With what are we born?  Are we like John Locke's blank slate?  Do we come with Immanuel Kant's intuitions of space, time, and causality?  Are we born with, as linguist Noam Chomsky, claims, the ability to speak?  What do we learn and what do we not?
     Though we cannot answer all of these questions in a blog, I ask them because I am reading a fascinating book called Inborn Knowledge by Colin McGinn.  As McGinn sees it, a large range of our knowledge is inborn, that is,it is not something we acquire through our senses.  We are not shaped entirely by our empirical experience.
     Wonderful, proponents of religion might say:  this demonstrates that people could well be born with what some commentators have called a "God shaped hole" in their hearts. The human longing for God is innate to the species.  It is not Sigmund Freud's idea of a desire stemming from our material neuroses.
     Perhaps.  Yet as McGinn cautions, while innate knowledge is a fact, it remains a mystery.  How can we envision a brain that comes with knowledge already built into it: where did such knowledge come from?  And how did the brain know to accumulate these types of knowledge and not others?
     Nonetheless, McGinn's thesis seems to confirm a larger point.  Although we may well be able to reduce the human being to a product of chemical exchange, we will never be able to argue that this is all that a human is.  As a neuroscientist friend of mine told me recently, "I believe in an evolved mind, but I cannot dismiss the notion of spirit."
     Indeed.  In fact, it is our very desire to consider these questions that belies any contention that we are no more than their sum.