I've been thinking a lot about religion versus science lately (I'm actually writing a sermon for my church about it,) so I was interested in comments about a Presidential science appointment. The future head of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins.
Collins has interesting views about God and science. He believes in science, but also in God. To paraphrase, "Evolution is a glove on the hand of God." He believes in the Creator creating the universe and designing the laws of nature, and then ceasing involvement. It's a pretty elegant solution.
Except. When it comes to the human mind and moral intuition, Collins thinks God came in from her extra-dimensional home and gave us a soul, once we evolved naturally to the point that we could sustain intelligence and such. And he believes that we can't ever discover the source of our consciousness or our ethics scientifically.
As scared as I am that we'll eventually find that our minds are just big machines and that consciousness is a wonderfully pleasing illusion, I can't accept the Intelligent Design idea that the mind is irreducible. It smacks of the roman patent clerk thousands of years ago who said that everything that can be invented has been.
I think there are things that are unprovable. The existence of God or an afterlife are concepts beyond science. I think ethics is a subject where science cannot be helpful. But when it comes to the relationship of the mind and brain, it is premature to say that science has reached its limit and that God has all ownership.
1 comment:
I don't think we know what consciousness is. So until we know what it is, I don't think we can begin to discover how it works.
Sort of like Aether. It was invented back in the day to explain how light propagates. Later on we found out it doesn't exist-instead several other things are going on.
Saying we are going to study how consciousness works now is like saying (back in the day) we will study how ether works. It inevitably lead to a lot of dead ends, until we find out far in the future the other stuff that is going on.
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