thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
It was just a short conversation over coffee….. …. when the conversation turned to brains. “My neurobiology lecture this morning was pretty challenging. It was about theories of how the brain does logical reasoning. They still don’t really understand it. Left me wondering about how the brain can think logically at all.” “What do you […]
Humans can use the Pythagorus Theorem to set out accurate right angles. You may be surprised to know that one philosopher sees this ability as being a pointer to naturalism not being true.
This page in brief …. Some people have deep spiritual, or mystical, experiences. Many of them believe they have experienced God. Psychologists have examined these experiences, which are very real, and can describe some of their common characteristics. Could this really be God communicating with people? Let’s look at the evidence that psychologists have uncovered.
The story so far We have been looking at different aspects of our common experience as human beings that are hard, if not impossible, to explain if our universe is no more than physical. Most neuroscientists find it hard to see why our consciousness, our unique sense of ourselves, would evolve in a purely physical […]
The story so far ….. We have seen that it is hard to explain the fact that the universe exists without some sort of cause and hard to explain its apparent design apart from a designer. Then we saw that it is also difficult to explain human consciousness on purely naturalistic terms. This post, we […]
We have looked at how the universe gives us strong clues that God exists. Now it is time to come closer to home, and examine how humanity offers clues to God. We know everything else in the universe from the outside, but we know ourselves from the inside. That inside knowledge raises some perplexing questions. […]
This page in brief …. Neuroscientists tend to conclude that the processes in our brains follow known physical laws, and so our thinking is determined by physics – meaning we don’t have genuine free choice. But our experience is that we do indeed make choices and they seem to be free most of the time, […]
Have you ever wondered: if the cells in our bodies change every 10 years or so, am I still the same person I was 40 years ago?
Do human beings have free will? Can we choose among different possible actions and beliefs? Or are we controlled by our genetics, or by blind physical processes in our brains? And if we couldn’t make genuine choices, would that diminish us? Would we be any different from animals, except a little smarter … perhaps? And […]
Last post I looked at the differences between scientific thinking and religious thinking, at least as one social scientist sees it. But where does religious thinking come from? Religious belief has been an important component in virtually every culture in human history. Why is this so? Social scientists have studied this question extensively. Whether you […]