Milt Rosenberg interviews Mario Beauregard and Francis Collins

Thursday,, my lead author Mario Beauregard will be on

9:05pm Extension 720 with Milt Rosenberg: Does science reveal the existence of God? Are science and God mutually exclusive? Tonight, we will attempt to answer these questions, as we welcome to the studio Mario Beauregard, author of the book The Spiritual Brain: How Neuroscience is Revealing the Existence of God, and Dr. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project and author of the book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. Both guests are leading scientists and have written rivetting new books discussing how science may actually prove the existence of God.

A friend writes to say,

Milt Rosenberg is one of the best and most objective interviewers in the U.S., and his program is not only on a 50,000-watt clear channel AM station, but also regularly has listeners in Australia via the Internet.

Mario wrote me earlier today to say,

I am ready for this radio interview (it's a very good thing that Mr. Rosenberg is an objective interviewer).

Well, so we'll see. I will link to a podcast if available. Francis Collins is, of course, the famous genome mapper, and author of The Language of God.

Here's the link to the podcast.

P.S.: To the person who wrote to ask me if Mario is married. Yes, he IS married. And his wife Johanne is an enchanting person. I only had the happiness to meet her once, in Ottawa. Yes it was cold. Yes she was warm. Yes, she agrees with Mario on the thesis of The Spiritual Brain. Update: I should have mentioned, come to think of it, that Johanne isa neuroscientist in her own right, in clinical work rather than research.

Poster boy for atheism rails against genome mapper Francis Collins in science journal Nature

Neuroscience grad student Sam Harris, who still doesn’t want anyone to know where he lives, rails against prestigious science journal Nature for publishing a respectful review of Francis Collins’s The Language of God:

The Language of God should have sparked gasping outrage from the editors at Nature. Instead, they deemed Collins’s efforts “moving” and “laudable”, commending him for building a “bridge across the social and intellectual divide that exists between most of US academia and the so-called heartlands.”

Now, I have had a love-hate relationship with Language of God, having given it both good and bad reviews, depending on the audience.

Basically, Harris hates Language of God because he hates all religions other than his own private one, but Nature likes the book because it suggests that a dumbed-down spirituality is no threat to the materialism that Nature generally espouses.

And, as for me, I have mixed feelings about it because I prefer the sort of robust spirituality that is a genuine threat to materialism - though not to sanity. But Language of God makes uch more sense than the current rants against religion.

P.S.: I don’t care if Harris lives in a yurt in Mongolia, but I wish he’d finally get his PhD. The term “neuroscience grad student” bugs me, but I can’t award him an honorary doctorate just so I don’t have to use it.

Time Magazine: Maybe materialism is not winning?

"We revere faith and scientific progress, hunger for miracles and for MRIs. But are the worldviews compatible?" TIME asks, conveninga debate between evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins and genome scientist Francis Collins. Time notes,

Can religion stand up to the progress of science? This debate long predates Darwin, but the antireligion position is being promoted with increasing insistence by scientists angered by intelligent design and excited, perhaps intoxicated, by their disciplines' increasing ability to map, quantify and change the nature of human experience. Brain imaging illustrates—in color!—the physical seat of the will and the passions, challenging the religious concept of a soul independent of glands and gristle. Brain chemists track imbalances that could account for the ecstatic states of visionary saints or, some suggest, of Jesus.

The article leads up to the usual materialist rubbish that you might have expected Time to publish, but hang in there: Collins comes off way better than Dawkins. Collins' arguments are not especially stellar and - as he gladly admits - they are hardly original, but they have never really been answered by Dawkins' ilk.

By the way, Dawkins, who should have stayed a scientist, is leading a crusade against religion, according to the Times of London, including inundating schools with antireligious rubbish.

RICHARD DAWKINS, the Oxford University professor and campaigning atheist, is planning to take his fight against God into the classroom by flooding schools with anti-religious literature.

He is setting up a charity that will subsidise books, pamphlets and DVDs attacking the "educational scandal" of theories such as creationism while promoting rational and scientific thought.

The foundation will also attempt to divert donations from the hands of “missionaries” and church-based charities.

Just what the beleaguered school systems need. So much for Dawkins' chair in "The Public Understanding of Science" at Oxford. Maybe they should start looking for an incumbent who has the time for it.

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, which keeps tabs on the intelligent design controversy.

My previous books are By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004) and Faith@Science. The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007), with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard.