If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions (or, we would say today, electro-chemical reactions between neurons), what reason have we to trust it?Materialistic psychologists and philosophers are not, of course, making a brand new error. They are making the same error committed by the Sadducees in Mark 12. Today's New Testament reading tells of an encounter Jesus had with them. They came to him "with a question," Mark tells us:Evil and God,
from The Spectator
vol. CLXVI (7 February 1941),
reprinted in God in the Dock
(Eerdmans, 1970), p.21
19"Teacher," they said, "Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and have children for his brother. 20Now there were seven brothers. The first one married and died without leaving any children. 21The second one married the widow, but he also died, leaving no child. It was the same with the third.... 23At the resurrection, whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?"Now did the Sadducees start off hating the idea of a resurrection, and go looking for paradoxes? Or did they wonder about some of these things and end up rejecting the idea of a resurrection afterwards?from Mark 12.19-23
24Jesus replied, "Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? 25When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. 26Now about the dead rising — have you not read in the book of Moses, in the account of the bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? 27He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!"Perhaps I shouldn't enjoy this so much, but he really lets them have it here. He chides them for not knowing the Scriptures -- something I'm sure they prided themselves on. Then in particular, "have you not read...?" Ouch! Every Jewish boy reads that passage and probably recites it.