Justin Thacker (Head of Theology at the EA) wrote an interesting article in The Guardian this week. He responds to Colin Blakemore's speculation, that maybe we humans carry within us a false model of ourselves, as beings who have free will.
Blakemore's position appears to be that free will is an illusion, and that we are actually biologically programmed to behave in certain ways, and that freedom of thought and independent choice are simply illusory. He also postulates that eventually science will reveal the part of the brain that creates religious ideas.
Thacker's responding article points out that Blakemore's argument suffers from a number of flaws, not the least of which is the fact that Colin Blakemore writes and argues as if he and others do have free will.
Personally I find it strange that Colin Blakemore takes an apparently scientific viewpoint, yet he states that the big 'why' (e.g. "Why are we here?") questions are dubious, and should be rephrased as 'how' questions. What kind of science is it, that is not happy to try and address both 'how' and 'why'?
Blakemore's penultimate paragraph makes plain his bias, he'd rather have us only ask "the how questions that science answers so well". OK, lets only ask the questions we can currently answer shall we?...Er...but won't that restrict the development of scientific thinking? Might it slightly stifle the search for truth? Or is that another figment of our imagination?
Sorry Colin, you can restrict your questions to how, but me, I'm going to keep asking why as well!
Let's pray for more people of the ilk of Justin Thacker, and pray that Justin will continue to enjoy the freedom to put forward a sound evangelical response to such important issues. Let's also pray that Colin Blakemore and others like him find the Truth for themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment