Apropos that last post

"'To a neuroscientist, you are your brain; nothing causes your behavior other than the operations of your brain,' Greene says. 'If that’s right, it radically changes the way we think about the law. The official line in the law is all that matters is whether you’re rational, but you can have someone who is totally rational but whose strings are being pulled by something beyond his control.' In other words, even someone who has the illusion of making a free and rational choice between soup and salad may be deluding himself, since the choice of salad over soup is ultimately predestined by forces hard-wired in his brain."

"If that's right," he says.

Now, can science determine if it is? No. Science can tell (very incompletely, so far) what's going on physically inside a brain; it cannot pronounce a judgment that nothing other than those physical processes is going on. That's metaphysics and theology. In those fields, there are compelling arguments that something more than physical processes must be involved.

From the NY Times Magazine, The Brain on the Stand, by Jeffrey Rosen. Hat Tip to Edge.

(My earlier post, referred to in the title to this one, was, "What is left that theology can be brought to bear on?")

Posted: Wed - March 14, 2007 at 11:28 AM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

Apropos that last post

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson