As Christians, we have to understand that the bottom line is that the Scriptures have the strong assumption that inherent in our humanity is the ability to think. Over the past few decades, the evangelical church has increasingly emphasized the heart and feelings in the Christian life, viewing thinking, study and doctrine as cold, as almost antithetical to a relationship with Jesus.
But it was Jesus who told us in Matthew 22 to love the Lord your God with all your heart, yes, but also with all of your soul and with all of your mind. And our minds and thinking will be the theme this week on Renewing Your Mind. Welcome to the Monday edition, and all week you'll hear messages from R.C. Sproul's series Think Like a Christian. This series is actually 12 messages, and Dr. Sproul explores the important role of critical thinking in the life of a Christian. When you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, or when you call us at 800 435 4343, we'll give you lifetime digital access to this 12-message series, plus we'll send you Dr. Sproul's book, The Consequences of Ideas, which will give you an overview of the ideas and thinking that have shaped the Western world. So what is thinking, and what is the mind? Here's Dr. Sproul. Today on Renewing Your Mind, we're going to begin a new short series that's directly related to the title of this program, Renewing Your Mind.
We're going to be looking at what it means to have a Christian mind and exploring ways in which the mind is intimately involved in the Christian life. Now to start, I would just like to relate to an experience I had just the other day as I was eating a meal, and I had some watermelon on my plate. And I was thinking deeply about the significance of this watermelon, because I happen to be on this new zone diet program that seeks to balance proteins, fats, and carbohydrates in the biochemical structure of eating habits and so on. So I was thinking about this piece of watermelon, and I was thinking now this is a carbohydrate. I used to just think of it as a fruit, but now I understand it's a carbohydrate, and I had to determine whether it was a favorable carbohydrate or an unfavorable carbohydrate.
And then I discovered it was a favorable carbohydrate whose substance would be inverted into fructose in the bloodstream and so on. And as I was doing all of this analysis of the value of watermelon, I asked myself this question. I said, here I am thinking about this piece of watermelon, and I'm wondering what the piece of watermelon is thinking as it is about to be devoured. And of course, we laugh at that because we make the initial assumption that watermelons can't think. They're not animals.
They're plants. And there are few, if any, people who would imagine in their wildest dreams that this piece of watermelon could contemplate its eater as I was about to become. Now, of course, in the history of philosophy, not everyone has agreed with the assumption that watermelons can't think. I think, for example, of the rationalist philosopher Leibniz, who in his intricate system of what was called monadology believed that all forms of matter had some capacity for what we call thinking, even if this thinking would be reduced to what he called petite perceptions.
Now, for the most part, his theory of petite perceptions did not make that much of an impact on the intellectual world. And as I said, few, if any, people since have considered the possibility of plants thinking, except those who tend their gardens and have houseplants that don't prosper and flourish, and they take their plants and talk to them and sing to them or put them in the closet and scold them and say, if you don't behave, I'm going to leave you in this closet and not feed you and not water you. So you hear a lot about people who are interacting with plants as if they could think. Well, how do we really know whether plants can think? How do we know if animals can think?
I look at my dog at home, and I will say something to him, and his customary response when I address him is to cock his head to one side and look at me with what I can only describe as a puzzled look on his face, as if he were in deep cogitation as he's considering whether he wants to respond positively or negatively to whatever I say. I mean, there are times when it seems that our pets and other animals that we encounter have some kind of ability to think. However, it's normally the assessment of the scientific world that these animals don't actually think.
They simply respond to external stimuli by a force that is somewhat loosely called instinct. Well, have you ever wondered what is the difference between instinct and thought? Now that question, the difference between instinct and thought, has been probed by significant researchers, and people have come to various conclusions about it that are significant for us. On the one hand, there are those who say that when we say that what animals do is mere instinct and not thought, that reflects a certain arrogance of the human species in assuming that they are the only creature that has this ability or capacity for discursive thinking.
And there are those who argue that animals do have the ability to think, though perhaps at not the same advanced level that human beings have. Now on the other side of the coin, there are those who say that what we call thinking as human beings is nothing more than instinct, that it is nothing more than a biochemical reaction to either internal or external stimuli. Now again, that raises one of the oldest philosophical questions that thinkers have considered, and that is the simple question, what is the mind? What is the mind?
I remember one theologian who played a little word game in seeking to understand that question. He said, what is the mind? And he said, no matter. And then when somebody said, well, what is matter?
He said, never mind. So in that little game he was playing, what he was trying to communicate is that what we call the mind, though we recognize it is inseparably related to something material and physical, such as the brain, nevertheless what he was saying in his little game was that the mind cannot be absolutely equated with the brain. The brain may be the seat of the mind. It may be the organ that the body uses to think, but there is a difference between the physical organ that does the thinking and the thinking itself. And so again, we ask the question, what is thought? Is thought merely a biochemical electrical impulse of some sort that can be measured in pure physical categories, or is there something soulish or spiritual or nonphysical about this thing that is so basic to our existence as human beings? One thing we're aware of, and that is that we are people who think, and we have ideas, concepts in what we call our mind, and sometimes we say I have an idea in my head.
We don't sense that we're thinking with our fingers or with our toes, but we have a tendency to locate the source of that thinking in our heads. And we also know that physical injuries to the brain can alter patterns of thought, and chemical imbalances can also alter patterns of thought. We make distinctions with respect to what is called mental illness, where people lose the capacity to think in a rational manner, and yet people who are deemed to be perfectly healthy mentally also at times think in an irrational manner. And so we often wonder where that line is between mental illness and mental soundness, between sanity and insanity. It's often been said that there's a thin line between genius and insanity, between those who think at extraordinary depths and those who somehow cross the border into madness. We've seen an unusually high rate of insanity among some of the most celebrated thinkers of world history, and so that thin line that some say marks the difference between genius and insanity is one that we see people presumably skating back and forth over in return frequently.
But it's no simple question to answer. What is the mind? What is thought? And we think, for example, of being awake during the day, and is there ever a time that we're awake when we're not thinking? We may not be thinking in some deep logical order or analysis of something. We may be what some people call wool-gathering or daydreaming, but even while we're daydreaming, we're having thoughts. We're having ideas that we're aware of. We're in a state of consciousness. Then we also have this weird phenomenon of thinking when we're asleep, where sometimes the train of thought or the stream of consciousness takes some wild and bizarre turns.
We're all aware of that phenomenon when we are awakened in the middle of the night by what we call a nightmare, where the thinking in the midst of our sleep frightened us or alarmed us to some degree. Just the other day, I said to my wife, I said, honey, did you tell me that you wanted me to buy such and such a thing for you? And she looked at me in total surprise, and she said, no, I never asked you to buy anything like that.
I said, are you sure? And she said, yes. I said, well, just the other day I had this distinct memory that you had asked me to buy this certain thing. And the other person sitting there said, you must have been dreaming. And then it hit me. I said, yes, that's exactly what happened. I had had this vivid dream where in the dream my wife asked me to purchase this thing.
And a couple of days later I couldn't remember whether I had dreamed it or if I had actually experienced it from her lips. These are only questions that further multiply the difficulty of sorting out exactly what it means to have a mind and to think. Now for our consideration as Christians, we have to understand that the bottom line is that the Scriptures have the strong assumption that inherent in our humanity is the ability to think. And the universal assumption of sacred Scripture, and it's not simply an assumption because it is actually claimed throughout Scripture, is that we are moral beings. Now in order to be a moral being, one has to have the ability or the capacity to behave in such a way that is in correspondence to or opposition to some moral standard. And the standard, of course, in the Scripture is the law of God.
And the God of the Bible is a God who holds us accountable for our obedience or disobedience to His law. So that's clear that to be a creature who is responsible for their behavior morally is to be a moral being. Now what else is required to be a moral being? Well, we've thought that through in the history of the church again and again, and we say, well, one of the most important things, absolutely essential, a necessary condition for being a moral being is to have a will. That is, moral creatures must be volitional creatures.
That is, they must have the power, the ability, or the capacity to make choices, to make decisions. And so we are deemed to be creatures who possess a will. Then we get to the next level, and we have to ask the even perhaps more problematic question, what is the will? Well, Jonathan Edwards, who I believe wrote the most important book dealing with this question of the nature and function of the human will, once defined the will in these simple terms, he said, the will is the mind choosing. The will is the mind choosing.
And what he was getting at was this, that for a person to exercise their will, for a person to make a choice that is of a moral kind, that person has to be in some state of awareness. What you do when you're unconscious is not something that we normally consider to be of a moral nature, or we distinguish in our bodily functions between those which are voluntary and those which are involuntary. We don't choose every second to have our hearts beat and push blood throughout the circulatory system. The heart beats as an involuntary organ. We don't make a conscious decision to make it do what it does.
It just goes on like the pink rabbit, you know, until it stops. Now, to make a moral decision requires some kind of consciousness, some kind of understanding of the moral issues or options involved so that the mind is intimately engaged in the choices of what we do. So, as Christians or as human beings, we can't assume that our ethical decisions, our moral responses are mindless acts, but rather our actions are resulted from the choices that we make, which choices are informed by our thinking, informed by our mind. That's why it is that Scripture exhorts us to have the renewing of the mind, so that we will begin to think in categories that God is pleased with, so that our thinking will then have an influence on our choices and that our choices will be in conformity to the law of God rather than in disobedience to them. So, do you see in simple terms how vital the mind is to the Christian life?
Now, as I said, over against this biblical view is the idea that is becoming more and more popular, and that is this view of physical determinism. We think of the works of B.F. Skinner earlier in this century, who in the realm of psychology came to the conclusion that all of our responses are determined basically not only by our environment but by our physical makeup. In the nineteenth century, Ludwig Feuerbach was famous for saying, you are what you eat, noting that what people ingested for food had a profound impact on their biochemistry, and their biochemistry tended to determine their behavior. I once met a man who was enormously obese, and he said to me, he said, I can tell you how it is that I became so fat.
And I said, how was that? He said, I read Feuerbach. And Feuerbach said, you are what you eat. And I wanted to be rich, so I gorged myself on rich foods.
Instead of getting rich, I got fat. Of course, that's a jocular application of Feuerbach's principle. But we have this idea not only at the philosophical or psychological level among scholars that examine ways in which our physical makeup determines our behavior, but we're living in an age where in our culture we have a man-like manager writing a book called Whatever Happened to Sin? And in our law courts, we wonder whether anybody can be held accountable for their behavior, which of course they couldn't if every decision was determined by their environment or by their biochemical makeup. We've looked briefly today at this puzzling question of the nature of the mind. And at the end of our discussion, we saw that there are those who argue, as B.F. Skinner has, that all that we think is controlled and determined by physical causes. And of course, the great critique of Skinner is the critique that why should I give any credence to his argument? Since his argument falls by its own weight, that I'd have to say that anything that B.F. Skinner says about the nature of the mind and the nature of volition would itself be conditioned by B.F. Skinner's biochemical composition and his background. And so his ideas have no more credence than anybody else's ideas. I might as well listen to the responses and the instincts of a gorilla or a hippopotamus as to pay any attention to his thinking because he's eliminated cogency from the very act of thinking by his theory. And that's what I mean by saying his theory collapses by its own weight. Well, we'll explore more of these questions in the days to come.
That was R.C. Sproul. And stay with us all week on Renewing Your Mind as we spend the week thinking about thinking. Dr. Sproul had a vision to flood the world with knowledgeable and articulate Christians. He sought to accomplish that through the books he wrote, series he recorded, study Bible he edited and the college he started. You can help that vision flourish when you make a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800 435 4343. As our way of saying thanks, we'll give you two resources to help you think like a Christian.
Digital access to all 12 messages in his Think Like a Christian series and we'll send you his book, The Consequences of Ideas, which provides an overview of philosophy and those ideas that have shaped today's world. So request both resources at renewingyourmind.org or when you click the link in the podcast show notes. Another way you can help fuel that vision is to officially become a Ligonier ministry partner. Our ministry partners support this ministry monthly with their prayers and financial support. This is helping equip millions of Christians around the world and in return to aid them further every month they receive discipleship resources from us including complete access to hundreds of teaching series that they can stream on the go.
You can learn more about becoming a ministry partner at ligonier.org slash partner or become a partner by clicking the give monthly button when you respond to today's offer at renewingyourmind.org. Thank you. Here's a preview of tomorrow's episode. What an enormous resource God has given His creatures with the brain as it relates to thinking. We're not just empty minds. We don't live merely as thinkers, but we do play football. We play the piano. We play golf. We walk across the street. We ride bicycles.
We are engaged in physical activity all the time because not only do we have a mind, but we also have a body. So be sure to join us tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. God bless. God bless.
