Before we discuss what a Christian’s definition of the mind is, we must discuss what is a general definition of the mind.
When we are referring to the mind, in the most general sense possible, we are talking about a person’s faculties for processing stimuli. That is, we are referring to whatever it is, biological, psychological, spiritual, or else that enables a person with homeostasis to have its most basic forms of bodily functions such as a heartbeat and electrical and chemical brain activity and in the more common sense have the ability to think and feel and interact with their internal body and the external environment. We may broadly also include animals in the mix as having minds, but for the purposes of simplicity, and quite frankly, my areas of interest, I’m just focusing on human minds.
I also don’t want to restrict the discussion of mind to include specific functions necessarily like memory because, for example, people with dementia or people with memory loss of some kind still would be universally acknowledged as having minds. People in a comatose state without an awareness of the environment or themselves would still be strongly acknowledged, although probably not universally, to still have minds.
From a biological perspective, for example, reductive physicalism, which I would gander is a very popular perspective, the mind is reducible to the brain’s electrical and chemical impulses which travel to and from the rest of the human body to stimulate feelings and sensations. At first glance, this is probably a popular perspective because it seems to be a parsimonious theory on how the mind works, in that brain activity is something that we can actually measure using the available technologies such as fMRI and EEG. If that is as far as one needs to go to assess that brain activity is something that happens when stimuli occurs in the body or then that is all well and good, but the journey cannot end there for many reasons, such as correlation does not establish causation. Just because there are electrochemical signals that we can measure in the brain does not mean that that the electrochemical signals are the cause and holistic embodiment of minds.
We may expand out the biological perspective to include other signals from other parts of our bodies such as hormones, the immune system, gut stuff, the presence or lack thereof of neurochemicals like dopamine and serotonin. It is pretty well established that all of these things absolutely do affect our feelings and sensations. But even if we created a biological body with all the right biological parts and filled it with all of the right chemicals in all the right places, it would not create homeostasis and a functioning mind.
There is the idea that the mind is independent from the physical body systems, And because the mind is independent from a physical body, it therefore becomes not physically able to be measured and so many scientists push it into the modern study of philosophy rather than neuroscience.
The Bible does not explicitly make a conclusive statement on what the source of a human’s mind is, or where it starts or ends. A Christian perspective, believe it or not, is not actually too different from a secular perspective, in that the bible uses multiple words in different places to describe a human’s life force including what we translate as wind/spirit/breath (rûaḥ), and soul/living being (nep̱eš). Some people use these words in various verses across the Bible to give support for dualism or the idea that the mind and body are separate, and others to argue the more holistic perspective, while others again make the argument that it is body and mind and spirit. All Christians would agree that God is who gives people their minds, but the argument then turns into understanding how does God give people their minds.
Some argue that the mind is created at the point of conception through the creation of new DNA which is present in every cell of a human’s body. This would make DNA to be the necessary precondition, or possibly cause of, a mind, but this is again moving towards a reductive perspective, and does start to need to bring in the argument of whether other non-human living organisms such as animals and plants also have minds given they have DNA?
It would more than likely be a majority view of Christians that the human mind is given to people from God through the existence of a soul. The existence of a soul does solve many of the issues about how we can continue to live with God even after a bodily death; if our body were destroyed and our thoughts and beliefs were stuck with the body, would there be much benefit for just our spirit to remain, without the thoughts and beliefs that formed our relationship with God in the first place?
The soul is not scientifically measurable, which makes it very hard to put forth as an argument for those who don’t believe in supernatural interactions. Some critics also argue it was created or emphasised from certain Bible verses (e.g., Matthew 10:28) to bridge some of the continuity gaps to bring a harmonisation between the functional tricky points about a person’s physical and mental state of being.
Therefore, the Christian perspective, in humbleness, is to conclude that we don’t know exactly how God causes a person to have a mind, or whether it is in a way that will ever be measurable by physical sciences. However, given that science also does not have this answer, we therefore may suggest that the Christian perspective of God being the cause of our minds is an interpretation that remains epistemically possible.
There is obviously much here that is rife for debate, and I expect I’ll update this blog post over time with further thoughts.
