I see nothing about the human mind any more than about the weather that stands out as beyond the hope of understanding as a consequence of impersonal laws acting over billions of years.
The scientific enterprise is the attempt to understand the laws which govern the appearances of the natural world. This attempt proceeds by trying to make the smallest number of hypotheses necessary to account for the phenomena. The leap to 'explanation by deity' is such a huge one, and is so far-reaching in its explanatory presumption, that it explains nothing. Any phenomenon at all can be deemed understood with the utterance of the phrase, "That's the way God made it". That's just not science.
Would you suggest that studies of brain function and consciousness (and also perhaps studies of the weather) should be abandoned? I hope not.
No kidding, I stipulated that.
"God didn't make it" is also not science, and to assert "impersonal laws" of science is to say "God didn't make the laws."
Would you suggest that studies of brain function and consciousness (and also perhaps studies of the weather) should be abandoned? I hope not.
False dilemma. Brain function can be studied with absolute scientific and academic freedom while remaining agnostic about the the question of purpose in the laws governing those functions.
I would characterize the 'hopeful' statement as one of blind faith -unproven assumptive posit...