Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory, once wrote in a personal letter to a friend,

quote, the horrid doubt always arises, whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower

animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Well, today, on Breakpoint, theologian and

professor Thaddeus Williams talks about Darwin's horrid doubt and why it matters so much.

Here's Dr. Williams. Do you understand Darwin's horrid doubts?

If our minds came from a capital M mind, God, gifted to us as truth-knowing mechanisms,

then we have a reason to reason. But if our minds came from non-mind, a literally dumb process of random mutations and natural selection,

then our minds are not fundamentally truth-knowing mechanisms, but mere survival mechanisms.

We cannot trust our minds on an atheist story of our origins any more than we can trust, in Darwin's words,

the convictions of a monkey's mind. With progress in the field of philosophy of mind since Darwin's day, especially over the last

50 years, we have found at least nine profound reasons that Darwin's horrid doubt was justified.

How could the impersonal and mindless it, that is the material world,

possibly account for the non-material realities you and I experience 10,000 times a day?

There's the reality of eyeness, that is, first-person consciousness, being more than an impersonal it, a reality known by philosophers

as indexicality. There is aboutness. That is the ability to think abstractly. You can think

about Mars without the splitting headache of the red planet materializing in your brain matter,

because thoughts can be non-physical.

Then there's what it's likeness. That is, the phenomenological texture of subjective experience,

or what philosophers call qualia, as in what it's like to behold the cysteine ceiling,

which can't be reduced to mere firing synapses.

...