Love and Chemicals

Excerpts from a Valentine's Day essay by Dinesh D'Souza (hat tip: Veritas Rex)...

For instance, we have consciousness and that is something that doesn’t show up under a microscope. We experience love, one of our deepest human experiences, and this seems absurd to explain simply in terms of atoms and molecules interacting with each other. We also are “selves,” which means that we experience our lives as unified wholes. The molecules that make up my bodily frame change over the years, and yet I remain the same “me” all along. We are intentional and purposeful beings, and our actions are much better understood in these terms than in terms of the laws of physics. Finally we have free choice and free will, and neither of those are possible if we are simply material objects subject to the invariable laws of nature....

The materialist fallacy, Schopenhauer wrote, is that mistake of “the subject that forgets to take account of itself.” Schopenhauer was an atheist, but he recognized that the materialist understanding of reality is a very shallow one. I’m not sure if today’s leading atheists like Dennett and Pinker have someone to care for, but if they did they would surely know, and would not need me to remind them this Valentine’s Day, that love is much more than chemicals.