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The Existence of Cyberspace
and the Mind that Created It

We have shown that there is no scientific evidence that materialistic processes could have originated personal human nature consciousness and everything of which human minds are capable. Now consider this inner world of the mind and the apparently limitless internal and external realm of thought and concepts with which the mind connects. Let us borrow and adapt the term, cyberspace, now used to refer to the global information network. Human minds through the millennia have conceived of or discovered a vast universe of pure thought. What we will call cyberspace encompasses knowledge and the reality of knowing, reason, memory, logic, mathematics, grammar, languages, and all other forms of symbolism, the concept of truth and error, and information theory, together with the mystery of human intellectual creativeness. The conception, knowing, and practicing these things of the mind of cyberspace are entirely in terms of abstract symbols such as words and visual symbols that represent words, sentences, ideas and logical operations.

Does cyberspace exist independent of human minds? Are human minds creating cyberspace, or does it exist independent of humans whose minds are capable of discovering it? Mathematicians and scientists have demonstrated that the much in the universe is describable by mathematics with exquisite precision. But mathematics and the logical principles of science are part of cyberspace. Furthermore, mathematicians do not believe they are continually creating or inventing new laws of mathematics and new properties of numbers. No, they believe that they are discovering existing truth. Such facts as these strongly suggest that cyberspace exists independent of human minds and therefore was not invented by human minds. It existed before man came on the scene. If cyberspace has existence independent of human minds, how can its origin and existence be explained? How can something that consists entirely of mental concepts and processes exist without a mind that is its repository, that knows it? Since cyberspace is evidently infinite, how can it exist except in an infinite Mind who is its Author? The existence of the universe supports the real existence of cyberspace and of a Mind that conceived and created the universe . It is certain that human minds did not accomplish this. Only the God of creation revealed in the Bible has the credentials of the Author of cyberspace.

As we found in Chapter-5, leading authorities in linguistics have concluded in recent years that fundamental, universal principles of language and language acquisition are built into the brains of human infants at birth. Very early they begin to analyze some non-verbal and social aspects of language, and at around two years begin to control basic grammatical principles. Also, recent research has established that when only a few months old, infants possess the ability to perform basic arithmetic, such as simple addition and subtraction. Such scientific facts as these suggest that human minds are at birth geared to cyberspace and thus to the infinite-personal Spirit, to the Mind of God who Christians believe created the universe, man, and cyberspace.

The existence of cyberspace and the fact of man's inherent connection with it, make man unique among all earthly creatures, transcendent over nature. This is part of the image of God in man that is taught in Genesis. It is thus part of the ultimate design.

The Mythical Concept of "Emergent Evolution"

Some secular philosophers and scientists, perhaps feeling the force of the failure of science to arrive at a credible materialistic solution to the mind-brain problem and other difficulties, have proposed a concept called "emergent evolution" or simply "emergence."¹⁴ They point out that science deals with a hierarchy of progressively more complex systems of theories and laws, each of which is dependent on the more fundamental theories and laws of the next lower system in the hierarchy. A commonly assumed hierarchy of sciences from bottom to top is physics, chemistry, biology and anthropology. But, because each increase in complexity introduces new principles, no level of the hierarchy can be understood merely as a combination of its parts which are explained by the next lower level of the hierarchy. For example, although chemistry supposedly is entirely an expression of the laws of physics, physicists cannot predict all of chemistry from their knowledge of physics. And so on up the hierarchy, biology rests on the principles of chemistry but cannot be entirely predicted by chemistry, and anthropology rests on biology. Thus, it is alleged, conscious human nature emerged from lower biological levels of awareness by evolutionary processes. Supposedly, then, the human mind or personal nature rests entirely upon biology, chemistry and physics, but could not be predicted from the laws of these lower levels of scientific knowledge.

The concept of emergent evolution is, however, no explanation of how or why personal human nature or anything else came into being. With respect to the mind-brain problem it is actually just a particular form of the materialistic idea that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the physical brain. The concept is nevertheless used to produce the impression that evolution does, indeed, explain the origin of human nature. Emergent evolution is not a scientific, but a philosophical concept. It is another faith proposition, not a conclusion grounded in scientific evidence. Science and scientific theories cannot explain the origin of anything which transcends the natural order, anything immaterial, spiritual. But both the pertinent scientific evidence and our personal experience of consciousness strongly support the conclusion that at the core of personal human nature is the self which is immaterial, spiritual and that it does indeed transcend the natural order.

The origin of personal human nature must be found in a higher personal source, an infinite-personal source, a spiritual Being who created the universe and made man in His own personal-spiritual image. The existence of human nature with its essential attributes affords conclusive evidence upon which to base a powerful logical case for the real existence of the Creator-God of the biblical revelation. And this evidence is entirely independent of the Bible. Thus we see that the Bible is reasonable and in agreement with the observed facts when it reveals the Creator-God of the universe to be a personal Being, the infinite-personal spirit who is the source and ground of all being. The ultimate design, the ultimate evidence of design in the universe, is the personal-spiritual nature of man, for the pattern is the image of the Creator Himself, the ultimate Design.

References

14. Ayala, F.J. and Theodosius Dobzhansky, Editors, Studies in the Philosophy of Biology (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1974), pp. 57-63, 110, 163-166; F.J. Ayala in Dobzhansky, Theodosius, et al., Evolution (W.H. Freeman, San Francisco, 1977), pp. 489-490.