God on the Brain: What Cognitive Science Does (and Does Not) Tell Us about Faith, Human Nature, and the Divine by Bradley L. Sickler




Do the advances of neuroscience eliminate the need for the idea of a human soul? Sickler attempts to answer this and other questions by showing that “the soul is a basic, unified, continuing, property-bearing immaterial existent with causal powers” (18), that humans are made to know God (that theism is a properly basic belief), and that we are hardwired for morality. He also lays out the stakes of the issue, stating that that the popular view that a person is “just their brain” (i.e., a very complicated chemical machine) poses serious challenges to the reliability of Jesus’ teaching and the integrity of the Scriptures are both at stake, since both assume that people are made up of an immaterial soul and a material body.

While not exactly charitable all the time, Sickler explains the core principles of the opposite view, starting with cognitive science of religion and ending with the materialist-determinist view of human freedom. Roughly, we have evolved the capacity devise explanations that are just weird enough to be memorable and just true enough to correspond to our perception and limited knowledge of the universe, and that’s religion. Since what we are is a result of a self-contained natural system, our being is composed of incredibly complex brain states, all linked to each other causally. Since this is the case, our actions are all predetermined by our previous brain states, and so on backward to the Big Bang. Sickler argues against these ideas thoughtfully, and although I have to confess that I haven’t digested all of the arguments yet, I’ll be referring back to his definitions and explanation of consciousness in the future. His most compelling idea, in my view, is his explanation of Reformed idea that we were hard-wired to know God, and that this is a gracious gift. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 do a good job of laying out a philosophical defense of Theism as the best explanation for knowledge, personhood, and morality. I’ll restrain critique until I digest more of the book!

I’d enjoy talking about this book with someone else who’s read it or similar literature. These ideas about personhood and our ability to know are fascinating to me and I’d love to do further reading here.



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