Chapter 17 of Groothuis’ Christian Apologetics argues that being an embodied mind or soul is the best explanation for the ways humanity is unique:  consciousness, cognition and language.  Materialism cannot adequately explain first person access, incorrigibility, qualia, propositional attitudes, intentionality, truth or love.

A substance is a particular thing (can’t be in two places at once, has causal powers) and its properties can change, whereas it is not a property of anything.

Substance dualism says the mind and body are two different substances.  Materialism says mind is a property of matter.  Idealism says matter is a property of mind.

Jesus was a substance dualist, as seen when he told the repentant thief he would be with him that very day in paradise, though their bodies would be in the grave. (Luke 23:43)


Accounting for Consciousness:  A materialist puzzle

Consciousness is a puzzle for materialists because, unlike most everything else they account for, it has no weight, mass, motion, et cetera.

Mind and Matter:  A difference in kind

Differing in kind involves possessing different defining characteristics, with no intermediate between kinds.  Differing in degree is differing continuously, not in kind.

Discrepant Properties

Brain matter cannot be faithful, hopeful, loving, rational, seeing blue, feeling blue.  It will help if you replace “mind” with “experience” …you can feel an experience…but when you touch the brain, you are not feeling an experience (mind), you are just feeling a brain (matter).  A thought about a rose isn’t red.  Mental states and physical states differ in kind and so are not identical.

Private Access and Incorrigibility

Though brain function can be seen in a CAT scan and manipulated with a probe, only the mind has access to its thoughts and feelings.  As with religious experience in the last chapter, the mind is not one-way produced by the brain, rather it can also have effects on the brain.  We can have incorrigible beliefs about our experiences, but we cannot have incorrigible beliefs about physical objects.

Qualia:  Being there

This one is fuzzy.  Qualia are sensations of consciousness.  They are associated with material states but not reducible to them.  I’m not sure how he argued to that conclusion.  See brain touching example above, though.

Propositional Attitudes and Intentionality

Propositional attitudes are just beliefs.  Intentionality just means that the beliefs are “about” something.  The argument is that the relationship between believer and believed is not a spatial/material one, but one of thought (mind).

Truth:  A materialist problem

A proposition (belief), at the heart of all human language, is an intellectual unit of meaning not reducible to any of its physical manifestations.  Truth: a belief corresponds to its object–but not spatially/materially.

Love:  The materialist acid

In order for love to be a true experience we can know and exemplify, 1. selves must be real, 2. love must be more than a physical response–it must be rooted in the eternal character/substance of God.

Responding to objections to dualism.

1.  Ockham’s razor:  Why claim 2, when you can go for the more simple 1?  Because it fails to explain.  It’s “too” simple.

2.  Material states effect consciousness.  Answer:  Correlation does not equal identification.

3.  Mind and matter are too different to interact.  Answer:  Don’t have to know the “how” to know that interaction happens.  There is evidence that interaction happens.

4.  Darwinism entails materialism.  Answer:  See Popper and Eccles “The Self and Its Brain” and other philosophers who do not argue for materialism.

From Mind to Mindful Maker

Alternatives:

1.  Mind (substance) emerged from matter ex nihilo.

2.  Epiphenomenalism or property dualism.  Mind is latent or intrinsic in matter–rather than being separate from it (it is property of matter).  This denies that mind can act as an agent, defying our experience.  It cannot account for the unity of the self over time.  It fails to give a purely materialistic account.

3.  Pantheism:  All of reality is a universal mind–matter does not exist.  It denies our experience of matter and cannot explain finite consciousness or subject-object distinctions.

Cognition:  How can we know the world?

Materialism and Reason

1.  If materialism is true, we cannot trust our cognitive faculties because a) they weren’t designed to know the world and b) they are merely material organs with no ability to experience rational insight.
2.  Our cognitive capacities are basically trustworthy.
3.  Therefore, materialism is false.

My critique of the first premise is that it commits the genetic fallacy.  Attacking the propositions of an evolved brain on the basis that it is evolved does nothing to address its arguments.

Pantheism and Reason

1  If pantheism is true, we cannot trust our rational faculties because a) they are not designed to know the world, b) there is no finite and material world to know, c) reason (either-or) is not the organ to discern truth.
2.  We can trust our rational faculties.
3.  Therefore, pantheism is false.

The Christian Answer

We are created in God’s image and likeness.  Though the world is rationally ordered, it is irrational in that it cannot reason.  We can break free from it through abstract reasoning.  My pushback here is that God doesn’t do some weird sort of whammy on us that makes all knowledge possible…and we are still wrong about a lot of things.

(discussion index)

Chapter 16 of Groothuis’ Christian Apologetics is on the argument from religious experience.  Several times he repeats that “religious experience claims need to be weighed  against other germane sources of evidence for or against a worldview (like Mormonism)…It should not be made to shoulder the entire burden of apologetics.” (379)

The argument is that various (veridical, or truth-conveying) human experiences are best explained by God’s existence (inference to the best explanation).  According to Richard Swinburne’s “principle of credulity” — “unless there is good evidence to the contrary, if person S seems to experience E, S should believe that E probably exists.” (365)  His “principle of testimony” states that “testimony is usually reliable.” (ibid).

Religious experience claims are either 1) deceptive, 2) non-referring, 3) non-divine, 4) divine.  Of type four, there are three types of arguments:  1) the argument from emptiness and divine longing, 2) the argument from numinous experience and 3) mystical arguments. Dr. Groothuis also will address two naturalistic rejections of theistic arguments:  1) the projection argument, 2) the reduction of religious experience to natural, physiological factors.


The argument from emptiness and divine longing.  “We all experience a deep sense of yearning or longing for something that the present natural world cannot fulfill–something transcendently glorious.” (368) (on C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”)  “A man’s physical hunger does not prove that the man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic.  But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist.  In the same way…my desire for Paradise…is a pretty good indication that such a thing exists.” — C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Numinous experience.  Three parts:  A subject (1) experiences (2) an object (3) that is both transfixing and frightening.  The framework of knowledge does not devolve into mystical nonsense, and the person usually does not walk away unchanged (Paul’s companions in Acts 9 did).  Examples:  Isaiah 6:1-7, Exodus 3, Ezekiel 1-3, Job 38-42, Acts 9, Revelation 1:12-18.  Pascal seems to have had a numinous experience, and it was a numinous experience that brought me back to God.

Transformational experience.  Pascal’s experience changed his life dramatically for the better.  Same with Paul. Same with me and Christians around the world for the last two thousand years.  

But, what of those who have fallen away?  A few options.  1. It was predicted that they would in the NT, and they weren’t Christians in the first place.  2. Their faith was merely experience-based and not genuine, dying when the experiences died.  3.  They thought their experience-based faith was all they needed, and became overwhelmed by doubts it didn’t answer.

Objections to religious-experience arguments.

1.  They can’t be verified.  Answer:  If you see the mountain goat that runs off before anyone else spots it, does that mean you didn’t really see it?  If God is supernatural, how can you verify him as you would the natural (to demand it begs the question against religious experience)?  Two ways to test for veridicality:  1.  Compare it to previously recorded religious experiences.  2.  Rule out contributing factors (drugs, mental illness).

The Projection Objection

Feuerbach said theology is anthropology.  Marx said religion drugs the masses into compliance.  Freud said God and religion are ideas based on wish fulfillment meant to cope with reality by projecting a stabilizing Father figure.  This is all true of false religion, idolatry.  But 1) the projection objection does not answer all the other arguments for theism and Christianity, 2) “The glory of God is man fully alive” (Irenaeus), William Wilberforce was not pacified by his Christianity (brought down slavery in Great Britain), and Freud was highly speculative and even if the religious people he analyzed were neurotic, that does not warrant such a sweeping generalization. 3. A strong wish for X to be true does not count against X being true (and see previous C.S. Lewis quote).  We can come to God for psychological reasons and still hold a true belief.  To say it is false because it is psychologically motivated is an example of the genetic fallacy.  4.  Christianity is not always comfort-inducing and often results in upheaval (numinous experiences are not pleasant).  God is not tame.  5.  The argument can be reversed on atheists:  You erase the concept of a God because of past hurts.  God gave us the parent-father relationship as a way of understanding our relationship to him.

Neurotheology:  A category mistake

Religious belief is a function of the brain.  Answer:  It has effects on the brain, rather than being an effect of the brain.  Are nonreligious beliefs a function of the brain?  Would that make them untrue?

Diverse religious experience claims:  eastern religions

The enlightenment experiences require a negation of individuality, personality and language.  Nirvana means to become extinguished.  Brahman means the self dissolves as individual into a Universal Self.  Language is not supposed to be able to capture nirvana or brahman states, as they leave concepts behind and communicate no knowledge…and so this experience cannot be used in a rational argument toward any worldview…though Ken Wilber does go on about it.  It cannot serve as evidence, and it cannot provide satisfaction:  It eliminates the God-shaped vacuum itself.

(discussion index)