In chapter 17, The Uniqueness of Humanity, Groothuis argues that Biblical anthropology teaches that man is a unity of body and soul. Philosophically, this is called substance dualism. Groothuis distinguishes between substance and property.
Biblically, man is both physical and mental. Jesus understood man as dualistic heard in His statement to the dying thief in Luke 23:43. Paul also taught this in 2 Corinthians 5:1-10.
Materialism as in Darwinianism denies dualism.
Accounting for Consciousness
Thinking, broadly understood, involves consciousness and cognition.
The Materialist Puzzle
Consciousness is a puzzle to materialist philosophers. Naturalist, Raymond Tallis’ naturalistic worldview fails to explain how an unconscious universe evolved consciousness when consciousness was neither needed for survival nor can be explained in materialistic terms.
Theism provides a worldview that is rooted in the character of God as the immaterial Creator and Designer and Lawgiver of the universe. Such a universe is surely friendly to dualism since God himself is an immaterial thinking and acting being who interacts with the material world.
Mind and Matter: A Difference in Kind
There is a difference in kind between mental and physical states that had ontological implications. Yet materialists want to maintain that thoughts are, in some sense, identical to material states.
Private Access and Incorrigibility
An incorrigible criminal is one who cannot be reformed. An incorrigible belief is one that cannot be wrong. Therefore, incorrigible beliefs are another marker of immaterial consciousness.
Qualia: Being There
Man feeling the phantom limb pain is an example of the experience of qualia. Qualia refers to the sensations that make up subjective feeling or the experience of being conscious. These cannot be reduced to a material state.
Propositional Attitudes and Intentionality
Propositional attitudes do not fit easily under any material description. Computers work on a binary system of zeros and ones, but it has no cognitive orientation toward the codes. It computes, but it doesn’t think or experience anything.
Truth: A Materialist Problem
A proposition is an intellectual unit of meaning not reducible to any of its physical manifestations. For the materialist, it seems that truth vanishes without a trace into matter. If so, we must turn a deaf ear to the materialist’s pleas to believe that materialism---or anything else---is itself true.
Love: The Material Acid
If love is nothing but a collection of physical states in those person felling love, the existence of love as a moral ideal vanishes, because ideals are not material states.
Responding to Objections to Dualism
Materialists aver that while matter may have very curious properties found only in humans, positing a separate soul or mind to explain mental events puts using no better a position to explain consciousness than does invoking the mysteries of materialism.
So, the materialist says we are on safer ground to say that mental and physical states are equivalent in some way yet to be discovered by science. Brain scientists such as Wilfred Penfield has concluded based on their scientific research that there is more to consciousness than the physical brain.
From Mind to Mindful Maker
Which worldview best explains dualism?
First, some nontheist, Jean-Paul Sartre says that mind originated from matter without any explanation at all without any design.
Second, other nontheists, argue that mind is latent or intrinsic in matter. When matter becomes complex enough though long periods of unguided evolution, consciousness emerges in the same way that hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water.
But this “does not fit naturally into a Darwinian understanding of our origins.”
Having eliminated the nontheists’ views, we find ourselves before the throne of theism. According to theism an absolute, personal and self-existent Mind (God) is the original and fundamental reality.
Cognition: How Can We Know the World?
It is a transcendental existence of God as the rational source of reason.
Materialism and Reason
Materialism is a mindless, matter-first worldview. The evolutionist says that rationality came by a “strange provocative contingent accident of natural selection.” Nietzsche’s answer: How did rationality arrive in the world? Irrationally, as might be expected: by a chance accident (Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, p. 125).
The conclusion of evolutionists is that man cannot know truth. Richard Rorty: The idea that one species of organism is, unlike all the others, oriented not just toward its own increased prosperity but toward Truth, is as unDarwinian as the idea that every human being has a built-in moral compass---a conscience that swings free of both social history and individual luck (Untruth and Consequences, p. 36).
Pantheism and Reason
Pantheism is the worldview promotes the idea of a Universal Mind which is not personal which did not design the universe because it is not a person. Also, all are part of the infinite mind and therefore there is no finite and material world to know.
The Christian Answer
Christianity provides the justification for our rational abilities through the doctrines of God, creation, and humanity. This chapter has argued that neither consciousness nor reason can be explained by materialism or pantheism. But Christian theism gives us an adequate explanation for our very selves.