He said it: Materialism makes a good religion ... if you are deeply depressed

Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970

Such in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins-all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.


- Bertrand Russell, first published in a journal in 1903. Published in Mysticism and Logic , Chapter 3, 1929.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

If all that were true, we’d have all committed suicide, so obviously something else is going on, and any materialist explanation I have heard has been laughable.

Neuroscience: Materialist neuroscience leads to controlling politics?

In "Can a machine change your mind?" at Open Democracy, Jane O'Grady argues that "The mind is not the brain. Confusing the two, as much neuro-social-science does, leads to a dehumanised world and a controlling politics" (25 - 05 - 2009)

The most irritating (to us lay people) aspect of philosophical and scientific attempts to reduce the mental to the neural, and to squash down human beings into being on all fours with other physical things, is that their proponents nearly always say that actually they are just putting the truth about consciousness more clearly and taking nothing away from our experience. Like politicians deviously withdrawing privileges, they expect us to be quite happy about this. Some developments of identity theory, however, are more upfront. They force consciousness into equivalence with lightning and water by impugning the ignorance of us ordinary people. The way we talk about sensations, memories and beliefs is, say eliminative materialists, hopelessly antiquated, a form of ‘folk psychology’ as hidebound and superstition-laden as talk about witches, or about epileptics being possessed by devils. ‘Folk psychology’ is a theory about how humans function, they say, that is pathetically inadequate in both describing and predicting. In time, a more scientifically sophisticated vocabulary will replace it.

Well, she is certainly right about the controlling politics!

Almost all totalitarian political systems in the last two hundred years have begun with an account of the human mind that assumes that it is completely understandable in terms of the latest theory (whether of race, blood, genes, neurons, molecules ... oh, who knows?).

Free societies, by contrast, simply state what you are not allowed to do if you live here.

How you came to be what you are and what - if anything - you plan to do about it is, within reason, your own business, really, not the government's.

That is part of what makes a free society.

Religion: There is atheism, ... and then there is materialist atheism ...

A friend wants me to contribute to the Atheism is Dead blog. I will try to do this, as I have time (though I never seem to have a lot of that).

For the record, my own view is that materialist atheism is indeed dead. As I explain here, the things that materialist atheists needed to happen have never happened - and that's why their idea is dead.

There are, of course, non-materialist atheist traditions, like Tibetan Buddhism, which are not at all threatened by the demise of materialist atheism in the West.

Materialist atheism is a pretty low-class show, to begin with. Materialist atheists want you to believe you are an animal, not really responsible for what you do. Bears fight, and so do people ... and it's all the same thing in the end. Is it?

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide have been atheists who nonetheless thought that humans are morally responsible. Typically, they belong to traditions where we must work off our sins in a future life. So if you want to spend this life using and abusing everyone and everything around you, fine - but according to them, you will work it off in another life. There is no free lunch in those traditions, as there is in materialist atheism.

Anyway, I just want it on the record that I have far more respect for traditional atheists, agnostics, and deists- among whom were some really major Western philosophers - than I do for the current crop of "We're just the 98% chimpanzee"crowd. All I can think of to say is, "Speak for yourself, Bud."

In fact, as a traditional Christian, I would say - in criticism - that that is exactly the problem with non-materialist atheism. There is no grace. Grace is not a free lunch. It is, for example, a father going out to meet his wayward son, when the latter has chosen to return.

Mind: We have minds whether we recognize them or not

A friend draws my attention to this video, in which Robert Wright interviews materialist psychologist Steven Pinker on consciousness and does a good job of bringing out Pinker's circular reference to materialism:

You can easily observe in this interview that Pinker can't see that his intellectual struggle with "sentience" [awareness-of-awareness, holistic awareness of self] is the result of an incompleteness in his material presuppositions.

This might apply: During meditation or deep prayer the mind shuts down sections of the brain to achieve the desired undistracted state. This argument relates to the cause-effect argument above. In this case the mind quiets the brain so that the brain is not sending distracting information to the mind ....

Also, while I am here, best wishes to Cindy Lou Bailey, who reported on Facebook: "Thanks for recommending the book, "Spiritual Brain". I got it on CD and have enjoyed it. I am now at Andrews University taking their Leadership Degree with a concentration in Neuroscience."

Hey, need any more help, we are only an e-mail address away.

Mind: Current science less and less precise as it approaches the mind?

Mathematician David Berlinski's essay, "On the Origins of the Mind" (Commentary, 2004) is the best I have ever read on that vexed subject. But it is the sort of essay one may need to read twice, to get the point.

That is not Berlinski's fault - he is an exceptionally lucid writer. The problem is that we are so accustomed to hearing sludge - sludge that attempts to efface the difficulties of a materialist understanding of the mind - that we may need some time for the nature of the difficulties to present themselves clearly.

He offers an excellent example: Current science becomes less and less precise as it approaches the mind (when not trying to explain it away). For example, in trying to understand how the mind works, we have

(1) Quantum chemistry: “For a molecule, it is reasonable to split the kinetic energy into two summations—one over the electrons, and one over the nuclei.”

(2) Biochemistry: “Initiation of prokaryotic translation requires a tRNA bearing N-formyl methionne, as well as three initiation factors (IF1,2,3), a 30S ribosomal subunit GTP,” etc.

(3) Molecular biology: “Once the protein binds one site, it reaches the other by crawling along the DNA, thus preserving its knowledge of the orientation of the first site” (emphasis added).

(4) Embryology: “In the embryo, cells divide, migrate, die, stick to each other, send out processes, and form synapses” (emphasis added).

(5) and (6) Developmental genetics: “But genes are simply regulatory elements, molecules that arrange their surrounding environments into an organism” (emphasis added). “Genes prescribe epigenetic rules, which are the neural pathways and regularities in cognitive development by which the individual mind assembles itself ” (emphasis added).

(7) Developmental biology: “The pattern of neural connections (synapses) enables the human cortex to function as the center for learning, reasoning, and memory, to develop the capacity for symbolic expression, and to produce voluntary responses to interpreted stimuli” (emphasis added).

(8) and (9) Evolutionary psychology: “Genes, of course, do influence human development” (emphasis added).

“[Genes] created us, body and mind” (emphasis added).

Note how we go from a simple mathematical statement in (1) to morea nd more activities that sound like the things humans do, not like the things natural forces do. By (8) we are into vague handwaving and finally we have a statement of religious belief in materialist atheism in (9).

Understanding the mind requires taking it seriously as a real entity. It can be studied, certainly, but not simply as a product of material things.

Philosopher: Why you can't be both an evolutionist and a materialist

In "Evolution vs. Naturalism: Why they are like oil and water", philosopher Alvin Plantinga comments (Books & Culture, July/August 2008),

As everyone knows, there has been a recent spate of books attacking Christian belief and religion in general. Some of these books are little more than screeds, long on vituperation but short on reasoning, long on name-calling but short on competence, long on righteous indignation but short on good sense; for the most part they are driven by hatred rather than logic.

Plantinga cites with approval some more intellectually respectable atheist works.

But in general, many people have noticed the trend he points to. Hatred can drive good writing, but not usually good reasoning. Indeed, most of the recent "new atheist" books remind me of anti-immigration tracts . They attribute all the world's ills to religion in the same way that some attribute all the country's ills to new immigrants - and with about the same amount of justification too.

Plantinga goes on to say,

Nearly all of these books have been written by philosophical naturalists. I
believe it's extremely important to see that naturalism itself, despite the smug
and arrogant tone of the so-called New Atheists, is in very serious
philosophical hot water: one can't sensibly believe it.

Why?

Naturalists like to wrap themselves in the mantle of science, as if science in some way supports, endorses, underwrites, implies, or anyway is unusually friendly to naturalism. In particular, they often appeal to the modern theory of evolution as a reason for embracing naturalism; indeed, the subtitle of Dawkins' Watchmaker is Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. Many seem to think that evolution is one of the pillars in the temple of naturalism (and "temple" is the right word: contemporary naturalism has certainly taken on a religious cast, with a secular priesthood as zealous to stamp out opposing views as any mullah). I propose to argue that naturalism and evolution are in conflict with each other.

Because?

The first thing to see is that naturalists are also always or almost always materialists: they think human beings are material objects, with no immaterial or spiritual soul, or self. We just are our bodies, or perhaps some part of our bodies, such as our nervous systems, or brains, or perhaps part of our brains (the right or left hemisphere, for example), or perhaps some still smaller part. So let's think of naturalism as including materialism. And now let's think about beliefs from a materialist perspective. According to materialists, beliefs, along with the rest of mental life, are caused or determined by neurophysiology, by what goes on in the brain and nervous system. Neurophysiology, furthermore, also causes behavior. According to the usual story, electrical signals proceed via afferent nerves from the sense organs to the brain; there some processing goes on; then electrical impulses go via efferent nerves from the brain to other organs including muscles; in response to these signals, certain muscles contract, thus causing movement and behavior. ...

Your beliefs may all be false, ridiculously false; if your behavior is adaptive, you will survive and reproduce.

In short, if you are a materialist, you can never hope to know that materialism is true because there is no direct relationship between your beliefs and evidence; your beliefs are merely the output of irrational forces. Read the rest here.

One can have philosophy without God, but not without a mind that is real, rather than an illusion. No wonder the new atheists (who differ from the old atheists precisely in that they do not think that the mind is real) sound like a host of "anti-" zealots. It really is the best they can do.

My experiences point to truth but yours are classic examples of brain rot?

The one-way-only skeptics at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst New York assure us that they know why other people have spiritual experiences:

Amherst, New York (July 11, 2008)The very same processes that enable our brain to be so dramatically successful are frequently the same ones that lead us into error. Epilepsy, drugs, damage, and stresses can cause the brain to function in ways that lead people to believe they have experienced or witnessed something supernatural or paranormal. But although dramatic errors and anomalies of experience often result from the malfunctioning brain, many cognitive errors and illusions occur when the brain is functioning normally. Join us for The Skeptic’s Toolbox 2008, where we will explore the ways in which the normally and the abnormally functioning brain can lead us astray and create cognitive illusions.

It would be just as easy to show that one-way-only materialist skepticism is an illusion caused by a glitch in the brain. If the materialists were right, they could never know they were because their brains are supposedly kludges.

Mario and I debunk a whole whack of this stuff in The Spiritual Brain. It was the funniest part of the book, as I explained shortly after turning in the manuscript.

See also:

"So you don't stick to your goals? Blame your kludgebrain - or maybe not?"

Evolutionary Psychology: Eliot Spitzer is a kludgebrain! psychologist opines (but so are we all)

Materialists start to come to grips with global failure, but materialism dies hard

In "The Neural Buddhists," David Brooks references Tom Wolfe's dramatic 1996 article "Sorry, but your soul just died,"

.. in which he captured the militant materialism of some modern scientists.

To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are “hard-wired” to do this or that. Religion is an accident.

In this materialist view, people perceive God’s existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems.

Uh huh. Mario and I took it all to pieces in The Spiritual Brain. Modern neuroscience provides no basis whatever for that view - on the contrary.

Brooks, the author of BoBos in Paradise, acknowledges,

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states.

Do they indeed? In that case, to learn what is really going on, they must acknowledge where they have been mistaken.

Brooks, however, hopes that the revolution will stop with "neural Buddhism,"which turns out to mean things like "the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships" and "God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is."

Sorry, BoBos, it's not up to you to decide where it will end. It will end where the evidence leads, and the evidence simply does not favour materialism - yours or anyone else's.

Thoughts for the day: Reasons not to be a materialist if you have a mind

Unless, that is, you have a grant and must spend it advocating materialism. Even so, consider what you are up against:

“The most striking feature is how much of mainstream [materialistic] philosophy of mind is obviously false….[I]n the philosophy of mind, obvious facts about the mental, such as that we all really do have subjective conscious mental states…are routinely denied by many…of the advanced thinkers in the subject.”
-- John Searle, The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 3.

“It is not that we know what would explain consciousness but are having trouble finding the evidence to select one explanation over the others; rather, we have no idea what an explanation of consciousness would even look like.”--Colin McGinn, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 61.

“We don’t know… how a brain (or anything else that is physical) could manage to be a locus of conscious experience. This last is, surely, among the ultimate metaphysical mysteries; don’t bet on anyone ever solving it.”
--Jerry Fodor, In Critical Condition: Polemical Essays on Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 83.

Actually if you say silly enough things, you could end up working against materialism, which might be a good idea.

Things we know but cannot prove - another nail in the coffin of materialism

Recently, I highlighted a talk that Prof. Robert Marks, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Baylor University, gave to Baylor's American Scientific Affiliation branch on things we know but cannot prove (and it doesn't matter how big computers get):

This is because of a new startling mathematical idea from algorithmic information theory (AIT): There exist things that are true that cannot be derived from fundamental principles. Some things are true simply because they are true.

Many claim God cannot be proved. (Although I'll show you Godel's short mathematical proof of God's existence). There are some things we know exist that we can prove we will never know.

I asked Marks how it went, and he wrote back to say,

This is mind bending stuff. Stephen Hawking, for example, is becoming agnostic in his belief there is a single theory that describes all of physics. There look to be things that are true simply because they are true. They cannot be derived from first principles. And there exist things, like Chaitin’s astonishing number between zero and one, that we can prove we will never know. The foundations of algorithmic information theory has been around since the 1930’s, but scientists and mathematicians are only recently appreciating its significance.

Algorithmic information theory and string theory make the science fiction I read as a boy seem boring.

I watched Marks's PowerPoint on line, and highly recommend it.

One thing Marks relates, is that computer pioneer Alvin Turing lost his faith and became assertively materialist after a boy he loved died of bovine tuberculosis. It wasn't anything he had learned about computers after all. It was - as so often - a personal issue.

Some of his observations (but they're much less fun without the graphics):

"There are things that are true and known to exist that will never be proven nor computed."

"We are at an undisputed edge of naturalism in computing and math. There is no TOE. Does science have a TOE? If so, will we ever know we are at the edge?"

Bob, some people won't know that it even is an edge, because they are reductionist materialists. They will just assume that their brains are cobbled together kludges from the evolutionary past. Possibly, they hope they can get a microchip implanted in their brains that will either cause them to understand or at least create the illusion of understanding. (See the story about Gary Marcus and the kluges, below.)

By the way, Marks starts his presentation with an interesting arithmetic word game. Try The Four's Be With You! with colleagues on your coffee break.

Why can't philosophy alone kill off materialism?

Campus Crusade for Christ's Tom Gilson reviewed The Spiritual Brain for Touchstone Magazine (April 2008). On the whole, he seems to have liked the book, though he wonders why we cannot demolish materialism through philosophy alone.

Myself, I would answer that materialists have their own philosophers and their own way of doing philosophy. They aim at convincing us either that our minds do not really exist or that they are simply the buzz of our selfish genes, trying to get themselves passed on in our offspring. Yes, of course, that would also b e true of their ideas, but their second move is to shut down discussion and debate - see the Expelled movie for how that happens.

Philosophy alone cannot decide the issue. We must look at evidence from science as well.

Never mind that for now. I was glad that he picked up on one of my main intentions in the book, which was to expose the way in which popular science media promote materialist ideas out of all proportion to the evidence. I wrote a letter to the editor, saying, in part:

Materialist science is a narrative, and, as it happens, a fictional one. The advent of quantum mechanics should have killed materialism off, but Darwinian evolution - as a faith position - appears to be keeping it in place. That is, in my view, the key reason that the controversy is so hot.

Here is his blog, The Thinking Christian.

Note: The text of the review is not yet on line. When it is, I will link to it.

New round of materialist theories of spirituality in the works

The Economist reports recently on a large study to try to understand religion from a materialist perspective:

“Explaining Religion”, as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the God business.

Religion cries out for a biological explanation. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon—arguably one of the species markers of Homo sapiens—but a puzzling one. It has none of the obvious benefits of that other marker of humanity, language. Nevertheless, it consumes huge amounts of resources. Moreover, unlike language, it is the subject of violent disagreements. Science has, however, made significant progress in understanding the biology of language, from where it is processed in the brain to exactly how it communicates meaning. Time, therefore, to put religion under the microscope as well.

To get some idea what you can expect,

For example, Jason Slone, a professor of religious studies at Webster University in St Louis, argues that people who are religious will be seen as more likely to be faithful and to help in parenting than those who are not. That makes them desirable as mates. He plans to conduct experiments designed to find out whether this is so. And, slightly tongue in cheek, Dr Wilson quips that “secularism is very maladaptive biologically. We're the ones who at best are having only two kids. Religious people are the ones who aren't smoking and drinking, and are living longer and having the health benefits.”

Okay, so, no worries Jason, we and our kids will bury you decent.

But that's not why we're religious.

See, materialist efforts to explain spirituality start from the assumption that there isn't really a spiritual world, that there isn't really any divine revelation. No one developed a spiritual life in response to anything that is actually out there.

Far from it, the materialist theory of religion, like the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution, will accept any fool theory as an alternative to that.

Which is why I don't have much time for it.

I used to be a warden at an Anglican church. There was nothing very unusual in people having genuine religious experiences that changed their lives that cannot be accounted for by some sociological or neurological theory. They encountered the Divine, and started to say things like "I forgive my enemies" because "No longer I, but Christ lives in me."

And if people don't want to study that, they don't want to study religion or spirituality.

Orwellian world an inevitable outcome of materialist philosophy

In "Brave Newark World", law prof and columnist Mike S. Adams exposes an Orwellian world of reprogramming inside the dorms at the University of Delaware:

Presently, students are actually pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate agreement with the university’s official ideology, regardless of their beliefs as individuals. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations and committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20% and fighting for “oppressed social groups.” (There is no indication that one of these groups is made up of University of Delaware residents who are oppressed by RAs who can’t stop asking “how do you feel?”).

In the Office of Residence Life’s internal materials, these programs are described using a chilling language of ideological re-education. In a manual relating to the assessment of student learning the residence hall lesson plans are actually referred to as “treatments.”

I wrote a letter to Adams because, while I greatly respect the work of groups like The Fire in fighting intelectual oppression, I also think that a critical dimension is missing - the role that materialism inevitably plays in producing the Orwellian conditions is too often ignored:

Dear Dr. Adams,

Thank you for your continuing campaign to expose thought control and brainwashing. i try never to miss one of your excellent and eye-opening articles.

I believe that a good case can be made for the origin of brainwashing in materialist theories of mind.

Let me ask you this: If the university bigwigs believe that the mind is simply the accidental buzz of electrons produced by the activities of the brain (and that is a STANDARD belief among materialists), then why SHOULD they respect their students' minds?

Of course they attempt instead to direct the meaningless buzz down the desired path - for the same reason as you would wire your house's electricity in a way that suits your purposes.

A person who believes in the reality of the mind may be willing to die for intellectual freedom, but why should a person who does not believe in the reality of the mind suffer anything AT ALL for intellectual freedom?

That is why so few speak out against the abuses today, surely?

Here is the strange part: Contrary to the PR for materialism that you hear from pop science mags, the news from science does NOT support the materialist view of the mind. Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I demonstrate that in our book, The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul.

It surprises me that people do not see more clearly that an inevitable outcome of materialist views is loss of respect for intellectual freedom.

In a materialist framework, the primary problem is not that there is no God but that there is no you in you and no me in me. So the university sees nothing wrong with training its students the way we train a dog - not to be a nuisance to himself or his masters.

To summarize, materialism cannot ground intellectual freedom EXCEPT as a form of mere licence. The right to have ideas other than those approved by the administration is like the right to do dope or pack heat on campus - subject to control or prohibition if things get "out of hand", in the view of the controllers. And in their view, it always does seem to get out of hand ...

As we say in The Spiritual Brain,

In a materialist view, freedom means simply that the determinist forces driving the neural circuits from within (genes, brain wiring, neurotransmitters) are not opposed by determinist forces driving them from without (social isolation, religious condemnation, laws). None of these forces is subject to rationality because rationality has no independent validity; it is merely one of the organizing illusions imposed by some neural networks on others. (P. 117)

In other words, materialist policies are not offered by a self to other selves but driven at an object by other objects. And if materialism is true, you are not. Otherwise, ...

Palliative care doctor on The Spiritual Brain

He kindly writes,

Just wanted to let you know that I just finished reading the latest book you co-wrote and found it to be dynamite.

My favorite was at the bottom of p.99 where you pointed out that if the materialist view is right then we'll just have to accept it despite it going against all of our observations about human nature and that we'll just have to live with "cognitive dissonance" due to materialism's assumptions. But the best part was the materialist's need to deny that the human brain could have evolved in a way that made us believe in materialism.

I'm not sure if you've heard this quip by C.S. Lewis when he was told that a belief in God is "only a creation of the mind". He said "so is the belief in materialism" The corollary of the materialist argument being that if one can believe in there being a "God gene" then logically there must also be the possibility of an "Un-God gene" and that explains why materialists "believe" as they do. - palliative care doctor, friend of co-author Denyse O’Leary

Thanks, Doc! Mario and I really hope that The Spiritual Brain will be just the sort of crossover science and religion book that can communicate with people in science who are also people of faith! - d.

Materialism is not, after all, the latest thing

You think materialism is relatively new? I did too, years ago. Then I discovered that, in both East and West, there are very old (thousands of years old) materialist schools of philosophy that sound just like the latest sage in Time Magazine.

While writing about why the Dalai Lama accepts modern science but rejects materialism, I had occasion to read about a genuinely materialist school of philosophy in ancient India (over 2500 years ago).

The Charvaka school that flourished around 600 B.C., and it had nothing to do with claims about discoveries in science.

In The Universe in a Single Atom, the Lama references

... the radical materialist Charvaka (or Carvaka) school's theory of the evolution of the universe through a purposeless, random development of matter, with all mental processes viewed as derivative of complex configurations of material phenomena.

Purposeless? Random? Everything old is new again!

Here is an extract from a later work setting forth the Charvaka philosophy:

In this school the four elements, earth, fire, water and air are the original principles. From these alone, when transformed into the body, intelligence is produced—just as the intoxicating power of some herbs is developed from the mixing of certain ingredients. When the body is destroyed, intelligence at once perishes also. They quote the Vedic text for this:

Springing forth from these elements itself

solid knowledge is destroyed

when they are destroyed—

after death no intelligence remains.

Therefore the soul is only the body distinguished by the attribute of intelligence, since there is no evidence for any self distinct from the body. Therefore the existence of such a separate self cannot be proved, because this school holds that perception is the only source of knowledge and does not allow inference as an alternative source.

The Charvakans were bolder than most modern materialist philosophers because they seemed to think that consciousness ("solid knowledge" in the text above) can actually be produced directly by matter. The modern materialist is content to argue that mind (self) is an illusion generated by the activities of neurons of the brain, but not that it can be produced by mixing elements of matter. So we have learned something or other in the last 2500 years after all.

The Lama is an atheist, but a non-materialist atheist, so he doesn't think that this sort of materialism is compatible with Buddhism. He writes,

This last position is not dissimilar to scientific materialism's belief that mind is reducible to neurological and biochemical reality and these in turn to facts of physics. Buddhism, by contrast, explains the evolution of the cosmos in terms of the principle of dependent origination, in that the origin and existence of everything has to be understood in terms of the complex network of interconnected causes and conditions. This applies to consciousness as well as matter. (pp. 76-77)

The point here is that he thinks that consciousness is real and that it is capable of causing events; it is not an illusion. Here is an old text on Charvaka.

Interestingly, the West also featured some interesting old materialists in Epicurus (341-270 BCE) and Lucretius (99-55 BCE). Outside the hothouse of the academy, it never caught on then and my guess is, it won't now.

Desperate atheist rage

Here's Marvin Olasky on the current desperate atheist rage:

Nineteenth-century novelist Gustave Flaubert used to joke about archaeologists discovering a stone tablet signed "God" and reading, "I do not exist." His punch line had an atheist then exclaiming, "See! I told you so!"

He goes on,

Hitchens calls "the whole racket of American evangelism a heartless con" -- but I've met hundreds of compassionate evangelicals who must be dumb, because they've spent their lives in a racket that's yielded them almost no money. They've adopted hard-to-place children, built AIDS orphanages in Africa, helped addicts and alcoholics turn their lives around, and much besides.
So why, despite the evidence, are authors such as Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens so doctrinaire in their denunciations? Alister and Joanna Collicutt McGrath offer a reason in their book, "The Dawkins Delusion": "Until recently, Western atheism had waited patiently, believing that belief in God would simply die out. But now a whiff of panic is evident. Far from dying out, belief in God has rebounded "

Maybe it's all those hard-to-place children and last-chance guys weighing in ...

That's something we noted in The Spiritual Brain. Generally speaking, spirituality is shown by masses of research to be good for you. I'm looking forward to getting and reading the McGrath book, The Dawkins Delusion.

Articles of interest: On materialists, atheists, consciousness, tenured authoritarian crackpots and more

Here's a Breakpoint commentary on "Breaking the Spell of Materialism"by Regis Nicoll, arguing that materialism is a new form of fundamentalism:

Materialism is a worldview based on a naturalistic understanding of reality. In materialism, the natural world is all there is. There is no supernatural—neither spirit nor soul nor God. There is only “nature”: the cosmic matrix of matter and energy operating according to physical laws. Reality is what is objective, observable and reproducible. For the materialist, the science is “in”: everything is a product of physical processes. On the surface of things, this would seem correct.

But it is not only incorrect, it is impossible.

Madeleine Bunting thinks that the United States is to blame for Dawkins's tirades against religion:

This wave of new atheism is deeply political -- and against some of its targets even a churchgoer might cheer them on. What they all share is a loathing of increasing religiosity in United States politics, which has contributed to a disastrous presidency and undermined scientific understanding

Oh well, that's all right then, I suppose, as long as Dawkins himself isn't to blame for what he says. She makes an interesting point, however, that for the most part the new atheists are "in danger of a spectacular failure." Yes, I think so: Shrill hostility is a tough sell.

Mary Grabar, offering students an antidote to tenured authoritarian crackpots, quotes Elizabeth Kantor:

"It's fatal to any totalitarian project for people to believe that there is an authority that they can appealo over the heads of the political power. That’s why totalitarian governments cannot tolerate religion. The postmodernist pretense that all authority is just a mask for raw power and that all reasoning is only rationalization is no defense at all against oppression—in fact, it can be a justification for it. Christianity, in contrast, is a guarantor of individual human freedom, not a threat to it."

Oh, and here's British physicist David Tyler on the latest attempt to deconstruct consciousness:

The materialist mind-set is a universal acid that eats away at everything, including itself. Consequently, the mind has to be a product of hierarchical levels of neuronal firings, and personality has to be an illusion. We are ultimately conscious machines. Why anyone with these views should think that our neuronal activity can have anything to do with truth and reality is a mystery to me! But even more important, the materialist approach to consciousness is commonly dignified by the name "science". Other approaches, which are likely to be linked to Theism, are labeled "religion" and are excluded, on demarcation grounds, from science. This is an unacceptable situation, for as metaphysics, materialism has a philosophical standing that is entirely equivalent to Theism.

(Note: For the rest of this week, I am tied up with a big writers' conference and won't likely be able to blog. If I'm not too tired, I'll be back to it Sunday.)

Consciousness: Do headache have themselves?

Philosopher Jerry Fodor, reviewing Galen Strawon’s Consciousness and its place in nature thinks about why materialist explanations for states of mind do not work:

So, then, if everything is made of the same sort of stuff as tables and chairs (as per monism), and if at least some of the things made of that sort of stuff are conscious (there is no doubt that we are), and if there is no way of assembling stuff that isn't conscious that produces stuff that is (there's no emergence), it follows that the stuff that tables, chairs and the bodies of animals (and, indeed, everything else) is made of must itself be conscious. Strawson, having wrestled his angel to a draw, stands revealed as a panpsychist: basic things (protons, for example) are loci of conscious experience. You don't find that plausible? Well, I warned you.

Nor, having swallowed this really enormous camel, does Strawson propose to strain at the gnats. Consider, for example: he thinks (quite rightly) that there are no experiences without subjects of experience; if there's a pain, it must be somebody or something's pain; somebody or something must be in it. What, then, could it be that has the experiences that panpsychists attribute to ultimate things? Nothing purely material, surely, since that would just raise the hard problem all over again. So maybe something immaterial? But monism is in force; since the constituents of tables and chairs are made of matter, so too is everything else. So, Strawson is strongly inclined to conclude, the subjects of the experiences that basic things have must be the experiences themselves. Part of the surcharge that we pay for panpsychism (not, after all, itself an immediately plausible ontology) is that we must give up on the commonsense distinction between the experience and the experiencer. At the basic level, headaches have themselves.

We all know headaches do not have themselves, but if materialists are running the shop we may need to pretend that that is so.

Quantum physics: Goodbye to reality?

This from PhysicsWeb

Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra "hidden variables". Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism -- giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871).

Of course, I suspect that it is not "reality" that quantum physics bids us say goodbye to, but a simplistic materialist idea of how reality works. What if mind comes first, and is not an illusion created by the random fluctuations of matter in our brain. We discuss, in The Spiritual Brain, why that is a reasonable view, based on evidence.

Materialism watch: The challenges that materialist atheism cannot face effectively

Columnist Frank Pastore weighs in on four challenges to (materialist*) atheism, as follows:

1. Origin of the universe
2. Origin of life
3. Origin of the mind
4. Origin of morality

What I found while researching By Design or by Chance? and The Spiritual Brain is not that materialists have no answers but that their answers are based mainly on promissory materialism (hey folks, we're still working on it. Give us another few centuries ...), when they are not based on merely suppressing dissent or promoting foolish ideas to the popular science media.

Anyway, Pastore advises,

Since the pre-Socratics, atheists have been intellectual parasites living off the host of Western Civilization. Able to con-struct so very little of their own that is either true, good, or beautiful, they live on the borrowed capital of their believing intellectual parents. Atheists have been asserting the same basic mechanistic worldview, and with roughly the same suc-cess, for centuries. They sell books and win converts from time to time, sure, especially among those gullible enough to buy the “just popped” thesis. Don’t be gullible.

The thing to keep in mind, it seems to me, is that the materialist/Darwinist will always come up with an explanation within his system in the same way and for the same reasons as the Marxist could always come up with an explanation within his system for any event.

For example, according to evolutionary psychologists, religion is and is not adaptive - both points of view can be maintained within evolutionary psychology quite comfortably, even though they cancel each other out and imply that the discipline, if discipline it is, is not capable of discovering basic, definite information about the origin of religion.

The only point of view that cannot be maintained within standard evolutionary psychology is that religion is evidence of transcendence - that is, it arose because, at one time or another, people really did contact a reality behind the universe. I am hardly surprised to learn that dying de-spiritualized religious denominations have been flirting with evolutionary psychology; it's only useful function, so far as I can see, is as a sort of humane lethal injection that puts such institutions out of their collective misery before they mislead anyone else about the nature of spiritual experience. The would-be remaining congregants would invariably be better off somewhere else anyway.

*Materialist atheists must derive everything in the universe from chance and necessity. A non-materialist atheist does not believe in a God as such, but need not derive everything in the universe from chance and necessity.

Here are some of my recent posts on related subjects at the Post-Darwinist and here at the Mindful Hack :

Pope Benedict vs. a chance origin of the universe - lines from an early lecture.

Why there is no compatibility between traditional communities of any kind and accounts of spiritual beliefs derived from Darwinism.

A most interesting survey of views in evolutionary psychology on religious belief makes quite clear that there is NO room in the evo psycho paradigm for the view that spirituality relates to any fact about the universe. Hence the folly of trying to get traditional communities to support Darwinian evolution. .

On language and
mystical experience: can language tell us what is real?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy, and of Faith@Science. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).