What came first, matter or mind? It matters. After all, the dominant scientific/metaphysical shtick—confirmed by nothing less than human-made science itself, and backed up (we are assured) by field studies, experiments, and peer-reviewed papers by Ph.D.s in prestigious journals—is that matter came first, and then, from matter, mind.
OK, let’s look first at matter, at simple basic matter itself, the “stuff” that preceded mind and from which mind (we are told) arose. According to the Standard Model of particle physics, matter consists of fermions, the bottom-level building blocks, which themselves are classified into six different quarks, and they combine to form hadrons (protons and neutrons). There are also leptons, which include electrons, muons, and tau particles. Anti-matter particles (positrons, antiprotons, antineutrinos, antineutrons) exist as well. What holds these different particles together are bosons, the force carriers: photons, gluons, and other fundamental particles, so finely tuned in their interaction with fermions that, with the slightest derivation, not only human life but our universe, at least as we know it, could not exist.
And yet all this, prime matter itself—rather complicated and very precisely lawlike—arose without any mind behind it at all? It had to, because, remember, matter precedes mind. So—fermions, bosons, quarks, positrons, all 17 fundamental particles (at last count), having been mindlessly created, just mindlessly arranged themselves together with the cross-eyed precision needed to create basic matter itself, which eventually led to mind.
What came first, matter or mind? It matters.
How did that happen? First, there was a mindless Big Bang, out of which came mindless space, mindless time, and mindless matter/energy. Then, mindless gravity caused mindless matter to coalesce into mindless molten globules, and one of these globules mindlessly cooled down, and on it mindless chemicals arose that mindlessly formed simple life forms (probably mindless themselves) out of which, mindlessly and unconsciously, mind and consciousness arose.
If it’s not far-fetched enough to believe that mindless chemicals could mindlessly morph into “simple life” (an oxymoron because even the “simplest” living entities have complex functions), that’s daisies compared to the advent of mind and consciousness. At least living things are “material.” But mind and consciousness, though hardly immortal, are, certainly, immaterial.
Otherwise—what’s the chemical, or even atomic, composition of thought, any thought? What, for instance, is the chemical or atomic structure of I want a piece of chocolate? Not the third-person objective chemical or atomic structure of chocolate (any chemist can tell you that), nor even the third-person and objective chemical and atomic structure of the associated neurons, but the chemical or molecular structure of first-person subjective experience of the thought I want a piece of chocolate?
If that sounds like an absurd question, it is, but only because mind and consciousness, whatever they are, are not material, and no more first arose from fermions and bosons than the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark arose from the atomic structure of the paper he wrote it on.
So, it was mind, Divine mind first, known as Yahweh—in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28)—and then matter, a truth that turns scientific dogma inside out, mind you.
