochemistry that explains the wondrous capabilities of the human brain, as well as the pitfalls, such as mental illness. This is not to diminish it. It makes the human brain all the more wondrous to me.
I think the problem of understanding why we're here and what happens now is the incomplete function of the brain. If anyone has watched the documentaries on savants, we know the capability to do these wonderful things are within us, yet a brain operating at ten percent of capacity has yet been able to put it all together.
Bruce: Yes, that’s my point. The archaeologist doesn’t have to see the guy who make the stone tool to know he existed. Similarly, I don’t have to see the One who made the first human brain to know He exists. Even if evolution is true, someone still had to program the algorithm. If people who breed animals for specific characteristics can only go so far (chihuahuas were bred to be small, but there can never be a chihuahua the size of a mouse because dogs just don’t have that genetic information to begin with), how can random evolution make it happen? You also haven’t dealt with the rest of what I said in my response.
That’s the evolutionary explanation, just as mine is the Christian explanation. You say yours is scientific and mine is religious, but I submit that both our positions are religious. For you, the idea that everything assembled itself from nothing is a dogma that you accept on faith, just as I accept the inerrancy of Scripture on faith. I can toss pebbles at my keyboard for the rest of my life and I still won’t be able to write a program. Where did that cell come from? How did such an irreducibly complex thing come from non-living matter? For that matter, what did the first cell capable of sexual reproduction reproduce with? Heck, why is there anything rather than nothing? I’ve read the literature on evolution. Have you read the literature on intelligent design? It makes some very cogent arguments.
Not to offend anyone's beliefs, but there has been an interesting experiment, that can make some question religion. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet
Please do not presume you know the workings of my mind. I understand that science is not dogmatic. A dogma is a principle laid down as incontrovertibly true. A scientist would never say ,"This is true." That is not the language of science. When a scientist makes a conclusion, what they say is, "This is the best explanation for the evidence." Scientific conclusions are accepted or rejected based on the empirical evidence. Science does not ask for faith, which is accepting a belief without evidence. Science demands evidence. It required the evolution of a molecule called a phospholipid, which is hydrophobic at one end and hydrophilic at the other end. In water, due to the charges interacting with polar water, the phospholipids self-assemble to form a phospholipid bilayer, enclosing the interior from the watery external environment. This phospholipid bilayer is the cell membrane. Sexual reproduction is the combining of DNA from two cells into one cell. It does happen with single-celled organisms in a process called conjugation, which may have evolved as a precursor to sexual reproduction. To make a long story short, evolution proceeds with small changes over a very, very long time. The small changes accumulate.
Yet scientists have been ostracized by the scientific community for accepting ideas outside their orthodoxy. Even if you’re right, why do they have those properties? I understand the theory, I just call bull on it. Those small changes are actually loss of genetic information (such as racial variation in humans). Have you ever read Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells? The author, a scientist, shoots down much of what is taken for evidence for evolution.
I read about that experiment, but it doesn’t disprove God. In fact, that there’s a part of the brain that senses God points to His existence. After all, we have eyes that sense light; if light didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have eyes, or even if we did, we wouldn’t be able to sense light.
I don’t quite understand the conflict between religion and evolution. Natural selection is a pattern that occurs on the lower levels of reality. It describes something that happens, apparently, but it doesn’t address the problems of human existence because it’s a theory of a physical mechanism. I don’t think it’s particularly interesting except as biology. And I’ll say something else: most of the meaning that has been derived from Darwin’s biological theory has been wicked. It doesn’t work when applied to a society. We can’t behave like chimp troops do, where they tear each other limb from limb, and call it justified by evolutionary imperatives, although usually we do behave like that. But we can’t say it’s good. Nobody really accepts that evolution fully describes the human condition, not really; it represents a certain principle but I don’t think it’s very good at explaining the totality. You get a very incomplete anthropology. But I don’t know, there’s something Wagnerian about the long aeons…
Is not knowing or comprehending something a good reason to assume its origin or properties are divine? It's a very human state of mind. In fact, I like that bold swagger: "If the minds of my species cannot parse it, it must have supernatural qualities." It seems like for every believer of the divine lost, we get one more believer in Visitors From Outer Space. Humans are naked and alone, on the frontier of things that the entire galaxy may have never seen before, so it's natural we all want something to save us or at least be a haven for our consciousness. To answer the thread's question, show me evidence and I'll start believing. Man is the most incredible species that has ever existed. Divine, though? I just don't think so.
I too think [believe?] that science and religion are not inherently incompatible. Their zealous adherents maybe, but not the concepts themselves. I always go back to a moment when I was walking up Crow Butte in western Nebraska, and somehow found myself in company with a pair of nuns. We were admiring the scenery and I mentioned the geological history of the area as accounting for it. One of the nuns said, politely, "I think God made it." My response was, "maybe so, but that's how He did it." I don't recall her response, if any, but I know we parted amicably shortly afterward.
I never said disprove, I said question. Or could it be the helmet is triggering that same sense that tells us someone is watching us?
In the Grim Fandango universe, "hell" is the journey to get to heaven. Or that's what I made of it, anyway. I was mostly concerned with pointing and clicking at the time. The most attractive part of religion in that vain, to me, is that it doesn't bother me with some beardy dude in the clouds who's deciding what happens. It just leaves most of the control with the traveler, for lack of a better word. I don't actually know of any real religions that do that, but if I had to, I'd gravitate towards one of those.
Most people today who write off religion do so with very little understanding of what it is. They tend to get hung up on the magic guy in the sky thing, and miss the fact that that's just a visual representation of something invisible. They also miss the fact that the religious stories contain the greatest wisdom of our species in its earliest forms. Ideas that would later separate and become philosophy, psychology, and sociology among other fields. Currently Jordan Peterson's Exodus discussions are delving into the story of the Ten Commandments, which lays out the preconditions of unity, both psychologically and socially. How to be mentally/emotionally healthy and how to form a society that can thrive. You have to really delve into it to find all this, but it's definitely there. But our modern materialist prejudices keep us from looking into it in the spirit of seeking first to understand, instead we wave it all off as silly primitive superstition so we can feel superior to it, as our society crumbles because we're moving rapidly away from the great discoveries our ancestors recorded for us.
Which I'll admit to doing, but that's kinda because the magic guy keeps popping up a lot. Or, so I hear. I've yet to actually see one. I'll eat my words when I do. Though, all things considered, my problem is not with religion. People can and should believe what they want. Just don't expect others to believe what you want, and we should be peachy. According to me, the real problem is organized religion. And I use "organized" very loosely. I mean, they probably didn't expect anybody to start asking questions. "Yeah, this guy right, he made everything. Light, the world, us-- what? No, of course it's a man... What do you mean 'maybe it's a flying spaghetti monster?' That's just silly." At its core I guess religion is a reasonable idea, but it hinges on average human beings, and that's where it all falls apart. If they could be trusted to read the ten commandments and adhere to them, or read their quran/bible/Battlefield Earth without interpreting it in ways that suit them... Maybe it would work? All these rules and words of respective gods seem to impair people's ability to take responsibility. Eh, I keep trying to work up to a point and I go off on a new tangent. I'm currently not able to discuss this as a reasonable person at the moment. I'll try after the Ricky Gervaisness wears off.
