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Ask Pastor John
Why Your Mind Cannot Die
00:16:31
If consciousness is part of the soul, what are the implications when the brain degrades and dies? Pastor John speaks to consciousness in both life and death.
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- [00:04]
A
Well, a man by the name of Francis Crick won a Nobel Prize. He won it for being one of the two scientists who famously discovered the double helix of DNA back in 1953, I believe that was at Cambridge in the UK. Four decades later, that same Francis Crick wrote this quote. You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will. Will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Wow. You basically are what happens materially in your brain. And when your brain function ends, you are extinguished, poof, gone. 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 the 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 the consciousness is non material, 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 non material. It's not a physical part of me, which is why Jesus could tell the thief on the cross today, you will be with me in paradise in Luke 23:43. And why Paul speaks of being away from the body and at home with the Lord in 2nd 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 are the implications? Is there a deep authentic me that is for now masked and distorted by physical limits?
- [02:41]
B
Well, I think Paul, I mean the Paul who asked this question of the Bible, Paul, but the Paul who asked this question, I think he's absolutely right that human consciousness is not identical with the physical brain and gets right. 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 conscious relating to Jesus is in heaven in the presence of the Lord. That's a clear teaching. I think 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. 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, yes, soul, interact with or interpenetrate our physical brains? Because clearly they do. I mean, 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. 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 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. 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. Just go get it. It's free online. Just type it in, you'll find it, or you can, or you can buy the book. The place that I'm quoting from is the Weight of glory, which is four essays or four sermons. HarperCollins, pages 91 to 115, just called transposition. It's about this very issue, more or less. And here's what Lewis says. It's a little aside in his essay, but provocative, it seems to me. I'm quoting Lewis now. It seems to me very likely that the real relationship between mind and body is one of transposition. That's what the essay is about. We are certain that in this life at any rate, thought is intimately connected with the brain, right? 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. This idea that thought is nothing more than movement in the brain is, in my opinion, Lewis says nonsense. For if so, the 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, so between brain and mind, consciousness. But if we assume a one for one correspondence, namely 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. That's what his essay is about, really. 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, single physical modification for each single modification of consciousness. Now, that's the end of the quote. 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 the emotion or consciousness descends bodily, as it were, into the sensation the nervous system and digests, transforms, transubstantiates, so that the same thrill along the nerves is delight or is agony. End quote. Now, this is only an analogy to illustrate the fact that consciousness, the realm of thought and emotion, reasoning and affection, are vastly richer, more varied, more subtle than the physical nervous system. 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. Number one, it helps us take seriously the spiritual significance of taking care of our bodies, because the body can seriously affect the mind consciousness. But this 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, 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 70 years and then after a stroke is sullen, withdrawn, cynical? I would be very slow to pass judgment, a judgment of apostasy on such a one. God knows the true person. And 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. 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, more subtle, so that they can accommodate the immeasurable fullness of joy and pleasures at God's right hand that we will experience.
- [13:03]
A
Amen. Yeah. I just read that essay a month ago. He's a gift.
- [13:07]
B
Yeah. It seems to me as I read it again yesterday, I was struck again how thankful I am that God led me to Lewis in college and how I think college students need to go there because quite apart from the conclusions that he draws, his power of analogy is something. It's simply amazing.
- [13:28]
A
Yes.
- [13:28]
B
I mean, it's just astonishing. What? He must sit there. He must sit there with his. With his head in his hand saying, okay, what's this like? I gotta make this understandable. And he comes up with drawing. Drawing lines on a page that use an acute angle to draw a cube made up of right angles because it makes it look like they're right angles. And all you've got to work with on the sheet is acute angles. So acute angles have to do double duty. They have to present the shape of a dunce's cap and they have to create the shape of a cube. And they're totally different in reality. To illustrate his point that the higher level of consciousness is richer and it's got to incarnate itself into a two dimensional flat surface. And all you can do it is with lines. I mean, how do you come up with something like that? Yes.
- [14:21]
A
It's so vibrant.
- [14:23]
B
I just want our young people.
- [14:25]
A
Yes.
- [14:26]
B
To. To develop those skills because they don't come out of nowhere. I mean, it's not like. I don't think he. He just spontaneously thought of that. No, I think he sat and he. He pondered and he. He worked it through. And then God mercifully gifted him.
- [14:44]
A
Yes. Yes. And I think one of the things he did so well, was he. He could remember experiences of his childhood, so he used those things as illustrations, too. Like, you know, people who play around with religion like they're, you know, playing cops and rob. Playing cops and robbers in the house. And then all of a sudden, you see the foot, the shadow of a foot on the other side of the door. And you realize a real robber has just broken into the house. And it's like it gets real when God shows up, you know, that that's some sort of experience that he had as a child that he never forgot that he then employs as a metaphor. And I think that's why the Narnia series is so fascinating, too. It's like he was so well acquainted with what it was like to be a child. He just had this endless fascination with life, but he could just record all of these experiences and things and then draw from them. Really remarkable mind transposition. The first ever appearance of Lewis's essay on apj, which is hard to believe. It has never been mentioned until now, over 13 years later. So, yeah, while 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. Amen. That's so good. The mind isn't just the brain. It's not just the brain. The mind is like a 3D box drawn on a flat piece of paper. The paper holds the drawing, but the 2D page isn't the box. So good. I love the imagery here. Speaking of what we have covered over the past 13 years. For more end of life questions, see the last section of the Ask Pastor John book, beginning on page 441. For more there on end of life questions. Many people believe joy must wait until the suffering ends. That's not what we see in scripture. Next time, we don't wait for the pain to stop. I'm Tony Reinke. I'll see you on Monday.