This materialistic belief regards the human body as a self-sufficient
machine whose brain generates thought. But the savage has a completely
evolved physical body with eyes, ears and other organs like our own. His
brain under the microscope shows no trace of difference in its material
constitution from the brain of civilized man. Indeed, his physical body
is not only as complete a machine as ours but is likely to be materially
sounder. Why, then, if the brain produces thought, does not this savage
produce the thoughts of a philosopher? If there is no directing soul
back of the brain, why the marvelous difference in the product of the
two brains?
Materialists go too far in the assumption that they can explain the
phenomena of life. They can talk learnedly about it but they must stop
short of the source of life. Everything about anatomy and physiology
they know, but the life that flows through the human machine remains
unexplained. They can trace the circulation of the blood from the heart
through the arteries, from the arteries across to the veins, from the
veins back to the heart, but the greatest mind the race has produced
cannot say what makes the heart beat. Life has not been explained and
cannot be explained from the materialist's viewpoint. Every human being
is a miracle. A fingernail is a mystery of evolution. It is formed from
the same food that makes the flesh and it will continue to be formed
regardless of the variety or quality of the food. Why do certain
particles become flesh or nails? Who can draw the division line between
them? With marvelous instruments and wondrous skill science has explored
and mapped and charted the "tabernacle of clay," but it cannot throw a
single ray of light upon the intelligence that animates it.
Materialism fails sadly enough in that direction, but still worse as a
satisfactory interpretation of the panorama of the life about us. It is
a philosophy of the gloomiest fatalism. It holds that we simply chance
to be that which we are; that we are what we are merely because of
fortuitous chemical and mechanical combinations. Had the combinations
chanced to be something different we should not be in existence. Chance
is the king of the materialist's world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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