Is Neuroscience Compatible with a Belief in God? A Perspective from the Thalamus

Abstract

: Microarchitecture of thalamic inputs suggests that the main information that reaches the cortex trans-thalamically contains copies of motor instructions issued to lower motor centers in the central nervous system. This includes all sensory inputs that reach the cortex with the sole exception of olfaction. Moreover, all cortical areas, regardless of their classification as sensory, motor or associational, contain layer VB neurons that have branching axons that innervate both lower motor centers in the CNS and thalamic relays. These findings together challenge the sensory versus motor dichotomy within the thalamus and the cortex and suggest that all thalamocortical interactions are to some extent both, sensory and motor. This means that agency and perception are inseparable. All experience is, therefore, necessarily a model for an agent. An important feature of all models is that they have outside requirements to function as such. They are not ends in themselves. The necessary background for a model can be provided by other more basic models, which is something that contemporary science has done very successfully. However, science, which is itself a model, ultimately requires the existence of something that is unmodelable. Therefore, being a scientist and believing in God is not contradictory.