The Big Question 68: Is Your Brain To Be Trusted?
May 18, 2021 2546
Radio Version:
Is your brain to be trusted?
That’s a surprising question isn’t it? But it’s an important question because we all really rely on our brains.
We don’t usually doubt that what our brains are telling us is right? Imagine if the information you’re getting from your brain is wrong. What could you trust about what you think you know? Remember that your eyes are actually part of your brain as well. It would really be a huge problem that would throw life into complete chaos wouldn’t it?
This is a major problem that Charles Darwin saw with his theory of evolution. As he considered the theory he had developed he wrote these words “with me a horrid doubt always arises whether the conviction of man’s mind, which has always been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”
Charles Darwin had good reason to be concerned. You see he understood the implications of his own theory of evolution. Do you?
Let’s look at it this way. When you buy a computer it already comes programmed ready to work for you, doesn’t it? Let’s say that you had a computer that had been programmed by chance. Perhaps you left it outside for a period of time and let hailstones fall on it and hit the keys randomly to program it. If you ask the computer to solve a problem for you would it be reliable? Would you trust its answers? No of course not.
Let’s say you wanted to make it more reliable and you gave it more time and so you let hailstones fall randomly from the sky onto the keyboard for millions of years. Would it be any more reliable at the end of that time? Of course it wouldn’t. It’s ridiculous to think that you’d get any sense from it at all.
Your brain functions like a computer and Darwin knew that his theory basically said that your brain had evolved over millions of years as a result of the random interactions of atoms. If that were the case what confidence could Darwin even have that his own theory of evolution was correct? None whatsoever. What confidence can you have that anything you think is actually reliable? Nothing.
And that was Darwin’s problem. That was his horrid doubt and that’s still a fundamental problem if you believe that you’re the product of the random clash of atoms over millions of years.
The Bible however gives you every reason to trust your thoughts. God tells you that you are the product not of mindless chance but of purposeful design. In other words you can think because God created you to think and that’s why you can trust that your thoughts are right and that’s why you can trust that your thoughts are even real.
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