By Lewis Willis
The book is entitled Dianetics, by L. Ron Hubbard. Not long ago I bought it in paperback form and primarily, nothing but curiosity motivated me. I found it to be one of the most difficult books to read that I have ever encountered and even now I wonder how it could have been a bestseller. I dug my way through about 125 pages of its total 600 pages and then laid it aside. However, if I fail to capture the point he is trying to make, I have found one point that serves my purposes well. I share that point with you.
For several months I have been fascinated by a book which I have seen advertised on almost every television channel I have watched. I wondered what it was all about. The name of the book did not offer any clues and the advertisements certainly did not answer my questions. It occurs to me that perhaps this is nothing but a new marketing technique. If many people have been as 1, the technique is working.
On page 69, Hubbard wrote, “Charles Darwin did his job well and the fundamental principles of evolution can be found in his and other works. The proposition on which Dianetics was originally entered was evolution.” Whatever Hubbard intends to say in his book, it will be said as an evolutionist. Imagine my surprise when he made one of the best arguments against evolution that I have seen in a long time.
Beginning on page 61 he had some things to say about the human brain. He compared it to a computer by analogy, observing, however, that the brain “is yet more fantastically capable than any computing machine ever constructed and infinitely more elaborate.” He said it could be called the “computational mind.” He observed that the brain, like a computer, “has its standard memory banks. . . . The various senses receive information and this information files straight into the standard memory banks” of the brain. He points out that there is a set of memory banks for every one of our senses which not only store information but cross indexes it with the other memory banks. Thus, what we see is recorded and cross-indexed with what we heard, thought, felt, etc.
For instance, if you step out on your lawn, your five senses go to work storing information. As you stand there you observe a car go by. Your brain stores your remembrance that you were standing in your lawn and cross-indexes this information with the fact that, at that time, you saw the car pass by. Not only does your brain store that information, it stores that you saw a red car, with four doors, occupied by two people, one of which was your neighbor, who just incidentally smiled and waved at you as he drove by. Your ears activate their storage banks, recording the sound of the car motor, the sound of the tires as they moved over the pavement, as well as the sound of one neighbor across the street mowing the lawn, while the children of another neighbor, were laughing and shouting as they played. Without realizing it, the memory banks of your sense of smell were activated to record the smell of your new mown grass, and perhaps the fertilizer which you had just applied, as well as the smell of your neighbor’s off burning lawn mower. It would be possible to go on and on with this kind of information, all of which we store in our brain. So, what is the point?
First, the point is that the human brain has the capacity to store all of this varied information! And, secondly, it has the capacity, under the right set of circumstances, to play back to us all of this data so that we can describe, in intricate detail, all that was observed at that normal, average, non-special moment in our long fife. A fifty year old man has fifty years of such information stored in his brain. And, there is stiff room in his storage banks for another fifty years of information if he should live that long. Thirdly, if the right set of circumstances exist, this scene which has been described above can be recalled in detail three hours, three years or thirty years after it occurs, without error!
The theory of evolution says that we human beings are in the evolutionary chain – albeit, at the very top of that chain. Whatever we are, they assert, it is the result of a series of blind-chance occurrences over billions of years. Thus, our marvelous brain, with its capacity to do what I have herein described, as well as millions of other things, according to the evolutionist, just happened! To a degree, the human mind is an accident, according to the theory!
It is impossible for me to accept the evolutionary hypothesis that says the human brain evolved, just as it is impossible for me to accept that the computer on which this article is being written is the result of blind chancel I would like to hear an evolutionist explain how either of these possibilities can occur. When he asked his brain to search its memory banks for a reasonable explanation, his brain could only reply, “no such data available.” Young people, if you do not remember all that is said in this article, at least remember, in general terms, the point which I have made.
Guardian of Truth XXXII: 22, p. 681
November 17, 1988