The German materialist Karl Vogt lectured across Euorpe on Darwin and scientific materialism, propagating a harsh anti-religious and atheistic philosophy. One of his most famous sayings was quoted over and over again: ‘Thoughts come out of the brain as gall from the liver, or urine from the kidneys.’ Feurbach asserted that ‘Man is what he eats,’ and commented dismally that ‘It used to be said “In the beginning God.” Now it is said, “In the beginning the belly.”
-Michael Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man, p. 33
I am currently studying for a degree with an emphasis in psychology. It happens that the bent of our psychology classes is evolutionary/behavioral. This is psychology built on the rock of B.F. Skinner, and it focuses on externals and scientific data, leaving no room for the existence of a soul. In a psychology class I took recently, the author of our textbook made the case that, scientifically speaking, ‘memory’ and/or ‘memories’ do not exist. His reasoning was that scientists have been unable to locate the whereabouts of memory and memories in the brain. Shortly after reading the argument of the textbook, I wrote this:
My psychology textbook virtually denies the existence of the memory (pp. 342-343). ‘Memory’ is not quantifiable. We have yet to scientifically locate it in the brain despite various efforts and theories. Therefore it cannot scientifically be said to have real existence. What we call memory, the textbook contends, is best expressed as behavior adaptation based on experience.
The only question is, How am I supposed to remember all that?
Some scientists (who are really philosophers impersonating scientists) have exalted the physical world to the point that nothing outside of it can exist. In addition to this, anything that cannot be explained in terms of physicality is nothing. It is written off. And so, thoughts simply become secretions of enzymes and the firing of synapses in the brain. Memories become the adaptation of physical behavior to past experiences (as if that makes any sense).
The fact of the matter is that Jesus Christ calls himself ‘the bread of life’:
John 6:48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50 This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.
This must mean, at least, that as the body is meant to live on bread, so the soul is meant to live on Christ. Without food, the body becomes malnourished, weakens, and dies of starvation. Without Christ, this same process takes place in the soul.
We, I am speaking as an American, live in a culture that exalts externals. Among those externals, food is a monster. How many diet books are being written each year? How many people are worried about eating the right sort of foods (gluten free, low-carb, organic, etc)? ‘You are what you eat,’ we are told.
This idolatrous nature of this type of physical obsession leads Aeschliman to share the above quote, which I post again here:
Feurbach asserted that ‘Man is what he eats,’ and commented dismally that ‘It used to be said “In the beginning God.” Now it is said, “In the beginning the belly.”
‘You are what you eat’ may be a true statement. But if it is, it may be extremely bad news for many. For it is not only the body that is capable of eating, but the soul as well. ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word which comes from the mouth of God.’ It is not, ‘in the beginning was the belly,’ but ‘in the beginning was the Word.’
The modern scientistic (not scientific, but scientistic) denial of God, Christ, and the soul is nothing more than a pseudo-sophisticated, grown up version of a child refusing to eat his veggies. And so he starves, and in his hunger-induced delusion, denies that there was ever such a thing as food to begin with – and we who go on eating are the crazy ones.
- John 6:54 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. 55 For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. 56 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. 57 As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me.
