Thursday, February 14, 2008

Love and Chemicals


If atheist scientists are right, love is just chemicals in the brain...

From "Love and Chemicals" by Dinesh D'Souza, posted 2/13/08 at tothesoure.org

Physicist Victor Stenger in God: The Failed Hypothesis rejects the idea that humans have souls. “If we do indeed possess an immaterial soul, then we should expect to find some evidence for it.” Along the same lines, philosopher Daniel Dennett writes, “Nerve cells are very complicated mechanical systems. You take enough of those, and you put them together, and you get a soul.” Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker adds, “Every aspect of our mental lives depends entirely on physiological events in the tissues of the brain.” And what happens to free will? “It seems free to you,” biologist Francis Crick explains, “but it’s the result of things you are not aware of.”

The issue here is the effort on the part of atheists—some with impressive scientific credentials—to extend the materialistic understanding of nature to human beings. Yes, we humans are material objects but are we no more than that? Certainly we experience ourselves very differently from the way we experience the outside world. All other things we experience indirectly, from the outside, through the apparatus of our senses; but ourselves we experience directly, from the inside, without the involvement of our senses.

Only about ourselves do we have this kind of “inside information.” And when we examine ourselves we discover things about our nature that we don’t find in inanimate objects. Based on our privileged and unique access, we know that the external or objective account of reality, however accurate it may be in describing raindrops and tree trunks, is not the fully story when it comes to describing ourselves.

For instance, we have consciousness and that is something that doesn’t show up under a microscope. We experience love, one of our deepest human experiences, and this seems absurd to explain simply in terms of atoms and molecules interacting with each other.

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