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

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

In the opening pages of his book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton likened modern philosophy to insanity.

Its inherent circularity might appear to explain everything he wrote, but only because it makes reality so small.

Those who claim that matter and energy are all that exist, he wrote, have a, quote, insane

simplicity, the quality of the madman's argument. We have at once the sense of it covering everything

and leaving everything out, end quote. Well, that's an appropriate designation for a recent post on X by evolutionary biologists

and Manhattan Institute fellow Colin Wright.

Here's what he wrote, quote, I'm perplexed by people claiming that consciousness is metaphysical.

We have absolutely no reason to believe that and every reason to believe it's a product of

our physical brains. We've never observed a

mind existing independent from a physical brain. I think we can safely conclude that consciousness

is a natural physical phenomenon, end quote. Wright then went on to recite the familiar

materialist litany that the mind is nothing but the brain. After all, that organ's activity can be monitored

and specific regions of the brain can be linked with specific behaviors, emotions, and actions.

If the brain is damaged, associated aspects of the person's memory and abilities and personality

are affected. Therefore, he concluded, the mind and consciousness of the person must be nothing more than a product of the brain and its activity.

It's certainly a simple, tidy explanation, but I think it's one that Chesterton would say has the telltale mark of insanity.

It seems to cover everything, but that's only because it leaves out everything important.

For instance, what about love? Is that just a mixture of neurotransmitters?

What about justice and integrity? Are they just arrangements of gray matter? Are true beliefs,

or having an eye for beauty, or the ability to grasp a mathematical theorem, simply reducible

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