[Questioner] If you looked at say 15 years forward, what do you think will be the big
apologetic issues that will fit these young people in the room? [Craig] I think that
neuroscience and neurotheology is emerging as one of the cutting edge
areas that we need to be prepared to address. There is a great deal of
discussion today as to whether or not belief in God is hardwired into the
human brain and what theological significance that would have if that's
true, issues of free will and mind-body relations, trying to explain
consciousness and mental causation, I think the whole realm of developing
neuroscience and its implications for theology will be a new frontier. [Moderator] Maybe unpack that
a little bit; in what areas might that... [Craig] well for example this question of
whether not belief in God is hardwired into the human brain. Some people think
that there is what's called a hyperactive agency detection device in
the human brain whereby we personalize things by attributing agency to them. We
talk to our house plants, we curse at our computer when it doesn't work, if
something goes wrong we say you stupid thingamajig; the claim
is that we have this built-in tendency to ascribe agency to things and the
reason is if, it says, is it has survival value if you do this, and so evolution has
built this into us. And so the idea behind this has been, theologically, that God is a
sort of projection of this hyperactive agency detection device. You look at the
cosmos, and the things that are happening in it, and you personalizes this and
ascribe it to God. Now the funny thing is that that's not necessarily
inimical to theism. Alvin Plantinga has developed a religious epistemology
according to which God has given us cognitive faculties which naturally form
belief in his existence when they're functioning properly.
So in one sense, Plantinga would be very happy to say that a device is hardwired
into our brain. So that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. What are the
theological implications of this if it's true, and is it even true? And then as
they said as well, questions of the relationship between the mind and the
brain. Reductive materialism is pretty much out of fashion now today. The idea
that mental states just are states of the brain is now widely rejected by
philosophers. So this reductive, simplistic
materialism doesn't work anymore. Why? Well because mental properties are not
identical with physical properties. The brain has physical properties like a certain
weight, a certain density, a certain location, but the brain isn't jubilant,
or sad. Those are mental properties that the
mind possesses, and so this kind of reductive materialism won't work. So some
will respond with a kind of non-reductive materialism, according to which
the brain has mental properties as well as physical properties, and these mental
states are a sort of epiphenomenon; they are a sort of a ghostly mental excrescence
of the brain, as it were. But on this view, the only causation that is going on is
from physical states to physical states, prior brain states to later brain states,
and from brain states to mental states. But the mental states are causally
impotent; they don't do anything to impact the brain. So this view of the self and
the mind-body problem is incompatible with personal identity over time, with
freedom of the will, with mental causation, and perhaps even with
intentionality, being able to think about things, so many contemporary philosophers
are arguing that the best view of the mind and the body is that these are two
integrated substances. There is a kind of mind-body dualism according to which brain and mind
interact, it's interactive dualism. Well that raises all kinds of theological
issues, because that sort of immaterial, spiritual substance fits a lot more
easily into a theistic view of the world than into a naturalistic, atheistic view
of the world, and so some atheists have said we can't solve the problem of the
mind and the body. We can't explain the nature of consciousness, but because
they reject theism they simply won't accept dualism interactionism. So these
are the kinds of debates that I think will continue to grow in intensity and
importance. And there will be experimental brain science results that
will have impact upon these sorts of issues.