Greg Koukl composed an article in 2013 entitled “How to Know Immaterial Things Exist?” In my latest blog posts I have shown that there is reality in the immaterial. This point is vital to an understanding and acceptance of dualist interactionism. We have seen that information is a reality in and of itself, distinct from matter and energy. It is immaterial and consists of structure, purpose and meaning. It also has a statistical component, all of these aspects having been addressed in earlier blogs as well as in my books.
Koukl comments on the content of the mind:
“When you gaze, as it were, on the content of your mind so that you know what it is you are thinking, is the thing that you’re aware of neurons, brain tissue, and electrical impulses? No. The things you’re aware of are your own thoughts. Maybe there are electrical impulses that are happening when you’re thinking, and it may be that they’re always accompanied with the thoughts, but that isn’t how you know your own thoughts. You can just tell by reflecting, if you will, upon your thoughts themselves that you are not gazing upon something that has chemical properties. Thoughts have propositional qualities. They are not governed by the laws of physics, yet your brain chemistry is. They must be something different. . . . Can we employ some of those same ways of knowing that we know immaterial things to other issues, like the existence of God or souls or morality? I think the answer to that is yes. There is no good reason to believe that we cannot have confident knowledge about facts of the immaterial world. If we simply, by default, assert that we can’t know those things, then what Christians are doing is asserting a materialist worldview that is not only inconsistent with Christianity, but I think inconsistent with our basic perception of reality. . . . the rejection of the idea of certitude about spiritual things is not well grounded.”
I close this post paraphrasing Mortimer Adler who stated that we need our brains to think, but we do not think with our brains.