Page 686 - Atlas of Creation Volume 4

THE BRAIN IS NOT THE SOURCE OF

PERSONAL IDENTITY

The flawlessly equipped human brain

he per cep tu al world whose de tails we have been ex am in ing is an ar ti fi cial one, formed by way
of elec tri cal sig nals. But do our brains in ter pret these sig nals and con vert them in to a friend we
T recog nize, a beau ti ful flow er, a bound less land scape, chil dren play ing in the street or a love a -
ble kit ten?

Technically, it’s true that the sig nals are an a lyzed in the brain. Materialists go on to claim that we
con sist sim ply of our brains’ neu rons and that the world we in hab it is the re sult of in ter com mu ni ca tion
be tween those nerve cells. They main tain that an en ti ty who thinks, laughs, re joic es, rec og niz es oth er pe-
o ple and can an a lyze is, in the words of the ev o lu tion ist phys i cist and dis cov er er of DNA Francis Crick,

“a pack of neu rons.” 83
For a ma te ri al ist, it is un im por tant how hu man be ings think and how they draw sig nif i cance from
their per cep tions. It is un im por tant be cause ma te ri al ists have no ex pla na tion for these things. In their vi-
ew, ev ery thing must be in ves ti gat ed in a ma te ri al sense. The fact is, how e ver, that this is a

great false hood ut tered in or der to turn peo ple away from faith in Allah.
To clar i fy this in more de tail, it will help to fa mil iar ize our selves with the
gen er al out lines of the hu man brain, one of the most com plex struc tures in
the world.

A new born ba by has around 100 bil lion neu rons or nerve cells, the
hi ghest num ber a per son can have. The num ber of neu rons in the
hu man brain nev er in creas es, and mere ly de clines as time pass es.
Neurons are the nerv ous sys tem’s ba sic structural and func -

tion al units. Every neu ron es tab lish es from one thousand to ten

684 Atlas of Creation Vol. 4