Audio Transcript
Francis Crick won a Nobel Prize for being one of the two scientists who famously discovered the double helix of DNA in 1953. Four decades later, that same Francis Crick wrote, “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules” (The Astonishing Hypothesis, 3). You are what happens materially in your brain. When your brain function ends, you are extinguished. Poof.
Of course, the Bible says otherwise. In this episode, we examine Scripture’s teaching on the soul, the consciousness, and how our true personhood survives death and flourishes in resurrection. Today on Ask Pastor John: Why our mind cannot die.
The question is from Paul in Indianapolis: “Hello, Pastor John! I have a pair of college friends, non-Christians, obsessed with a debate over the human consciousness and where it exists. At this point, they’re both firmly convinced that consciousness is nonmaterial, not explained by physical realities. They both firmly believe consciousness exists outside or beyond the brain. Until recently, I was completely uninterested in their debate. Then I began to ponder the intermediate state of the Christian between death and bodily resurrection, and I arrived at the same conclusion. My consciousness is nonmaterial. It’s not a physical part of me. Which is why Jesus could tell the thief, ‘Today you will be with me in paradise’ (Luke 23:43), and why Paul speaks of being ‘away from the body and at home with the Lord’ (2 Corinthians 5:8).
“These passages imply a continued awareness independent from a physical, functioning brain. So, is consciousness the soul? Or part of the soul? And then what do we make of people whose consciousness is distorted by a brain in dementia and other degeneracies? What are the implications? Is there a deep, authentic me that is (for now) masked and distorted by physical limits?”
Brain and Consciousness
Well, I think Paul — the Paul who asked this question of the Bible Paul — is absolutely right that human consciousness is not identical with the physical brain. I think the reasons he gives from the Bible are compelling. We are going to be conscious persons in the presence of Christ after we depart from the body (Philippians 1:23; 2 Corinthians 5:8). Our brain is going to be lying in the grave, and our personhood — our consciousness relating to Jesus — is in heaven in the presence of the Lord.
That’s a clear teaching in the New Testament, and that shouldn’t surprise us since God himself existed from all eternity as consciousness, not as a body. Physical matter, of which the brain is a part, was created; it’s not an eternal part of God. Therefore, God is personal — personal consciousness — and we are created in his image (Genesis 1:26–27).
The wonder is that he created not just persons with consciousness, who could communicate with him in truth and love, thoughts and affections, but that he decided to link those centers of consciousness — those persons — with bodies and brains. That introduced a great mystery — namely, how do our personal consciousness (that is, our very personhood, our souls) interact with or interpenetrate our physical brains? Because clearly they do.
“We are going to be conscious persons in the presence of Christ after we depart from the body.”
I remember thinking about this a great deal in Germany 50 years ago. I was a graduate student, and I can remember sitting in my little pantry off the kitchen where I studied for three years. I was thinking, Now, patience is called a fruit of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22). In other words, patience is the work of a supernatural being, producing in me a spiritual reality. That’s a matter of consciousness. And yet, patience is clearly affected by physical sleeplessness. This is always so obvious to me that I get more irritable and less patient when I get less sleep. So, my body and my consciousness clearly interact somehow.
Transposition of the Mind
Maybe one of the best things I can do for Paul and his friends who are thinking about this issue is to direct them to an essay by C.S. Lewis called “Transposition.” The place that I’m quoting from is The Weight of Glory, which is four essays or four sermons. It’s about this very issue. Here’s what Lewis says:
It seems to me very likely that the real relationship between mind and body is one of Transposition. We are certain that, in this life at any rate, thought is intimately connected with the brain. The theory that thought therefore is merely a movement in the brain [which is what naturalists think — atheistic, evolutionary naturalists who don’t think anything about a supernatural reality] is, in my opinion, nonsense, for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction, but of which it could never meaningfully be called “true” or “false.” We are driven then to some kind of correspondence [between brain and mind, consciousness]. But if we assume a one-for-one correspondence [between what happens in the mind and what happens in the body, the brain], this means that we have to attribute an almost unbelievable complexity and variety of events to the brain. But I submit that a one-for-one relationship is probably quite unnecessary. All our examples [from the earlier part of the essay] suggest that the brain can respond . . . to the seemingly infinite variety of consciousness without providing one single physical modification for each single modification of consciousness. (103–4)
Let me see if I can shed some light on that statement. For example, the conscious experience of love, in its richness and depth and diversity, cannot simply be identified with the physical counterpart of the experience of sexual desire in the brain or in the body. In fact, the consciousness of fear, or some other emotional pain, may use the very same neural pathway in the brain as sexual desire. But because the higher level of consciousness — love and fear — is vastly more complex than the lower level of physical responses, the lower level has to make do, so to speak, with the same anatomical, neural sensation for both love and fear. But we experience these two acts of consciousness as very different physical sensations, because the consciousness embodies itself in the same nerves but interprets those sensations for us differently.
Lewis puts it like this: “The emotion [or consciousness] descends bodily, as it were, into the sensation [the nervous system] and digests, transforms, transubstantiates it, so that the same thrill along the nerves is delight or is agony” (103). Now, this is only an analogy to illustrate the fact that consciousness — the realm of thought and emotion, reasoning and affection — is vastly “richer, more varied, more subtle” than the physical nervous system (98).
Three Implications
This may all sound a bit heady, but there are serious implications if we believe that our true personhood, our human consciousness, is both distinct from our physical brain and profoundly interwoven with it. I’ll mention three of those implications because that’s one of the things that Paul was asking about.
First, it helps us take seriously the spiritual significance of taking care of our bodies. The body can seriously affect the mind, our consciousness. But the same conviction keeps us from the superficial notion that, because the body interacts with the consciousness, therefore consciousness is nothing but brain — nothing more than physical matter — and we go utterly out of existence when we die (on that view). That’s not true. We know it’s not true from the Bible, and it does not follow from the fact that the consciousness and the brain interact.
Second, since our true personhood is not identical with the brain or the body, we should be slow to assume that drastic, traumatic, negative, physical alterations in the brain also mean that the true person is also drastically altered. What if a person has been a humble, godly lover of Jesus for seventy years, and then after a stroke is suddenly withdrawn, cynical? I would be very slow to pass judgment — a judgment of apostasy, say — on such a one. God knows the true person.
Third, since the life of the soul or consciousness is vastly — to use Lewis’s words — “richer, more varied, more subtle,” it is likely that our glorified bodies in the resurrection will not merely duplicate our present brains (1 Corinthians 15:42–44). Instead, it is likely that our glorified brains will be of a whole new order, so that they can create sensations of joy that, dare we say, are infinitely richer, more varied, and more subtle so that they can accommodate the immeasurable fullness of joy and pleasures at God’s right hand that we will experience (Psalm 16:11).
