From neurosurgeon Michael Egnor at Plough Quarterly:
I watched the CAT scan images appear on the screen, one by one. The baby’s head was mostly empty. There were only thin slivers of brain – a bit of brain tissue at the base of the skull, and a thin rim around the edges. The rest was water.
Her parents had feared this. We had seen it on the prenatal ultrasound; the CAT scan, hours after birth, was much more accurate. Katie looked like a normal newborn, but she had little chance at a normal life. She had a fraternal-twin sister in the incubator next to her. But Katie only had a third of the brain that her sister had. I explained all of this to her family, trying to keep alive a flicker of hope for their daughter.
I cared for Katie as she grew up. At every stage of Katie’s life so far, she has excelled. She sat and talked and walked earlier than her sister. She’s made the honor roll. She will soon graduate high school. More.
Egnor goes on to talk about similar examples. Brain imaging techniques have done for materialism in neuroscience what the match did for the haystack.
See also: Neurosurgeon: Craniopagus twins demonstrate separate “souls” without separate brains
11-year-old conjoined twins have a connected brain, see through each others’ eyes, but have separate minds
Post-modern science: The illusion of consciousness sees through itself
and
Neuroscience tried wholly embracing naturalism, but then the brain got away
Another excellent article by Dr. Egnor.
Recent advances in “Quantum Biology” also provide evidence that, to quote Dr. Egnor’s last sentence in his article, “Katie, like you and me, has a soul.,,,”
On the contrary, materialism forces believers to confront the questions they would not otherwise ask or are afraid to ask.
Seversky:
Like what?
Materialism is a failed philosophy. Just sayin’…
Sev states,,,
No Sev, “you” (as if there were such a thing as “you’ in materialism), like Hawking, have it, as usual, completely backwards:
Might I also suggest that the denial, by atheistic materialists, of their very own agent causality, i.e. the denial of the reality of their very own consciousness and free will, is, besides being incoherent, completely insane?
Why is there no link to details about “Katie” or any of the other names he drops? Are they made up?
Here is a more realistic example of what happens in these cases:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/baby-born-missing-most-of-brain-celebrates-first-birthday/
I would never deny Jaxon a chance at life, but please don’t tell me it’s anything close to normal.
Sev, good grief. The only physical system on earth that operates like the gene system is human language. That fact has been in the literature for decades. Would you like to start answering the many questions you work so tirelessly every day to avoid? Since the semiotic gene system is far too complex (everyone agrees) to have popped out unannounced, did the dynamic system that preceded it have to specify the semiotic system that was to follow? How it do that Sev? Dynamically?
Oh wait, That’s right. You have your game. This is where you kick the dusty ground in front of you and say “Well fellas, we just don’t know, no one does”.
You go ahead on with it Sevvy, we’ll all pretend that your attack on theists isn’t your hammer for that nail.
Mr Materialist asks:
Yet, Dr. Egnor has this caveat:
And here are a few more examples that directly challenge the materialistic model of mind,, (a model that provides no realistic answer for the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness’ in the first place):
Mr Materialist @ 5. Why do you jump to the conclusion Dr. Egnor is a liar? He could simply be observing doctor-patient privilege. It could simply be that the point of the article is not to reveal family details but to describe an example the doctor is very familiar with which provides evidence that the brain and the mind are not one and the same, contrary to the demands of the philosophy after which you have named yourself.
Applying the same approach to you I could easily ask: Materialist, so you would give little Jaxon a crack at life would you? But you would have aborted it in the womb if you had known, right?
How does it feel?
Sev, in your dreams people of faith run away from materialists’ questions. Only there. What they do run away from are your death camps, gulags, indoctrinations, disregard for life, the will to power, nowhere exemplified better than among materialist atheists: socialists, communists, fascists. Your kind.
As for who is really running scared, consider this, the source of which I have, unfortunately, lost.
Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy at New York University, one of America’s leading institutions, candidly wrote,
I want atheism to be true. And I’m made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t that I don’t believe in God and naturally hope that I’m right in my beliefs, it’s that I hope there is no God. I don’t want there to be a God. I don’t want the universe to be like that.
Doesn’t the cost of truth bubble over in that statement, practically startling us? Nagel candidly admits that he is uneasy because intelligent people are religious. He strongly implies that if there is a God, he will lose his hope. He doesn’t want God to exist. But if he rejects God because of purely evidential reasons, why the unease, why the loss of hope? Nagel admits that his atheism is not merely about intellectual conclusions, but about emotional desires.
Aldous Huxley is even more candid in exposing that his personal biases—even more than the evidence—influenced his rejection of God. In Ends and Means, he writes,
I wanted to believe the Darwinian idea. I chose to believe it not because I think there was enormous evidence for it, nor because I believed it had the full authority to give interpretation to my origins, but I chose to believe it because it delivered me from trying to find meaning and freed me to my own erotic passions.
You can’t run more scared than being willing to blind yourself to reality. Just so like you. I pose you questions and you don’t acknowledge them, let alone answer them. You pose me questions and I provide you logical answers. Same happens with other people and you.
Next time you “see” me running, take close notice that the scenery is as well.
Mr Materialist,
I have a very limited understanding of hydrocephaly, but from what I’ve heard, what’s happening is that the brain is compressed, and even though the amount of space for the brain may be very constrained, the amount of gray matter could still be close to normal. The lack of details here is kind of frustrating. He says “Katie only had a third of the brain that her sister had”. Does he actually mean that her brain was compressed into 1/3 the volume of a normal brain? Or does he actually mean that 2/3 of the brain is missing, which is very different?
Also, what does her brain look like now? My understanding is that in infants, once a shunt is inserted and the water drained, that the brain can then often develop more-or-less normally. Does she still have only a third of a brain?
Blip,
Do you have a source for the Aldous quote?
goodusername @10 The Aldous quote:
Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means (London: Chatt & Windus, 1946), 310.
Related:
I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning – the Christian meaning, they insisted – of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.
goodusername @10
Those are exactly the sort of questions I have. Egnor first states that she had “slivers” of brain tissue. Then later he says “a third”. A third is not the same as slivers.
blip @8
Egnor could easily provide follow-up details without violating privacy.
And yes, it would be reasonable for a woman to chose to abort given the high likelihood that this would not end well.
Why don’t we just stop dancing around the real question here, which is: Does a mind require a brain?
Can anyone show me a mind that does not rely on a physical brain? Anyone?
Only for those trapped in the physical realm.
Blip,
That was the one claimed source that I could find as well, except it’s not there (or anywhere else in the book AFAICT). Page 310 does have a famous Aldous quote though, the “We are living now” quote.
ET @13
So, the last time you visited a non-physical realm, what was it like?
Mr Materialist asks ET:
When was the last time you did math Mr Materialist? That was one of the last times you yourself, with your immaterial mind, visited the ‘non-physical realm’. Mathematics is thoroughly non-physical, non-material, in its basic essence.
Mathematics, which provides the backbone for all of science, engineering and technology,,, Mathematics itself exists in a transcendent, beyond space and time, realm which is not reducible any possible material explanation. This transcendent mathematical realm has been referred to as a Platonic mathematical world.
As the following article points out, ‘Mathematical platonism enjoys widespread support and is frequently considered the default metaphysical position with respect to mathematics.,,, and that arguments for mathematical platonism typically assert,,, that mathematical entities are not constituents of the spatio-temporal realm.’
Simply put, Mathematics itself, contrary to the materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists, does not need the physical world in order to exist. And yet Darwinists, although they deny that anything beyond nature exists, need this transcendent world of mathematics in order for their theory to be considered scientific in the first place. The predicament that Darwinists find themselves in regards to denying the reality of this transcendent, immaterial, world of mathematics, and yet needing validation from this transcendent, immaterial, world of mathematics in order to be considered scientific, should be the very definition of self-refuting.
Of side note: Like all other falsifying evidences against Darwinian claims, Darwinists ignore mathematics since “mathematics has consistently demonstrated that undirected Darwinian evolution does not work”.
As to mathematics existing in a non-physical, immaterial, Platonic realm, David Berlinski goes even further and states, “There is no argument against religion that is not also an argument against mathematics. Mathematicians are capable of grasping a world of objects that lies beyond space and time….”
In fact, Eugene Wigner, who received a Nobel for his work in quantum mechanics, and Albert Einstein of relativity fame, are both on record as to regarding it as a “miracle” that we can reliably model the world with mathematics.
Moreover, whereas, atheists have no compelling evidence for the various parallel universe and/or multiverse scenarios that they have put forth, Christians, on the other hand, can appeal directly to the higher dimensional mathematics behind Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity and General Relativity to support their belief that God upholds this universe in its continual existence, as well as to support their belief in a heavenly dimension and in a hellish dimension.
In the following video, the discovery of the higher dimensional nature of the square root of negative one, which is integral to quantum mechanics, and the discovery of higher dimensional geometry, which is integral to General Relativity, are discussed:
The history of the square root of negative one is particularly interesting to look at. Descartes had rejected complex roots and coined the derogatory term “imaginary” to describe the square root of negative one. Whereas, Gauss, who was the mathematician who finally clearly explained the higher dimensional nature behind the square root of negative one, suggested that complex magnitudes be called “lateral” instead of “imaginary” magnitudes since they represent a dimensional extension of the continuum. Gauss also proposed that complex magnitudes be awarded “full civil rights.”
The author further comments, in the language of Plato’s allegory of the cave, complex numbers represent “forms” from a higher dimension casting “shadows” on the real number line.
And in quantum mechanics, we find that the square root of negative one is necessary for describing the wave packet prior to measurement.
What was not mentioned in the preceding video, or in the article, is that the wave function is also represented as being in an infinite dimensional Hilbert space:
Here is an interesting quote about the infinite dimensional Hilbert Spaces in quantum mechanics:
Moreover, we find it is an infinite dimensional Hilbert space that takes an infinite amount of information to describe properly.
As should be needless to say, the preceding findings are very comforting to overall Christian concerns. Here is a video that goes over the preceding findings, and how they relate to Christian presuppositions, in a bit more detail
Four dimensional space was also mentioned in ‘The Mathematics Of Higher Dimensionality’ video. As was the necessity for Four-dimensional space in the formulation General Relativity also mentioned in the video:
What was not mentioned in the ‘The Mathematics Of Higher Dimensionality’ video is that special relativity is itself also based on a single four-dimensional continuum now known as Minkowski space. In fact, the higher dimensional nature of special relativity was a discovery that was made by one of Einstein math professors in 1908 prior to Einstein’s elucidation of General Relativity in 1915.
Moreover, these four dimensional spacetimes that undergird both special relativity and general relativity are also comforting to overall Christian concerns in that they reveal two very different eternities to us. One eternity is found for a hypothetical observer who is going the speed of light, and the another eternity is found for a hypothetical observer falling to the event horizon of a black hole.
As was mentioned, the eternity for special relativity is found when a hypothetical observer approaches the speed of light. In this scenario, time, as we understand it, would come to a complete stop for that hypothetical observer as he reached the speed of light.
To grasp the whole concept of time coming to a complete stop at the speed at the speed of light a little more easily, imagine moving away from the face of a clock at the speed of light. Would not the hands on the clock stay stationary as you moved away from the face of the clock at the speed of light? Moving away from the face of a clock at the speed of light happens to be the very same ‘thought experiment’ that gave Einstein his breakthrough insight into special relativity. Here is a short clip from a video that gives us a look into Einstein’s breakthrough insight.
That time, as we understand it comes to a complete stop at the speed of light, and yet light moves from point A to point B in our universe, and thus light is obviously not ‘frozen within time, has some fairly profound implications.
The only way it is possible for time not to pass for light, and yet for light to move from point A to point B in our universe, is if light is of a higher dimensional value of time than the temporal time we are currently living in. Otherwise light would simply be ‘frozen within time’ to our temporal frame of reference.
One way for us to more easily understand this higher dimensional framework for time that light exist in is to visualize what would happen if a hypothetical observer approached the speed of light.
In the following video clip, which was made by two Australian University Physics Professors, we find that the 3-Dimensional world ‘folds and collapses’ into a tunnel shape as a ‘hypothetical’ observer approaches the ‘higher dimension’ of the speed of light.
To give us a better understanding as to what it would be like to exist in a higher dimension, this following video, Dr. Quantum in Flatland, also gives us a small insight as to what it would be like to exist in a higher dimension:
Besides the tunnel curvature to a higher eternal dimension found in special relativity, we also have tunnel curvature to a very different eternal dimension in general relativity. The following video clip is very good for illustrating that tunnel curvature that is found in general relativity.
The following video is also very good for illustrating the tunnel curvature that is found for the space-time of gravity in general relativity. Specifically, it is good for visualizing the tunnel curvature that is found at black holes
What makes the eternity of General Relativity profoundly different than the eternity found at Special Relativity, is that entropy, which is the primary reason why our material bodies grow old and eventually die in this universe,,,
,,entropy is found to be greatest at black holes. As the following article stated,, ‘supermassive black holes are the largest contributor to the observable universe’s entropy.’
In the following quote, Kip Thorne describes what will happen to a hypothetical astronaut as he reaches the singularity of a black-hole. He stated: “Einstein’s equation predicts that, as the astronaut reaches the singularity (of the black-hole), the tidal forces grow infinitely strong, and their chaotic oscillations become infinitely rapid. The astronaut dies and the atoms which his body is made become infinitely and chaotically distorted and mixed-and then, at the moment when everything becomes infinite (the tidal strengths, the oscillation frequencies, the distortions, and the mixing), spacetime ceases to exist.”
Thus the ‘eternity’ that is found at a black hole can rightly be called an ‘eternity of decay and destruction’.
Needless to say, to those of us who are of, shall we say, a spiritually minded persuasion, this finding of a eternity of destruction should be fairly sobering.
Of related interest, in his resurrection from the dead, and as witnessed by the Shroud of Turin, Jesus Christ bridged this seemingly ‘infinite gap’ between these two very different entropies that are associated with Special Relativity and General Relativity respectfully. The following video gives an overview of that evidence:
Moreover, to further validate the Christian claim that heaven and hell are real and actually exist, we don’t have to rely solely on our scientific evidence from special relativity and general relativity. But we can also reference the many testimonies of people who have died for a short while and come back. These testimonies are termed Near Death Experiences.
Moreover, although some atheists fight tooth and nail against the validity of Near Death Experiences being real, as Dr. Michael Egnor points out in the following article, Near Death Experiences, as far as scientific evidence goes, certainly have a far more going for them than Darwinian evolution does.
It is also very interesting to note that many of the characteristics found in Near Death Experience testimonies are exactly what we would expect to see from what we now know about Special Relativity and General Relativity: For instance, many times people who have had a Near Death Experience mention that their perception of time was radically altered:
In the following video clip, Mickey Robinson gives his Near Death testimony of what it felt like for him to experience a ‘timeless eternity’.
And here are a few more quotes from people who have experienced Near Death, that speak of how their perception of time was radically altered as they were outside of their material body.
As well, Near Death Experiencers also frequently mention going through a tunnel to a higher heavenly dimension:
In the following video, Barbara Springer gives her testimony as to what it felt like for her to go through the tunnel:
And in the following audio clip, Vicki Noratuk, who has been blind from birth, besides being able to see for the first time during in her life during her Near Death Experience,,,
,,, Vicki also gives testimony of going through a tunnel:
And in the following quotes, Mary Neal and John Burke both testify that they firmly believed that they were in a higher dimension that is above this three-dimensional world and that the reason that they have a very difficult time explaining what their Near Death Experiences felt like is because we simply don’t currently have the words to properly describe that higher dimension:
Moreover, besides heavenly experiences, there are also hellish experiences that also corroborate what we would expect to see from what we now know about General Relativity.
In the following video clip, former atheist Howard Storm speaks of what eternity felt like for him in the hellish dimension:
And at the 7:00 minute mark of this video, Ron Reagan gives testimony of falling down a ‘tunnel’ towards hell:
And in this following video, Bill Wiese also speaks of ‘tumbling down’ a tunnel in his transition stage to hell:
And in this following video, Paul Ojeda also speaks of ‘falling’ towards hell at a very fast speed:
Thus, in conclusion, Christians, far from being ‘anti-science’ as atheists often accuse Christians of being, can appeal directly to Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity, and General Relativity to powerfully back up some of their core beliefs in God and the afterlife.
Verse and music:
Mr Materialist
Quite mind-boggling. 😎
Materialist @ 12
I’m not dancing. I’m just happy proving you are a liar. So you would never get in the way of letting Jaxon have a crack at life would you? Oh but you would have aborted him!
Tell me, lying Mterialist: Can the child be aborted and have a crack at life?
(Crickets)
Then neither will I tell you if a mind can exist without a brain.