Materialism and the Mind

Christianity has historically embraced a dualist interpretation of the mind/body problem inherited largely from the Greeks (Plato, Aristotle, etc.). There are two main reasons for this embrace: the first is explanatory, and the second is ontological. The explanatory power of dualism is intuitive to many (if not most) people. Thought does not appear to be physical, and reason appears to ascertain truths far more abstract than any material substance. It seems intuitively plausible that reason itself must be the product of a non-material substance. Along these lines an even more compelling case can be made for the non-physical existence of the will, which, if separated from the mind, constitutes perhaps yet a third "substance" in addition to the mind and the body. The ontology of dualism (or trio-ism?) is probably even more important to the Christian than this explanatory power. It typically helps explain the image of God in man, the ability for human beings to spiritual, and the significance of human life over and against plant and animal life.

I would argue that neither its explanatory power nor its ontology is enough to justify a dualist answer to the mind/body problem, since (1) its explanatory power does not take into account modern empirical observations and (2) its ontology contains critical philosophical and theological problems. Concerning point (1), many Christians are quick to point out that "science can't teach us everything." But this observation becomes quite hollow if we ignore things science does in fact say. By rejecting scientific materialist accounts of the mind out of hand, Christians often deny themselves the opportunity to interpret such accounts in light of theological considerations. The results of this trend could be disastrous in an age where decisions on bioethics are often made by people with skewed interpretations of scientific facts. If the only answer to this disturbing situation is to demand that scientists would go back to a Christian-Aristotelian view of the soul, then I'm afraid we're sunk.

A modern scientific materialist account of the mind is necessarily evolutionary: the mind emerges out of a process of "selection" (which, for my part, I take to be a horribly inadequate term to label such a broad principle). While evolution can account for the development of human reason, it can't account for it in the way a dualist would like--an utterly transcendent phenomenon. Rather, intelligence is accounted for as the result of a sufficiently complex dynamic system. (See, for instance, W. Ross Ashby's essay on self-organizing systems: "every dynamic system generates its own form of intelligent life.") This account is reductionist in the sense that the mind is no longer a fundamental substance in the universe, impenetrable to empirical studies. On the other hand, as F. A. Hayek pointed out in an essay on "The Theory of Complex Phenomena," "in the case of mind attempting to explain the detail of the working of another mind of the same order of complexity, there seems to exist, in addition to the merely 'practical' yet nevertheless unsurmountable obstacles, also an absolute impossibility: because the conception of a mind fully explaining itself involves a logical contradiction." In other words, physical explanations of the mind are statements of general principles, and no such explanation can ever be comprehensive. A materialist account of the mind, rightly interpreted, leads to a humble epistemology: we both acknowledge with reverence the enormous complexity of our own minds as well as the inherent limits on the knowledge which can be learned by them.

The Christian may combine a materialist account of the mind with theological insight to develop an account of knowledge that stresses harmony with God and his creation, rather than the acquisition of abstract truths. Dualism, by contrast, tends toward a lower view of physical creation. Indeed, it makes it rather difficult to explain what the mind has to do with the body at all. How and why is the mind attached to the body? Why should sleep cause the mind to stop functioning as it usually does? Why should physical substances such as alcohol effect the non-physical mind? And then there is this theological problem: how can God be anything but capricious to damn our souls to prisons of physical existence, if indeed our minds would otherwise transcend the physical world? So long as it gives a dualist answer to the mind/body problem, Christian tradition has a difficult time maintaining that the body is part of God's creation and therefore good, apart from the brute force of dogma.

It is simply not the case that a non-physical mind (or will, or anything else) makes the human more significant than other created beings. From the point of view of the Creator, why would any such justification be required? First of all, we can rule out the notion that the mind is non-physical because it is uncreated; this is to confuse humans with God. Secondly, there is no reason why the "image of God" is something added onto an otherwise functional physical creature. That God breathed into Adam to give him life does not seem to imply that he conferred on him a non-physical soul, but rather that without the breath of God nothing can live (this seems to apply to the animals, as well). If someone were to interject here that the "soul" is not a "substance" but rather a matter of meaning and purpose which God gives us, I have nothing to say in response, since that claim seems to have nothing to do with what the mind (or the will) actually is.

A dualist account of the mind does not fit naturally into a humble epistemology. In the Christian tradition this is corrected by the doctrine of original sin. Toss this aside, and it would appear that man is left with an unlimited mind fully capable of objective, dispassionate reason. I maintain that there are limitations on our minds even more fundamental than sin. Though I can't develop the idea more fully here, I think that being "dispassionate" is not the way humans really gain knowledge, and that we are more productive learners when we embrace rather than reject our inherent intellectual limitations. To associate our limitations solely with guilt is, I believe, a huge mistake which has many unfortunate consequences in the church.

To conclude, I will address the question of God's mind versus human minds. There is a grand tradition of thinking of God himself as a Mind. Such ideas appear to solve the problem of objective truth: all truth exists in the Mind of God, and we come to know the truth insofar as we receive it from him. I no longer think this is a useful idea. It may be helpful to give the "Mind of God" a Trinitarian--and therefore a dynamic--interpretation. Even this may be misleading, if we're to suggest a materialist account of the mind and yet hold that God is uncreated. My main point here is that we're likely to make many errors if we project onto God a flawed picture of our own minds. For my part, I would have to say it is generally impossible to say "what" God is; every statement describing God must in some sense be taken as a metaphor. One such metaphor is that "God is rational," and that metaphor has, I think, led to certain errors. In particular, human rationality as we know it evolved in the world as God made it; it would be a mistake to think that God's rationality is fundamentally similar to ours.