I’m fortunate to have married a woman amazingly gifted in working with and caring for children. She’s not alone. Her two other sister, like their mom all work with children, two of which have pursued degrees in child care.

Her youngest sister recently returned from a childcare development conference held over the weekend. She was excitingly sharing about some of the things that she had learned over the weekend when I was startled by the worldview being taught to our up and coming generation of teachers. I don’t know why, as I’ve been in enough classes to expect this kind of thing, but I was concerned none the less.

She began to discuss what she had been told about child development, especially regarding the brain, and that as the brain develops that is when we see emotions begin to develop. She motioned toward the back of her head as if to say, “Here is where that happens.”

Unfortunately I jumped in the conversation a little too quickly, perhaps too abrasively, with my concerns and the discussion ended, so I suppose I won’t know where the rest of the discussion was going. I suppose I owe her an apology for that. But back to our topic.

From that small description, can you see the very obvious problems? In short summary, the idea is that emotions (and in turn, thoughts) are in the brain, they are products of the brain. Emotions and thoughts (and all of consciousness) are what the brain does. Aside from being false, the worldview behind this type of teaching is dangerous. It also undermines a great deal about the world that most people accept as self evident.

The idea that the brain is the center of consciousness, is incompatible with free will, an independent mind, and in turn, morality, the soul, heaven, hell or any afterlife and Christianity.

Rather than try to reinvent the wheel (especially when it’s been done better than I could ever do!), let me quote some people that have written some excellent thoughts in this area.

Here Greg Koukl discusses the consequences of this.

What you have going on inside of your head is just chemical reactions that are governed by very physicalistic processes. That which we mistakenly understood to be the mind or the soul is simply the brain, and if it is anything more than the brain, consciousness is a mere property of the brain that kind of rides on top of the physical substance of the brain, much like wetness rides on top of water. It supervenes upon the brain. It is temporarily produced by the brain and dependent upon the brain, but there is nothing akin to what we would call a soul.

…

Think about it for a minute. If there is no soul, if you are your only your body, then when your body dies, you die. When your body decays, you decay. When your body disappears, you are gone. There is no sense to any discussion about the reality of life after death if you die with your body. Though this would not solve the question of whether God existed, because certainly there could be a God existing even if there were no eternally existing souls in human beings, it certainly does end the discussion about the relevance of Christianity.

Christianity is false, period, end of issue, end of story, if we have no soul. If there is not a substantial human rational soul, a “you” that is not your body, but interacts with your body, controls your body, has a deep unity with your brain, but is not the same thing as your brain, it is not identical to your brain. If those things aren’t true, then it is all over for Christianity because all of Christianity is dependent on the notion that you survive the death of your body and that you, as a substantial soul, have to answer for the deeds done, as the Scriptures say, in the flesh. What it means by in the flesh is in the physical body. That is the point. ¹

This isn’t an ivory tower academic issue. The implications that result from this thinking will impact (or are already) everything in our world. Remember, the discussion that started this spawned from a child development class aimed at teachers and not from a higher level philosophy program.

The traditional Christian view is in a mind and a body (brain) that are distinct — mind body dualism. This is the view that the mind and the body both exist, each distinct from the other, though they may interact and affect each other.

However, if we’re merely our brains, if our thoughts are merely consequences of chemicals and electricity in the brain, then this idea of free will is illusory. Material causes then account for everything, even our seemingly free actions. If we follow that rabbit far enough down that hole, ultimately anything we do: caring for children or molesting them is no more our fault that a toothache is. It’s merely a series of dominoes. You’re simply reacting to natural forces. It’s like a car accident where one driver is pushed into a car in front of him by a third car in the rear. Though the middle driver “hit” the car in front of him, he’s not (usually) at fault. His had was forced. And if we’re simply material causes, our hands are too.

Greg adds this.

If consciousness is just a property created by the brain, then when you make a decision who or what does the deciding? If consciousness is a mere effect of chemical reactions in the brain, then your conscious act of deciding is not a free will act of your own, it is a result of some physical process that came before it. Your choices are controlled by physical events outside of your will. To put it more bluntly, you have no will at all. Not really. Why not? According to this view, physical states produce particular mental states, which produce particular physical states all following one after another in a determined pattern just like railroad cars following an engine.

More still, if consciousness goes, so do you, at least as a distinct ‘self.’ In Greg’s essay he was responding to a Time Magazine article titled Glimpses of the Mind, available here.

Here the article talks about just this issue.

However, despite our every instinct to the contrary, there is one thing that consciousness is not: some entity deep inside the brain that corresponds to the “self,” some kernel of awareness that runs the show, as the “man behind the curtain” manipulated the illusion of a powerful magician in The Wizard of Oz. After more than a century of looking for it, brain researchers have long since concluded that there is no conceivable place for such a self to be located in the physical brain, and that it simply doesn’t exist. (emphasis mine)

But there is no shortage of competing theories about how consciousness might arise. One, offered by the Salk Institute’s Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) and Christof Koch, at the California Institute of Technology, is that consciousness is somehow a by-product of the simultaneous, high-frequency firing of neurons in different parts of the brain. It’s the meshing of these frequencies that generates consciousness, according to Crick and Koch, just as the tones from individual instruments produce the rich, complex and seamless sound of a symphony orchestra

But “Science” cannot view the brain to see it’s thoughts. No Machine or surgeon can open up a brain and find memories because they aren’t there. The soul, the self, thoughts, emotions, memories, etc. exist in the mind, not the brain. A lonely scientist will never find love by digging through brains… he’d be looking for love in all the wrong places! (Hat tip Moreland.)

I wrote these notes in one sitting, without revision, so I hope they are coherent. But I wanted to at least get my thoughts in writing. (Usually I think, “Hey, I should write about that” and never do.) Understanding the distinction between mind and brain is critical, and to be sucked into the materialism trap, especially for the Christian has dark consequences.

1. All Brain, No Mind – Greg Koukl