Nuggets from Seeking and Finding God—More Than Matter

There is no way that chemical reactions and electrical impulses among the brain’s cells can explain a sense of right and wrong, the beauty of a sunset, or the rational and moral choices we continually make. No material of any kind, either in the brain or outside of it, has any qualities to explain our ability to understand ideas such as truth, justice, holiness, mercy, and grace. These concepts are totally nonphysical. They do not originate within the brain, nor are they a conditioned response to anything anywhere in the entire physical universe.

Indeed, the brain does not conceive creative ideas or originate thoughts. If thoughts originated in the brain, we would be prisoners of our brains, wondering what our brain would think of next and compelled to do whatever the brain decided. On the contrary, every person is convinced that he or she makes rational choices by weighing alternatives, not because the brain gets an impulse to make the body act in a certain way. While we are prone to react impulsively to the stimuli of physical temptations that breed desires, we are not forced to do so. The moral struggles we all experience to resist temptation are proof that we are not stimulus-response mechanisms ruled by impulses but that we do make genuine choices, though our choices are not always rational or morally right.

Without a doubt, there is a “ghost in the machine”—something nonphysical inhabiting the body. There must be a human spirit, which thinks these nonphysical thoughts, holds these concepts that have no source in the physical universe, and makes rational and moral choices—or irrational and immoral ones. The brain is like a computer, which the spirit (the thinking, choosing person within) uses to operate the body in order to function in this physical universe of space, time, and matter—and to interact with other souls and spirits who also occupy similar bodies.