Image credits belong to: Ben White (@benwhitephotography) | Unsplash Photo Community Whenever the mathematician and metaphysician Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650) is mentioned in books on neuroscience and the brain (at least the ones I have read), the authors apparently want to distance themselves from him. He is like the plague. Today, Descartes is seen as responsible for Cartesian dualism. If you are speaking to an audience of materialists who argue that the soul is a religious fiction, a defense of dualism amounts to intellectual suicide.  But maybe I have nothing to lose from showing ..read more

Image credits belong to: Greg Rakozy (@grakozy)Unsplash Photo Community “In Him we live and move and have our being.” ~ Acts 17:28 The connections between the subjective aspects of the mind and the solid states of the body are hotly debated within materialism (i.e., mental states are the results of material interactions) and consciousness studies. It seems to me that some or many materialists may be able to reconcile their non-spiritual philosophy of mind (an emergent property of physical processes) with the reciprocal influences of the mind on the body and the body on the mind. As a ..read more

I made a guest appearance on a story-driven podcast called Side B Stories where Jana Harmon interviews former atheists and skeptics. Here, I tell my story about growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household where I experienced chronic fears about Hell and damnation that eventually led to a kind of unbelief that helped me cope with life in my twenties. After vacillating between wishy-washy faith and strong unbelief in my twenties, I finally found my peace with Christ in 2022. Image credits belong to: Marcos Paulo Prado (@marcospradobr)Unsplash Photo Community ..read more

Sometimes, misfortune strikes without our consent. It violates our sacred bubble that no one is allowed to touch without fierce consequences. We wonder why this happens and why we could not prevent it beforehand.  My beloved church friends and I did not welcome the frightening event of July 9th, 2023. But I believe that God was still watching over us that dark, early morning. We thank God that the outcome was not worse.  It was between 3:30 am and 4:00 am when Yul García, Dylan Drake, and Yul's 15-year-old niece, Sarah, were the sleeping passengers in the Hyundai Tucson with me, M ..read more

Image credits belong to: 12019 - Pixabay Introduction The human soul, or the part of us that eternally continues forth after death, is often addressed in topics of consciousness. The soul has been treated as something immaterial or non-physical in the history of the Church. This article explores what the Bible says about the soul alongside the neuroscience of consciousness. I know my critics expect to see empirical, measurable evidence for the thing in question before I am allowed to discuss that said thing.  But first, I need to outline some things. First, I am going to discuss some ..read more

Image credits belong to: DanielHannah | Pixabay Introduction This blog post is about how the non-physical, narrative world can touch the objective, physical world of human biology. Though physical biology can correlate with every thought and experience imaginable, this does not prove that your thoughts, experiences, and personal narratives all are identical to physical biological parts. Physical biology does not inform you on the type of narrative that is necessary for you to have. In humanity’s historical timeline, narrative and storytelling originated with religion that predated the rise ..read more

Image credits belong to: mohamed_hassanPixabay Introduction  "Don’t you realize that grace frees you to choose your own master? But choose carefully, for you surrender yourself to become a servant—bound to the one you choose to obey. If you choose to love sin, it will become your master, and it will own you and reward you with death. But if you choose to love and obey God, he will lead you into perfect righteousness." ~Romans 6:16  This article is intended to defend compatibilism, which says that free-will and determinism do not necessarily have to logically contradict each other ..read more

Image credits belong to: Malvestida (@malvestida)Unsplash Photo Community “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Genesis 1:27 This article is about circadian rhythms and time-keepers among microorganisms that are widespread on the Earth, and how that relates to cognition, consciousness, and God in a universe that is claimed to be unconscious, godless, and indifferent to human affairs.  Most of what I know about time-keeping and decision-making for my article today comes from an April 2022 article titled Time-keep ..read more

Image credits belong to: mohamed_hassan | Pixabay Here, I want to discuss Antonio Damasio’s perspective of bioelectrical computations of human intelligence that separates us from the intelligence of bacteria. Though Damasio does not appear to be a non-materialist, I gather from him some non-materialist support for mind/consciousness that I think has some relevance to the Christian spiritual neuroscience of Curt Thompson. This leads me to a conclusion about the importance of having the mind of Christ that should shape our social lives and thinking patterns. Antonio Damasio is a juggernaut in ..read more

Image credits belong to: Maximalfocus (@maximalfocus)Unsplash Photo Community Philippians 2:3 “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves…” “ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy,” wrote Steve Gimbel and Stephen Stern. It “can only give us virtual facsimiles of wisdom, not the real deal.”  Steve Gimbel and Stephen Stern are two philosophers focusing on Jewish studies. Although they are not experts on artificial intelligence, their words on divine wisdom in comparison to ChatGPT are still remarkable. The words I quoted ..read more