It is only in recent years that brain-imaging has developed. That is using MRI, CT and PET scans to visualise the structure and functioning of the brain. With it, we can see neurons in the brain lighting up and sparking into connections when someone is thinking. It is fascinating and could provide untold potential for curing mental disorders. 

From this new development, a large number of people have concluded that consciousness and thinking are governed by physical brain activity alone. What is the Christian response to that view?

It really is a matter of your point of view, your philosophy or your religion. If you believe that there is only a material universe and that thinking is an accidental occurrence in the random development of the cosmos, you may well say that it is the brain that governs thought and consciousness. There are a lot of people who have this world-view, and there is a great deal of discussion going on about “consciousness” among various branches of science, which gets more and more confusing.

The Christian world-view is that before there ever was a material universe there has always existed a non-material Triune God, three infinitely distinct persons living in total harmony - so total that they can be said to live within each other, and are correctly described as “one”. That is not just a number, but an accurate description of their complete unity. From God’s life of utter love, God created the material universe so that we humans, beings who are created in the divine image, can flourish and grow to the point of joining in the life of the Trinity for ever.

So from the Christian world-view, we ask the question the other way round. How does consciousness, thinking, and knowing act upon the material brain? It is fascinating, and like many other novel questions in the past, we will find that modern discoveries will only support the Christian world-view.

Thinking and knowing do not function because the brain works that way. The brain works that way because we are more than material beings and the brain functions because we think and know and are conscious. We can not be reduced to some advanced AI-type machine. We are spirits as well as material bodies. We are persons, like God, who cannot be reduced solely to physical terms. We are mysterious beings - spiritual, yet embedded in the material world.

Salvation is when both come to complete maturity and integration. That is why the word of God entered our lovely world, to restore it and to bring it to completion. Its eventual fullness can only be guessed at, because it is too glorious to put into the words of this preliminary stage of our development.

Which world-view echoes most with your sense of being human?