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By destroying the validity of ideas, evolution undercuts even the idea of evolution. “Science itself makes no sense if the scientific mind is itself no more than the product of irrational material forces” (b).

A related issue is the flexibility and redundancy of the human brain, which evolution or natural selection would not produce. For example, every year brain surgeons successfully remove up to half of a person’s brain. The remaining half gradually takes over functions of the removed half. Also, brain functions are often regained after portions of the brain are accidently destroyed. Had humans evolved, such accidents would have been fatal before these amazing capabilities developed. Darwin recognized an aspect of this phenomenal capability of the brain (c).

Thoughts are not physical, although they use physical things, such as the brain, oxygen, electrons, and sensory inputs. The mind thinks, but the brain, like a powerful computer, can’t really “think.” Nor can any physical substance. Albert Einstein put his finger on this profound issue:

“I am convinced that ... the concepts which arise in our thought and in our linguistic expressions are all—when viewed logically—the free creations of thought which cannot inductively be gained from sense experiences. ... we have the habit of combining certain concepts and conceptual relations (propositions) so definitely with certain sense experiences that we do not become conscious of the gulf—logically unbridgeable—which separates the world of sensory experiences from the world of concepts and propositions” (d).

So Who or what provided humans (and to a much lesser extent animals) with the ability and freedom to think? It certainly wasn’t dead matter, chance, evolution, or time.

b . Phillip Johnson, “The Demise of Naturalism,” World, 3 April 2004, p. 38.

c. “Behind Darwin’s discomfiture [on how the human brain evolved] was the dawning realization that the evolution of the brain vastly exceeded the needs of prehistoric man. This is, in fact, the only example in existence where a species was provided with an organ that it still has not learned how to use.” Richard M. Restak, The Brain: The Last Frontier (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979), p. 59.

d. Albert Einstein, “Remarks on Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Knowledge,” The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 5 of The Library of Living Philosophers, editor Paul Arthur Schilpp (LaSalle, Illinois, Open Court, 1944), pp. 279–291.

[From “In the Beginning” by Walt Brown ]

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