
In order to restrict man to a purely physical existence the naturalist equates the mind with the brain. This is their botched attempt to solve the supposed mystery within naturalistic philosophy of the immaterial soul. For if the two, mind and brain, are distinct then the naturalist has an unexplainable anomaly in their worldview. Thomas Nagel, a naturalist philosopher, reluctantly admits this conundrum, “So long as the mental is irreducible to the physical, the appearance of conscious physical organisms is left unexplained by a naturalistic account of the familiar type. On a purely materialists understanding of biology, consciousness would have to be regarded as a tremendous and inexplicable extra brute fact about the world.” But they have only dug their own grave. For any attempt to form a construct of thoughts only proves what they are trying to deny. That is, you cannot consciously choose to deny consciousness. Like Wile E. Coyote they have run off the cliff, looked down, noticed they have no ground to stand on, and are simply blinking in the camera as if nothing is wrong.
According to the Biblical worldview man is made in the image of God (Gen 1:27). There are many implications for this but here are three:
- We are endowed with personhood.
- We are separate from the animal kingdom.
- We have a higher intrinsic value than animals.
Hence God’s covenant statement to Noah in Genesis 9:6, “Whoever sheds man's blood, By man his blood shall be shed, For in the image of God He made man.” This follows God’s provisions for mankind to kill animals for food (Gen 9:2-3). Knowing that this fact is unescapable the liberals chose to redefine the unborn from a person to a thing. If the unborn is simply a fetus, that is a glob of tissue, then he (it?) has no more value than a bad organ that needs to be disposed. This somersault of logic (or lack thereof) kicked the latch open on Pandora’s Box. For if the authority to define personhood resides with man then the scope of personhood will be mounted on the guns of those with the most firepower. Soon we will follow in the footsteps of the Nazis who justified genocide by dehumanizing whole groups of people who they deemed a parasite to the Aryan race. Scholar Andreas Musolff said, “The source imagery of Hitler’s political worldview consisted in the conceptualization of the German (but, in principle, every) nation as a human body that had to be shielded from disease…Jewish people…viewed as an illness-spreading parasite, represented the danger of the disease. Deliverance from this threat to the nation’s life would come from Hitler and his party as the only competent healers who were willing to fight the illness.” As we clearly see our understanding of the nature of man has grave consequences for the type of world we produce.