Yesterday, while Mommy and Peanut were napping and otherwise recovering from the stomach flu, Audie and I watched an episode of “Babar” (Season 5, 1991) called “Robot Rampage” in which Babar’s brother-in-law Arthur creates a robot, Robo-Bob Junior, that threatens to replace the Finance Minister (Pompadour) and Prime Minister (Cornelius). However, Robo-Bob Junior has some serious bugs and also cannot admit when it’s making mistakes. It also has no “reset” button, so when Robo-Bob runs amuck, Arthur has to shut it down with a paradox of contradiction:
Bob Junior: I AM ROBO-BOB JUNIOR. YOU CAN CALL ME BOB JUNIOR.
Arthur: I am Arthur. You can call me Arthur.
Bob Junior: I KNOW YOU, ARTHUR. YOU MADE BOB JUNIOR. YOU DID A GOOD JOB.
Arthur: Thanks. But actually when I made you, I made a … mistake.
Bob Junior: IT IS NOT POSSIBLE! ARTHUR MADE ROBO-BOB JUNIOR! ARTHUR DOES NOT MAKE MISTAKES!
Arthur: Oh, so when I said I made a mistake, I guess I was mistaken.
[The confused robot chatters nonsense and begins to melt down.]
Arthur: But if I DON’T make mistakes, then when you said I made a mistake, YOU must have made a mistake!
[The robot collapses into a smoking heap.]
Fans of the original “Star Trek” (1966–1969) will notice a similarity to “I, Mudd” (Season 2, Episode 8), in which Captain Kirk and the outlaw Harry Mudd talk Norman the Android to death using the Liar Paradox:
Kirk: Everything Harry tells you is a lie. Remember that! Everything Harry tells you is a LIE!
Mudd: Now listen to this carefully, Norman. I am lying!
Norman: You say you are lying, but if everything you say is a lie then you are telling the truth, but you cannot tell the truth because everything you say is a lie, but …. You lie, you tell the truth; but you cannot for you …. Illogical! Illogical! Please explain! You are human! Only humans can explain their behavior! Please explain!
The writers of “Babar” and “Star Trek” probably didn’t intended this, but they managed to illustrate a few points about why Darwinian Naturalism is not a valid explanation for the origin of the mind. In the case of Arthur, his robot creation (which is a deterministic automaton lacking free will) has limitations because Arthur himself has limitations. The episode’s story line shows how Arthur is as reluctant to admit that Robo-Bob needs dramatic improvement as he is proud of his creation, and these flaws are reflected in Robo-Bob’s malfunctioning. Yet if we replace Arthur with an unconscious, unguided process of random events–starting with the supposed self-assembly of proteins necessary for life–we don’t even get a logical/deterministic machine, let alone our own conscious mind. Oxford mathematician John Lennox points to his laptop and asks the Darwinian naturalist:
“If you knew that your computer was the end product of a mindless, unguided process, you wouldn’t trust it for a moment, would you? And yet to do your science, you trust something that you believe has come to be without any mind behind it whatsoever.”
We can say that a mindless, unguided process won’t even result in a logical/deterministic machine because nothing created can ever be more complex or ordered than its creator; a purely materialistic process therefore can’t result in anything capable of grasping basic principles of logic or of being confused by a paradox because these principles have no basis in the materialistic world. Mind simply does not follow from an arrangement of matter, as British scientist J.B.S. Haldane said:
“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”
So we’re not robots or deterministic machines that have merely an illusion of consciousness because we clearly have the free will to make choices, and we’re not the result of mindless, unguided processes because we are still subject to a demonstrably objective moral law and truth that necessarily point to something or Someone transcendent:
“Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires – one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.” (Excerpted from “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis)
The Mind-Body Problem remains an insurmountable obstacle to proponents of Darwinian Naturalism for reasons that aren’t difficult for even a three-year-old to understand (but as George Orwell said, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them”) and Audie at least seems to get the gist of this intuitively, with an exploding robot thrown in as a bonus.