Thinking about thinking...

With my science background and my religious (Christian) upbringing my core tensions are obvious: what is more useful for finding ultimate truth, the physical/tangible/biological understanding, or the (more) subjective/spiritual/philosophical understanding of who I am (where I come from and what my purpose is etc.)?

Of course I can't choose, so I'm searching for the balance. But it makes sense to me to start with what is most apparently certain/knowable, and that is my material/physical existence. More specifically, what do we know about the biology and mechanistic operations of the human mind? From here I can then (more properly) filter the unknown and mysterious "Truths" beyond the physical (the "metaphysical", if such a thing even exists) to come to my own philosophical conclusions most consistent with what I'm most confident as being true in my present physical perception.

Hence, my current preoccupation with neuroscience and the recent scientific findings on the workings of the human brain. Here's an excerpt from an awesome book that I'm currently reading, which will give you an idea of my thoughts on this subject as of the moment:

"Everything your 'immaterial' mind imagines leaves material traces. Each thought alters the physical state of your brain synapses as a microscopic level. Each time you imagine moving your fingers across the keys to play the piano, you alter the tendrils in your living brain.

These experiments are not only delightful and intriguing, they also overturn the centuries of confusion that have grown out of the work of the French philosopher René Descartes, who argued that mind and brain are made of different substances and are governed by different laws. The brain, he claimed, was a physical, material thing, existing in space and obeying the laws of physics. The mind (or the soul, as Descartes called it) was immaterial, a thinking thing that did not take up space or obey physical laws. Thoughts, he argued, were governed by the rules of reasoning, judgment, and desires, not by the physical laws of cause and effect. Human beings consisted of this duality, this marriage of immaterial mind and material brain.

But Descartes - whose mind/body division has dominated science for four hundred years - could never credibly explain how the immaterial mind could influence the material brain. As a result, people began to doubt that an immaterial thought, or mere imagining, might change the structure of the material brain. Descartes's view seemed to open an unbridged gap between mind and brain.

His noble attempt to rescue the brain from the mysticism that surrounded it in his time, by making it mechanical, failed. Instead the brain came to be seen as an inert, inanimate machine that could be moved to action only by the immaterial, ghostlike soul Descartes placed within it, which came to be called 'the ghost in the machine.'

By depicting a mechanistic brain, Descartes drained the life out of it and slowed the acceptance of brain plasticity more than any other thinker. Any plasticity - any ability to change that we had - existed in the mind, with its changing thoughts, not in the brain.

But now we can see that our 'immaterial' thoughts too have a physical signature, and we cannot be so sure that thought won't someday be explained in physical terms. While we have yet to understand exactly how thoughts actually change brain structure, it is now clear that they do, and the firm line that Descartes drew between mind and brain is increasingly a dotted line."

~Norman Doidge, M.D. (from his book "The Brain that Changes Itself")

So here it is, the edge of neuroscience and the "spiritual" existence of the human mind. Is there such a distinction? Is this another paradox that we must just accept on faith? Is it "both and", not "either or"? Is there no distinction because the spiritual and material exist simultaneously and are inseparable? If that's the case then are we eternal beings? Does the "new Heaven and new Earth" view of the afterlife satisfactorily explain this paradox of duality? Or does it just push the question back a step? If we are not dual beings destined to live out the rest of eternity as body-less spirits, but will instead live in "new" physical bodies, then in what way would we still be "ourselves"? With new physical brains, would we still have all the memories and conditioning that makes us who we are? Not to mention that the physical universe as we know it could not exist and function without the physical laws, such as entropy, that invariably lead to decay and death. Physical material existence (as we know it) is defined by mortality and transient existence (constant change). It is impossible to even imagine a physical world where these things are not inherent.

This would be where, if you earnestly desire the inexplicable to be true, you employ the "God of the gaps". And the answer to the dilemma is... God! He will provide the infinite energy required to keep our new physical bodies from decay and death. So that's what the Tree of Life in the garden of Eden is referring to? The ability to tap into God's "otherworldly" trans-spiritual/physical infinite energy source. The same source of material energy that started the universe at the Big Bang, and yet that was still finite, thus leaving humanity to the "natural" and imperfect resulting energy source to our planet (the Sun). This external input of energy propels the existence of life on our planet, but due to it's limitations and imperfections (UV light, cosmic rays, etc.) we are destined to deteriorate and eventually to die...

This answer just seems too good to be true, too simple, too... it's just so much what we as humans want to be true, yet so far from any empirical evidence, that it's so obvious that we are just too highly biased in our desire for immortality for it to actually be the Truth. I know I'm not very noble to admitted this, but I am a doubting Thomas. So God, if you exist, show me. Let me see your resurrected body, feel your wounds per se. Explain to me why you made us this way and what you have in store for us. Give me a reason other than my own self-delusional desire/hope to believe in something beyond what I can "see" that I have no other basis to believe.

Surely God wouldn't expect us to just "believe" something because we want it to be so and the alternative is depressing...