I have to apologize for my title – a greater brain could have conceived a better one…
Scientists aren’t allowed to consider even the possibility of design or creation, under threat of ostracism, ridicule, and loss of livelihood. Consequently such bafflingly complex design features as the human brain are just blindly accepted as being another product of chemicals plus a convincingly long period of time. It’s that baffling complexity which got my own brain thinking about itself recently.
(This post is another in my “blast from the past” series posted while I concentrate on writing a book. It was originally called “Brains, Sense and Nonsense”)
An average healthy human brain contains some 200 billion nerve cells connected to one another through hundreds of trillions of synapses, so that a single human brain has more information processing units than all the computers, routers and internet connections on the earth. One brain’s memory capacity, even by a conservative estimate, is at least a petabyte, equal to the entire world-wide web. Weighing only three pounds, it is super-energy efficient. The brains internal communications occur at light-speed.*
So if we’re part of the onward and upward evolution of life, why is it that even the most talented and intellectual among us only use a fraction of their brains’ potential? Does that make sense to you? Shouldn’t it be the other way around-that the most intelligent are pushing the boundaries of their brain so that their offspring will have greater brain power, given the additional requirement of an incredibly fortuitous mutation?
Someone may protest that the history of man demonstrates evolution clearly: just look how we’ve developed technology and travel in the last few decades alone. That’s not evolution, that’s development. It’s the result of a snowballing God-given thirst for knowledge, in conjunction with times of relative freedom from war, factions, disease and starvation. You could take a man from what is a very backward tribe, still a reality in some remote parts of the world, assuming that he could stand the shock of the change in lifestyle, and put him through school and university. He has brain power too, and it’s not that of an ape-man.
Historians-secular historians-find remarkable the rapidity with which the first civilization in Mesopotamia developed writing, literature, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, business and technology. People weren’t morons crawling out of the trees or muddy fields and making a few marks on a piece of rock or banging two sticks together, one for yes and two for no, in order to communicate. As far back as real history goes, man was intelligent-he just hadn’t got around to building a computer or an airliner yet. He did manage to build such structures as Stonehenge, the Mayan temple and the Pyramids-structures so big and so cleverly put together that we still haven’t figured them out. Some imaginative people have put such structures down to aliens-because, they’re convinced-early man was brainless and clueless. They aren’t allowed or willing to consider the possibility that humans have always had that brain-power potential, right from their creation.
However, some people even in past millennia were able to recognize what professors and educators of today are missing by intent, which is that we humans have been created physically complete and ready to function, and designed by a mind far above our own:
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.
(Psalm 139:14 NIV).
* http://www.icr.org/article/human-brain-beyond-belief
TOP DIAGRAM: NEURON CELL BODY, BY BRUCE BLAUS
(Image by JJ Harrison)
