Thinking Christian

Amanda Gefter wrote in New Scientist on October, 22,

Could the next battleground in the ID movement’s war on science be the brain?

[Link: Creationists declare war over the brain - brain - 22 October 2008 - New Scientist]

Some key excerpts:

The article is riddled with words like “worry,” “attack,” “war,” “threat.” Gefter tried to make it seem such language comes from the non-material side primarily, but the effect of it all on materialist scientists shows clearly.

Clearly, while there is a genuine attempt to appropriate neuroscience, it will not influence US laws or education in the way that anti-evolution campaigns can because neuroscience is not taught as part of the core curriculum in state-funded schools. But as Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, UK, emphasises: “This is real and dangerous and coming our way.”

He and others worry because scientists have yet to crack the great mystery of how consciousness could emerge from firing neurons. “Progress in science is slow on many fronts,” says John Searle, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley. “We don’t yet have a cure for cancer, but that doesn’t mean cancer has spiritual causes.”

Gefter’s last word is,

What can scientists do? They have been criticised for not doing enough to teach the public about evolution. Maybe now they need a big pre-emptive push to engage people with the science of the brain – and help the public appreciate that the brain is no place to invoke the “God of the gaps”.

What can scientists do? Let’s back that question up a step. What can scientists do for what? What are they so concerned to protect? Just this, it seems: science’s hegemony on knowledge; its ownership of all explanations; its insistence that it is the sole source of information. Other than that, what threat does this pose science?

Well, yes, there’s more. Philosophy of mind “threatens” to show that material explanations are not entirely sufficient. That opens the door another crack for the dreaded Intelligent Design to enter.

Be afraid, materialist science. Be very afraid.

I’ll add this before closing: the Evangelical Philosophical Society has also responded to Gefter’s article on their blog, including several corrections of factual errors, and this from J.P. Moreland:

The simple truth is that in both science and philosophy, strict physicalist analysis of consciousness and the self have been breaking down since the mid-1980s. The problems with physicalism have nothing directly to do with theism; they follow from rigorous treatments of consciousness and the self as we know them to be. The real problem comes in trying to explain its origin and for this problem, naturalism in general and Darwinism in particular, are useless. In my view, the only two serious contenders are theism and panpsychism which, contrary to the musings of some, has throughout the history of philosophy been correctly taken as a rival to and not a specification of naturalism.

Angus Menuge also corrected Patricia Churchland’s assertion that non-material views of mind come from an argument from ignorance:

At any given time, scientists should infer the best current explanation of the available evidence, and right now, the best evidence from both neuroscience and rigorous philosophical analysis is that consciousness is not reducible to the physical. Churchland’s refusal to draw this inference is based not on evidence, but on what Karl Popper called “promissory materialism,” a reliance on the mere speculative possibility of a materialistic explanation. Since this attitude can be maintained indefinitely, it means that even if a non-materialist account is correct (and supported by overwhelming evidence), that inconvenient truth can always be ignored.

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Denyse O’Leary was the co-author (with Dr. Mario Beauregard) of a book I reviewed in the April issue of Touchstone magazine: The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul. Beauregard has published research (see links from here) challenging some neuroscientists’ view that spiritual experiences can be explained through physical brain science alone, and this book covers his work while also challenging those other scientists’ conclusions, and even their often-questionable research methods.

A few days ago on her Mindful Hack blog, Denyse raised a good question in response to my review, which, by agreement with Touchstone, I will not be posting on the web for at least three months. I’ll quote this much from near the end of it for context, though:

For my money, philosophical approaches are sufficient to put materialism* away for keeps. But that doesn’t make it any less satisfying to learn the heavily hyped “empirical evidence” for materialist neuroscience is distorted, weak, and contradicted by other research.

Denyse wrote,

On the whole, he seems to have liked the book, though he wonders why we cannot demolish materialism through philosophy alone…. Philosophy alone cannot decide the issue. We must look at evidence from science as well.

Well, of course she is right about this. I will not quote her reasons (they are in the ellipsis) since you ought to read them from the source.

She is right in that philosophy has not, in fact, dec ided the issue. “For my money” (as I said), I think it should have done so by now, because materialist views of mind seem to be utterly self-defeating. They place all causation in the literally mindless machinery of electrochemical activity. There’s no room left for any other causation.

Therefore things like reasons and thoughts, which cannot be identified with that machinery, don’t cause anything. If you disagree with that, your disagreement was not caused by any reasons you might have, but by that mindless machinery firing away inside you. That pretty much eliminates your ability to say you have reasoned your way to your conclusion. Your reasons don’t have any power to cause anything, including the conclusions you erroneously think you came to because of your reasons.

Those who try to disagree usually do so by saying that reasons and thoughts actually can be identified with the machinery; that the brain’s physical activity doesn’t have to be distinct from what feels to us like logical reasoning and free decision making. Others say that reasons and thoughts more or less “ride along” on top of the machinery. The first answer, however, makes an illusion out of our freedom to think and to decide, while the other retains the problem of thoughts and reasoning not causing anything at all.

I’m reminded of a comic strip from years ago in which a tiger (I think) jumped up on an elephant and growled out, “I’ve got you, I’ve got you!” The elephant, quite unperturbed, just continued on its way. Whereupon the tiger on top said, “Okay, now that I’ve got you, where am I taking you?” If thoughts “ride along” on top of the brain’s machinery, they’re as powerless to direct its ways as the tiger is to tell the elephant where to go. Less so, in fact: they don’t even have claws.

Though all this to me seems certainly to be correct, I know others disagree. I suspect that for many of them, it’s because they don’t like where this reasoning heads. If they jump on this elephant, it’s going to carry them (like it or not) toward belief in some kind of spiritual reality.

Therefore, with genuine appreciation I grant Denyse’s point: any support this position receives from science is more than welcome.

*”Materialism” here means a view of reality in which nothing exists except for matter, energy, and their interactions according to deterministic natural law or pure chance. On this view there is no spiritual reality.

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