The Reasons why "Just Following Jesus" Doesn't work

[Rekeisha]

That's pretty much it, to be honest (except for the last paragraph). Not only are anger, joy, and happiness "just" chemical reactions (which can be seen in brain scans in predictable regions of the brain in all humans), but we're learning a lot more about the way the brain works in terms of us not having the degree of autonomous control over our instinctive reactions as we like to imagine we do. There's quite a lot of debate going on about to what degree we're in control of our own brains, so I'll leave that to the experts, but there's really no question that all of the things we once ascribed to the concept of a "soul" are in fact "simply" brain chemistry.


Of course, to whatever degree we have conscious control of ourselves, we should exercise that control in being better to one another, since we evolved as a social species capable of being moral actors (we also see moral actors in other intelligent, social species, as confirmed by scientific studies on that subject). The fact that it's "just" brain chemistry doesn't diminish the beauty or importance of our self-valuation of the products of these emotions and interactions with other humans, any more than knowing that the sun is just a fusion reaction at the heart of a huge ball of hydrogen diminishes the beauty of a sunset-- especially one viewed with your mate amid some hugs and tender kisses. We humans do and must assign values to the inanimate, the meaningless, but it doesn't diminish them because they have no innate value of their own. I have never understood why people think otherwise.

So why do you think we add meaning to things and contemplate our existence? 
Why call anything beautiful? 
Why do you see the beauty?

 
You said we humans do and must assign values to the inanimate. Why do you see this as a must?

I even agree with your premise that (presuming God exists for the sake of argument) then "knowing how things function doesn't remove the fact that God is doing it", except that I don't think God has to use magic to make things happen, if the Creator set everything up (including our brain chemistry) to function naturally, from the very beginning.

May I ask do you think Christians think that God uses magic to make things happen?

The difference is that the religious are a group with a unified explanation pre-sorted and pre-ordered as they are being presented to them in the Holy Scriptures, which are unquestionable (to them), and therefore constitute a uniform filter that the whole group employs at all time. The scientists, on the other hand, only come with their basic human filters and prejudices, scattered across the entire spectrum of humanity, and they have no uniform ideological dogma to protect. A scientist from communist China is not going to agree with a scientist who is a Jesuit monk from Italy, and neither of them are going to agree with a Buddhist from the US Midwest, et cetera. They will all approach the methodology of the published paper with skepticism and will accept the conclusions of new papers only to the degree warranted-- and they will writer their own counter-papers to show the Italian monk is wrong, for instance, and why.

So I see the data collected from scientific research and the Bible as two different types of information. Data from science pertains to the physical world and data from the Bible speaks about the spiritual world.  As a Christian I believe that these two data sources do not contradict and if they do there is something wrong with someone's interpretation. One thing I like about Christianity is you are asked to ask question and to test things(James 1:5). I see people who are religious but don't understand God and are afraid of questions. I think if your beliefs are correct it can be questioned and tested.  Many believing Christians have question. I have had question and received answers. God has made us to be curious in order to learn. It says "let us reason together" (Isa 1:18). I find I enjoy when I teach the Bible and my student's ask questions that means they are thinking!

What makes me angriest, as a scientist by training, is to see groups who don't have a real explanatory model, just a story that claims to explain by magical means, taking that story and holding it up as if it is a plausible counter-explanation of equal credibility to the scientific models carefully constructed by groups of scientists who have no reason to agree with one another. They manipulate their audiences by the use of scientific-sounding authorities which are in fact misrepresentations of either what a real scientist said, or some stuffed shirt with a bad degree who tries to pretend to be an authority in order to fool most of the people (who won't pay attention to what real scientists have to say, or notice that the Authority being quoted is out of step with everyone else in the field), just so they can keep people from "falling away" into scientific thinking about the world, as if that is contrary to God.

I recently came across a man by the name of  Hugh Ross who by science came to be a believer in God. He grew up in Canada and didn't know any Christians personally. Yet after many years of looking from the age of 9 up into his teen he was testing other major religions to see if they matched up with what is found in nature. He has a view of Genesis that I believe is hardly taught but make a great deal of sense. If you care to check him out you can click this link. 
https://youtu.be/d4EaWPIlNYY

It IS contrary to God as they (and the Iron Age Israelites) imagined it to be, true... but if there is in fact a Creator, then science is the best method of finding out the actions of that Creator, not the best imaginings of Iron Age goat herder priests.

Think of it: if evolution is correct, and we are "just" animals like every other nipple-having mammal on the planet, then mankind is the first animal to rise up enough to recognize his Creator (and in some cases to deny the same, heh) and give worship to the source of all life, of which he is an integral part. It means we are both animal and a transcendent being, which made us worthy of the Creator's notice, and love. To accept evolution as the mechanism of Creation, and our relationship with the rest of life on earth, does not diminish God or man.

Could you expound more on this paragraph because I don't know if I fully understand you?