We sometimes forget what miracles surround us without our even knowing. I would like to draw your attention to the particular miracle that is you and the physical structure that comprises you.

If one of your cells – which in the past was thought to be simply a sac of protoplasm, and nothing more – were magnified to the size of a large city such as Montreal, we would then see something of unparalleled complexity and unbelievable organization. Around the outer perimeter of the cell are literally millions of openings made to deliver and receive goods and materials and get rid of waste materials. We would see endless corridors branching in all directions, some leading to a memory bank in the nucleus and others leading to processing units. Within the nuclei we would see miles (yes, you read that right, miles) of coiled chains of DNA. These chains of DNA, from all the cells in the body, if stretched out would measure the same as the distance to the moon.

Then, there is the transportation system, shuttling various arrays of raw materials and finished products. Here we would find an artificial language and its decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems for regulating the assembly of various parts, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices for quality control, assembly processes involving the principles of prefabrication and modular construction. Here, a crucial role is played by enzymes, organic molecules which can be quite large and which are crucial in producing molecules necessary for the functioning of biological systems. Enzymes function as catalysts enabling chemical reactions to occur more rapidly and efficiently.

The cell would remind us of an immense automated factory exhibiting almost all of the activities that technological man has devised, and then even more in terms of efficiency and energy conservation. These cells contain a transportation system, libraries of information, chemical manufacturing plants to synthesize marvelous molecules, computers and much, much else. Amazing as this is, these ‘microcities’ that we call cells are capable of replicating their entire structure within a matter of hours. And within your body, you have over a 100 trillion of these ‘microcities’.

Science and technology have enabled us to learn about these miraculously operating systems within our bodies. The marvel isn’t simply that they operate – it is truly ‘unbelievable’ that they operate so efficiently and go wrong so infrequently. These miracles are happening within us every second of our lives. Our faith calls on us to focus on miracles as part of God’s created order. The Incarnation is a particularly striking, incomprehensible miracle that occurs within a creation that is flooded with miracles, if only we had eyes to observe them.

Creation is inscrutable and mysterious. Everything that is there before us is profoundly mysterious, even what we think we understand fully. We sometimes think that mystery is present only in the supernatural order. But everything even in the natural order is profoundly shrouded in its own richness and mystery, for the simple reason that we cannot understand anything completely and exhaustively. Creation is God’s loving expression of himself in the finite other. The Incarnation is the expression of this self-revelation and interaction with what is finite and limited, in a particularly focused form.

God continues to express himself in the complexity and beautiful organization even at the simplest and lowest of particles, such as our cells. The Incarnation is not something exceptional or contrary to what is. It is simply written in bold letters and underlined for us to see that, as is written in scriptures, God’s glory is everywhere, even in the mysteries of a ‘simple’ cell, if we have eyes to see and a heart to accept.

When scriptures talk about God’s glory, we see more clearly in the creation that enables us to live and be and act. When we consider a human cell with all of the activities going on with a rare error, one cannot but be struck by the incomprehensibility of it. Scripture has it right – even the simplest human cell is an illustration of God’s glory.

The physical you is indeed marvelous but there is something even more amazing about you and that is the existence of your mind, but there is some controversy as to whether you even have a mind.

The prevalent view is expressed by the co-winner of the Nobel Prize for proposing the double helical structure of the DNA molecule. Francis Crick wrote that a person’s mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up. Thomas Huxley in the nineteenth century said that consciousness is a side product of the workings of the mechanisms of the body and is totally controlled by the matter which is the brain.

If the above were true, then there are several consequences of this state of affairs. Firstly, a person has no free will and is governed by the materials comprising the person and this material works only in accordance with physical laws. But there is another underlying result of the proposal, that mind is non-existent, and this is fatal to the argument.

If all of our thoughts are merely the result of chemical or physical activities within the brain, on what basis then do we say that there is no mind? After all, this is a statement made by the random interactions of atomic or molecular particles which behave in accordance with physical laws and have no relation to truth or falsehood. Physical processes cannot help us in deciding this matter. So, on what basis can we say that the claim that what produces thought is the brain and nothing else? We have none and therefore we cannot make statements such as the one made by Crick above. His statement is illogical if I accept the existence of mind but it is nonsensical if I do not.

The materialists who claim that only matter exists are in a quandary and their main argument has been to deny the existence of mind. But this is not a rational position and speaks of desperation and not clear thought. The Old Science people try to explain human behavior by bringing in instinct, physiology, chemistry, physics, or psychology but none of these really gives a satisfactory answer to the question – does mind exist? And if mind exists, then this will have many important statements to make as to what a human being is and what the destiny of each of us is.

A simple illustration of you moving the index finger on your right hand will clearly illustrate the connundrum. I can move that finger at will whenever I wish – or so it appears to me as Old Science people would say. How does Old Science explain this whole process of my moving my index finger on my right hand? The calcium ions flood the motor-end plate and convert the electrical energy into mechanical energy. Fair enough but where did the calcium ions come from? They came from the nerve cells operating electrical potentials. Okay, but why (there’s this pesky why as opposed to the tameable how) did the nerve cells send the message to release calcium ions to the motor-end plate? The brain gave the chemical command to do this. Thus far, thus good but we now come to the crunch question. Why did the brain decide to send calcium ions along the nerve path to my finger? Two possibilities – one is that this was a meaningless chance occurrence and you really had no input. Your control of the finger is mere illusion. So the explanation for my moving my finger is really a non-explanation which is not a scientific resolution of a problem. But, there is no doubt about it – my finger clearly moved.

This whole question of the existence/non-existence of mind is at the center of the discussion of artificial intelligence. One can talk about artificial intelligence only if there is no mind. If there is mind then artificial intelligence is truly artificial but not intelligence. Intelligence is a far richer and deeper concept than the ability to maneuver mechanical equipment or turn switches on or to shop at home or to do any other type of procedure. But this is glibly bypassed as is the fact that computers are fantastic memory machines but are as dumb as a block of cement and cannot compute in the real sense of the word. How we play with words so as to hide meaning from ourselves.

There is an underlying wistful belief (shades of Frankenstein) that somehow, if we could only pump in enough terrabytes and whatever else, that these machines will ‘come to life’. We betray that deep-seated hatred that we have of ourselves as we try to bring ourselves down (what hatred for ourselves lurks within our bosom) and rebel against any indication that there is so much more to us than we had ever hoped.

Spontaneous generation was debunked in the nineteenth century but it seems that this longing has not really gone away. A cold shower of reality is called for.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas