Great majority of neuroscientists on wrong track?

Here's an interesting site: How the brain works sponsored by Eugene B. Shea.

Neuroscientists around the world are working day and night with their brain scans to analyze the activities of individual neurons and segments of the brain in hopes of learning how the brain works, and eventually, arriving at an understanding of human behavior.

[ ... ]

But since this article will take strong exception to the direction of their research, I must devote the following portion to explaining why I believe the great majority of cognitive neuroscientists and neuropsychologists are on the wrong track.

First however, I want to clearly and largely exempt Bernard J. Baars, Ph.D., and Nicole M. Gage, Ph.D. from my criticism, based on their marvelously lucid and carefully researched new textbook, Cognition, Brain, and Consciousness: Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Academic Press, 2007. Indeed, I am deeply indebted to them for much of the factual neuroscience cited in this article. I think every serious student of cognitive neuroscience should have a copy of this excellent book.

Shea is, I gather, just as impatient as Mario and I are of schlocky pop science theories of how the mind works.

Remember, your brain is like an ocean.

The problem is not that some theorist is wrong about what is in your brain. Rather, so much is in your brain that you should avoid giving his theories an unrealistic amount of attention.

Look at it this way: Suppose an oceanographer told us that his specialty is sea horses. In his view, we cannot understand the history of life - or even our own lives - without an intimate knowledge of sea horses.

Well, maybe - or maybe not.

Similarly, all theories of how the mind works may be true for at least some people some of the time, but probably none is true for everyone everywhere. And if the theorist thinks the mind an illusion or believes that it is some sort of material thing, well ... Anyway, I expect Shea has some good ideas.

He notes, while dismissing shallow theories,

Nor is there any validity to the “triune” nature of the brain, as composed of evolutionary development from reptilian to mammalian to primate brains. The so-called “reptilian brain” is not a brain at all, since it only represents a portion of the reptile brain, which is comprised, like ours, of brainstem, midbrain, and cortex. Nor, for the same reason, is the mammalian brain a brain. And as we shall see, our derogation of these so-called lizard and mammalian brains in favor of the cortex has led researchers to only a perfunctory analysis of their marvelous functions, without which we would be vegetables shortly before our demise.

Ah yes. I am glad he raised that topic.

I have not found any good evidence that reptiles are in principle incapable of emotion, as is often claimed. If you think that, please do not get in the way of a she-alligator nursing her eggs. She will behave exactly the same way as a she-bear nursing her cubs. It seems that, in these situations, the alligator uses the reptile brain the same way the bear uses the mammal brain: To drive off or kill the threat to her offspring. And if you think that that is not emotion, then you must commit yourself to the view that no animal ever shows emotion.

I wrote about the alligator's behaviour here, relying on the expertise of a man who knows a great deal about alligators.

See also: The unfeeling reptilian brain: Don't mess with its babies.

Book review: Hunting, herding, hiding, and hustling - that explains our social relationships?

In "The Synapse and the Soul" in Wall Street Journal online, Adam Keiper, editor of The New Atlantis and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center reviews popular materialist neuroscience book Human, by Michael S. Gazzaniga (July 8, 2008).

Remarkably, Keiper "gets it" about what is wrong with most of that stuff, when offering cautions regarding Gazzeous views:

"All those social relationships we now worry about so intensely," he writes, "are merely byproducts of behavior originally selected to avoid our being eaten by predators." Our social instincts were formed by "hunting, herding, hiding, and hustling." Mr. Gazzaniga even takes a stab at explaining the supposed biological origins of religious belief, although that section of his argument is (blessedly) brief. In essence, he claims that religious practices and beliefs satisfy certain "moral modules" – innate affinities for things like hierarchy, purity and coalitions.

So where are these "moral modules?" Isn't this just another way of talking nonsense? Keiper notes,

Mr. Gazzaniga does little to explore the implications of the research he describes. Once we have been armed with the latest scientific findings about how our brains came to be and how they function, how ought we to act? The findings of neuroscience do not immediately penetrate to the most intimate levels of personal experience. If you are scared of heights, it will make you no less afraid to hear that the "actual cause" of your feeling is a catecholamine rush. But neuroscience is increasingly playing a role in marketing, education and the law, and Mr. Gazzaniga offers no insights into whether this growing influence is justified or appropriate.

He dismisses Gazzaniga as "far too credulous," and I agree.

Scared of heights? Toronto Christians have a practical approach to "scared of heights." Our CN Tower is the world's tallest freestanding structure. It has a glass floor - and now even glass elevator floor panels. But there is still an infamous glass floor 322 m above Toronto. Children tumble and laugh over it; many adults can't put a foot forward on it.

Until they get down on their knees. Then they can manage.

So we say, you think there is a God? If so, remember, the first thing you do when you are in trouble is, ... Find knees! Use knees!

See also: Neuroscience: Human brains are unique, neuroscientist observes.

Brain: Find me those goddam pigs ... or else!

A friend alerted me to a wonderful poem on the brain, by Pier Giorgio Di Cicco (1949-) "Brain Litany: Or, Overlooking the Existential Factor". Di Cicco is poet laureate of Toronto and an Augustinian priest:

*" ... and when we think of coconuts and pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain." -- Gregory Bateson

[ ... ]

Where are the pigs
Where are the coconuts

The brain is a compendium of holographic mechanisms
Help me find the coconuts Help me find the pigs
The brain is a neuro-physiological metaphor
The brain is an illusionist's exercise in Euclidean geometry
The brain is a vibrational amplifier for ambient field quanta
Find me the goddamned coconuts the pigs
The brain is a cybernetic miracle with a three-ring
triune brain circus at its centre

Read the rest here.

It is simply the best sendup I have ever heard of materialist neuroscience.

So rarely does a poet actually take on the materialist nonsense rigorously, as opposed to simply sneaking away into some romantic or nihilist haze, or uselessly denouncing it, or claiming to have some incommunicable vision - those are all just copouts, really.

By the way, if you do find those pigs, lose them again, will you? And keep the coconuts, too.

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.

Materialism: When the store is on fire ... hold a fire sale!

Prestigious science journal Nature, originally founded in the 19th century by Darwin's materialist associates, seems to want to go down fighting. In a recent Futures feature in the April 9, 2008 edition, Nature writer Neale Morrison offers "All Over, Rover" a science fiction scenario in which materialists prove that there is no soul. (Citation: Nature 452, 780 (10 April 2008) | doi:10.1038/452780a)

And just when it is so obviously not happening.

Similarly, in "Biased brains, messy memories," Sandra Aamodt reviews Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind by Gary Marcus (Houghton Mifflin) and A Portrait of the Brain by Adam Zeman (Yale), both asserting materialist theories as if there wwere any reason to believe t hey are correct.

Marcus (Kluge), for example, concludes,

that evolution has left us with something of a mess. In an argument reminiscent of David Linden's The Accidental Mind, Marcus makes his case by describing cognitive difficulties, including false beliefs, linguistic ambiguity, impulsiveness and mental illness.
The blame, he asserts, rests with our imperfect memory, "arguably the mind's original sin". Perhaps we would reason more effectively if the brain could store and retrieve data as accurately and as simply as a computer. Instead we must contend with a limited system. Brains locate memories by matching them to the current context rather than having unbiased access to all of our experiences. This contextual dependence makes it hard during an argument, for example, to recall how often our spouse does the housework, because thinking of one failure inclines our brains to remember similar situations rather than contrary examples.

You mean, self-interest has nothing to do with such lapses? In which case, Dawkins's famed selfish gene (another theory that was supposed to explain everything) must be sleeping on the job.

Similarly, Adam Zeman outlines

how brains that are predisposed to tell stories and that attribute actions to agents rather than chance might lead us to believe in an immortal soul. His own view is that this is "no more than a wonderful fiction". (Marcus makes the same point less gently.) Zeman struggles with science's failure to find an emotionally satisfying replacement story, conceding that such questions may be more in the realm of art than science.

So this is the latest pseudo-explanation of the soul? I could do better myself! How about this: Minds that are accustomed to think in terms of a future have difficulty grasping the idea that there is no future after death.

Way simpler, to be sure, but materialists wouldn't buy it because I forgot to drag in the Paleolithic cave guys telling stories around the fireside - the staple of evolutionary psychology.

Sorry guys, Cave Thug just didn't fit my screenplay. Anyway, I don't believe the materialist theory because I think our minds' intuition is correct. Mario Beauregard and I set out reasons for our view in The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul.

Materialist neuroscience: "The mind is what the brain does! ... ?"

Recently, materialist cognitive scientist Steve Pinker wrote a letter to Commentary magazine, excoriating an article by bioethicist Leon Kass,

This point, the foundation of my field, cognitive science, is one that I have made repeatedly, at length, and with all the expository power I can muster. The mind is not the brain but it is, as I say, “what the brain does” (Mr. Kass’s parsing overlooks the crucial word “does”). By this I mean the brain’s ability to manipulate information in ways that mirror logical, statistical, and other normative principles. As many philosophers have shown, this dissolves the apparent mystery that the brain is a physical object but can traffic in abstract ideas involving meaning and truth.

and making the point that

Mr. Kass is free to use the word “soul” to refer to the software of the brain, but he is mistaken if he thinks that this equation, free of any conception of divine provenance or survival after death, is compatible with the way the vast majority of people use the word. Nor is it clear how invoking a soul illuminates any intellectual problem beyond slapping a label on what we feel we do not understand.

The uselessness of soul-talk is particularly evident in the thriving science of consciousness, the study of “inner states” that Mr. Kass decrees to be impossible. ...

Kass replies,

In the course of my critique of reductionism, I accused Steven Pinker of arrogance and shallowness. I am tempted to say that his letter provides further evidence for the charge, especially as it progresses quickly from science (about which he knows a lot) to philosophy (about which he knows a dangerous little) to the Bible and religion (about which he knows less than the village atheist). But some substantive points should be made.

One of which is,

In my article, I took him to task for the following remarks:

The supposedly immaterial soul can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, turned on or off by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or a lack of oxygen. Centuries ago it was unwise to ground morality on the dogma that the earth sat at the center of the universe. It is just as unwise today to ground it on dogmas about souls endowed by God.

I am happy to learn that Mr. Pinker denies saying that the “mind is the brain”—he says instead that "it is what the brain does," a position deftly skewered in Brian Beckman's letter. But one can hardly be blamed for thinking the man a simple materialist. Someone who boasts, even for rhetorical effect, that “the supposedly immaterial soul can be bisected with a knife” simply does not see that thought and awareness, like all powers and activities of living things, are immaterial in their essence and therefore cannot be so carved.

Biran Beckman's letter? Regarding the notion that the mind is the software of the brain (implying that it is easily accommodated by materialism), reader Brian Beckman of Newcastle, Washington, notes,

Steven Pinker’s idea that “the mind is what the brain does” is about as useful as saying that “software is what your computer does.” Is your word processor nothing more than a pattern of electrons in transistors? How about the letter from a friend that you read on a computer screen? Much more than a ghost in the machine, software activates the machine; but it is, itself, a purely spiritual thing.

... Software is just the latest example of immaterial but very real things like songs, ideas, emotions, and human souls. It is particularly apt, though, for shocking adherents of scientism because it is embodied in that trophy of science, the computer.

It's good to see Commentary getting into this debate. Read the whole thing and enjoy!

Anyway, there's little doubt about what Steve Pinker thinks about the soul. Here's what he wrote for Time Magazine (January 19, 2007):

Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.

[ ... ]

And when the physiological activity of the brain ceases, as far as anyone can tell the person's consciousness goes out of existence. Attempts to contact the souls of the dead (a pursuit of serious scientists a century ago) turned up only cheap magic tricks, and near death experiences are not the eyewitness reports of a soul parting company from the body but symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain.

[ ... ]

And when you think about it, the doctrine of a life-to-come is not such an uplifting idea after all because it necessarily devalues life on earth. Just remember the most famous people in recent memory who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11.

If there were such a thing as oral quotation marks, any time Steve Pinker used the word soul, it would be in oral quotation marks. Of course he is entitled to his opinion, but not to indignation when people take him at his word and doubt his account of reality.

Media watch: They’ll huff, and they’ll puff, and ...

... well huff and puff some more, I guess. Cornelia Dean’s recent New York Times story announces:

For many scientists, the evidence that moral reasoning is a result of physical traits that evolve along with everything else is just more evidence against the existence of the soul, or of a God to imbue humans with souls. For many believers, particularly in the United States, the findings show the error, even wickedness, of viewing the world in strictly material terms. And they provide for theologians a growing impetus to reconcile the existence of the soul with the growing evidence that humans are not, physically or even mentally, in a class by themselves.

And much else that you just knew it would say, quoting all the usual suspects.
Someone wrote to ask what I thought about it, given that The Spiritual Brain will ship in September. I replied,

This NYT piece is nothing but materialist huffing, and from a very predictable source.

Did you happen to notice how much specific research was cited?

None. Only opinion.

You are being asked to accept these views on authority alone.

There is a good reason for that. Actual research does not particularly support these views.

That is the topic of The Spiritual Brain, and if this article is anything to go by, I promise you it will be an eye-opener for many.

Publisher’s Weekly noted

the authors warn against the temptation to force the complex varieties of human spirituality into simplistic categories that they argue are conceptually crude, culturally biased, and often empirically untested.

which describes only a part of what’s wrong with all the materialist bilge, but that’s a good start.

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), anoverview 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).

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, detailing events of interest in the intelligent design controversy.

Brains on purpose: The Mindful Hack welcomes an interesting new neuroscience blog

Over at Brains on Purpose, Stephanie West Allen, who - in collaboration with Jeffrey Schwarts - specializes in neuroscience in relation to conflict resolution, is skeptical of the
pop science craze for neuroscience explanations for, like, everything:

Neuro-talk is popular these days. You can read about neuro-this and neuro-that. Much extrapolation is being done from the findings of neuroscience; often the extrapolation is not warranted or accurate.

I've called it neurobullshipping myself, but I am sure Allen is far too polite for that.
Brains on Purpose has been added to the blogroll at the right. When I'm a few days between posts, go there.
Brains on purpose: The Mindful Hack welcomes an interesting new neuroscience blog

Over at Brains on Purpose, Stephanie West Allen, who - in collaboration with Jeffrey Schwarts - specializes in neuroscience in relation to conflict resolution, is skeptical of the
pop sicnece craze for neuroscience explanations for, like, everything:

Neuro-talk is popular these days. You can read about neuro-this and neuro-that. Much extrapolation is being done from the findings of neuroscience; often the extrapolation is not warranted or accurate.

I've called it neurobullshipping myself, but I am sure Allen is far too polite for that.
Brains on Purpose has been added to the blogroll at the right. When I'm a few days between posts, go there.

(Note: Dr. Schwartz was lead author of The Mind and the Brain, a pioneering book in non-materialist neuroscience. He is a colleague of my lead author, Mario Beauregard. Our book The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, will be out in August. It is billed as "Finally, the counter-argument in the case against God.")

Pop science watch: Is the altruism spot edging out the God spot in pop science?

A Washington Post article reports

"You gotta see this!" Jorge Moll had written. Moll and Jordan Grafman, neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health, had been scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or keeping it for themselves.

As Grafman read the e-mail, Moll came bursting in. The scientists stared at each other. Grafman was thinking, "Whoa -- wait a minute!"

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable

There you have it! Morality explained. Indeed, a whack of materialists chimed in with comments like:

Morality, he said, is not a brain function elevated above our baser impulses. Greene said it is not "handed down" by philosophers and clergy, but "handed up," an outgrowth of the brain's basic propensities.

Here's a less hyped report of the original study, including the comment:

"Although understanding the function of this brain region may not necessarily identify what drives people like Mother Theresa, it may give clues to the origins of important social behaviors like altruism," said study investigator Scott A. Huettel, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center.

But would it even do that? A skeptical lawyer friend comments:

I don't think this is as persuasive as the author thinks. Different cultures have different taste preferences for food, for example -- some cultures love tastes that others find disgusting. Thus a person who has learned to like a particular taste will have the pleasure center activated when it tastes the flavor it has learned to experience as pleasant. But if the person has learned to hate a taste, that person's pleasure center will not light up on tasting that food.

So too with the altruistic behavior -- the person was taught that the behavior was good, and so feels pleasure when doing the behavior.

Thus I think what we are really seeing is a reflection of learned behavior, not "hardwired" altruism.

I note also that the study says the test subjects were "volunteers." In other words, the scientists chose altruistic people -- people willing to volunteer to help them -- as their universe of test subjects.

I should think the main question is whether altruism is really, in any sense, "hardwired" anywhere. "Hardwired" is outdated reductionist computerspeak, long overdue to be retired. It immediately raises an issue: "Hardwired" means part of the physical structure of the brain, like wiring in a computer. Somehow, that sounds unlikely. In fact, it sounds exactly like all those stupid, useless quests for the God gene, God circuit, God module in the brain, or whatever.

In my experience, young children have generous impulses, but the impulses are inconsistent and not necessarily keyed to a strong moral sense. The habit of generous behaviour within moral limits must indeed be learned. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. Like all good habits, it usually becomes a source of pleasure in time. No doubt the researchers are picking up a small part of that outcome. Of course, as anyone who persists in well-doing knows, altruism is certainly not always a pleasure. Some people are thankless, feckless, frustrating, or undeserving. Even the most experienced generous person can develop compassion fatigue. Persisting through the unpleasantness is the beginning of good character.

Kim in Vienna kindly noted some of my other comments on this subject. Here's a thought from nonmaterialist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor:

The brain is a material substance. It has location, dimensions, weight, temperature, and energy. It also has parts; it has a superior surface, a medial boundary, a left side and a right side. As such, it can interact with other things that have similar properties- things that have matter and parts and energy. A region of the brain can cause action potentials, or movements of the arm. Oxygen molecules, barbiturate molecules, electrons, or a hammer can, in turn, affect the brain.
Altruism, in contrast, has no matter or energy. It has no ‘location’, no weight, no dimension, no temperature. It has no properties of matter. Altruism entails things like purpose and judgment, which aren’t material. Altruism has no parts, in the sense that there is a ‘left-side’ of altruism and a ‘right side’ of altruism. There are, of course, left sided and right sided parts of the brain, which may be associated with acts of altruism, but there is no ‘left’ or ‘right’ to altruism itself. Of course, objects (like human brains or bodies) that have location, weight, etc. can mediate or carry out altruistic acts, but the altruism itself doesn’t have a location. Altruism isn’t spatial. ‘My altruism is three inches from the edge of the table’ is a nonsensical statement.

He adds,

Materialist neuroscientists confuse association with causation. This is the unhappy result of scientific materialism, which excludes immaterial causes. Yet many things in the world, including our ideas and even our theories about the world, are not matter or energy. Altruism is obviously something very real; many people’s lives depend on it. We don’t know exactly what it is, but we know, by its properties, what it’s not. It’s not material. It shares no properties in common with matter. It can’t be caused by a piece of the brain.

The materialist project is becoming all the more frenetic as it becomes more obviously undoable. Consider, for example the claim that apes speak.

Upcoming book! The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, Harper August 2007).

Thinkquote of the day: Nobody in here but us neurons?

From "Oh dear God, it's him again", Gina Piccolo's October 2, 2006 Los Angeles Times profile of atheist neuroscience grad student Sam Harris, author of antitheistic tract Letter to a Christian Nation :

Then Harris started talking about the philosophy of the mind and his blue
eyes started to shine. "We're the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience," he said, with no hint of irony. "And it's actually a false view. Because there's just experience. There's just consciousness and its contents. There's not an 'I' or 'me' in the middle of consciousness to whom it's all relating."

The profile is well worth reading, to get some idea of who writes these kinds of anti-God books. Apparently, Harris

won't say where he lives. Or where he grew up. Or what his parents do professionally. Or the name of the university where he's pursuing his doctorate in neuroscience. At the request of friends and family, he never acknowledges them by name in his books. He will allow that he's 39 and didn't start out an atheist, though he was raised in a secular family. He
is deliberately vague because, he said, murderous religious fanatics know their way around the Internet.

Well, as long as his publisher's accountant knows his address (for the royalty cheques), I suppose he can amuse himself by imagining danger, and no harm done.

Personally, I think that scholar Mary Eberstadt is right in seeing the spate of anti-God books directed against American Christians as displaced anxiety. People who can't risk being where the action is try to make up their own action somewhere where it is safe:

... what they have turned into a blogging bonanza and cottage publishing industry is the overwhelming threat posed by religious fundamentalists . . . again not Islamist fundamentalists, but rather American Christian fundamentalists, known variously in this new canon as "theocrats," "Christocrats," "Christianists," "fundamentalists," "Christian nationalists," and the old familiar, "Christian right."

As with the paleoconservative right and its Mexican illegals, this single-minded insistence on having located "the" fundamental problem for America is characteristic of the anti-"theocrat" genre. As Ross Douthat observed in an essay for First Things about such exercises, "the fear of theocracy has become a defining panic of the Bush era. . . . Today's battles aren't just a matter of ordinary political factionalism, they [the anti-"theocrats"] insist. The hour is much later than that, and nothing less than the republic itself hangs in the balance." It is this same outsized passion that is the first sign of a gap between reality and rhetoric, one suggesting that a scapegoat may be at hand.

The thing is, you can be anti-God in the US, and your books will sell. Try being anti-God in the Middle East and your head may be rolling and bouncing along the cobblestones. The real tragedy of modern-day materialist atheism is that it's quite easy in places where no one takes you seriously and quite impossible in places where everyone does.

As if to prove me right about the essentially irrelevant character of the whole current anti-God enterprise, Harris plans to write yet another "biology of belief" book, yet another attempt to explain spirituality with reference to some materialist thesis. But why wouldn't last year's books or the ones from the year before do just as well? And Harris could spend more time perfecting his aliases and disguises.

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, detailing events of interest in the intelligent design controversy.

My previous books are By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004) and Faith@Science.

A recent ChristianWeek column: Faith@Science: The God gene? Spot? Circuit? Okay, maybe a Module?

(Note: This is the column I wrote shortly after dragging myself up from finishing my work on The Spiritual Brain. It explains why notions of a God spot, gene, module, or circuit in the brain are completely ridiculous.)

Faith@Science: The God gene? Spot? Circuit? Okay, maybe a Module?

by Denyse O'Leary

Well, it's great to be back on my old coffee stool. As kind regular readers may recall, I was away coauthoring a book on the neuroscience evidence for the spiritual nature of the human, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard. Some may wonder what that is all about, so I should perhaps say a bit about it.

If you listen to the popular science media, scientists have discovered that there is no self, no soul, no spirit and no free will. The mind itself is an illusion. Neuroscientists have also discovered that there is a God spot, God circuit, God gene, or God module in the brain. They have also discovered that, by putting on a special helmet, you can have mystical visions, and that Darwinian evolution selected cavemen who believed in religion. That is why you can't help but believe (even though, for as yet undetermined reasons, the theorist himself and his buddies apparently can help it quite easily).

Not only that, but religion can be traced to defects in the temporal lobe. Paul the Apostle, Joan of Arc, Teresa of Avila, and Th‚rŠse of Lisieux were all epileptics, and that explains their careers. Every other month, a great new discovery of this type is said to revolutionize the relationship between science and religion. Mainly by showing that there is nothing much to religion.

You think it's all nonsense, do you? Or do you worry in your heart of hearts that one or another of these concoctions might be true? Well, I spent a year examining all of them in detail (or anyway, as many as we could spot flying above the radar). It was the hardest year of my life, considering the piles of stuff I had to get through dating from 1902 through 2006 and discovered that it is indeed all nonsense.

I came away astonished by the gullibility of the popular science media in this area. There were times I howled with laughter. The only explanation for the tendency to offer credibility to any "we've found God in the genes/brain" announcement, however poorly supported, is reflexive materialism.

In a way, it makes sense. If we start out with the axiom that materialism is true and that therefore the explanation for religious or philosophical belief must be found in Darwinian evolution, we have only two choices: Either evolution selected people who believe in religion because it confers a survival advantage or it permitted their survival even though it does not confer a survival advantage. Either way, we would be predisposed to expect that research will sooner or later probably sooner uncover the evidence. As a result, if we are journalists, we may stampede to cover the flimsiest nonsense as if it were an important discovery. And then on to the next nonsense.

Meanwhile, there is good evidence for the independent existence of a mind, apart from the brain. Based on evidence, it is also reasonable to believe that people who have deep religious experiences contact something beyond themselves. That, of course, is the core of the book, which will be published in spring 2007. I'll say more closer to the time.

By the way, in my last column (January 2006), I wrote about the Catholic Church taking on Darwinism. Recently, Fr. Martin Hilbert of the Toronto Oratory wrote an excellent article in Touchstone Magazine (available online at Touchstonemag) setting out the details of how and why that happened. It has come to my attention that the Vatican is now selling holy cards in many languages at souvenir stands throughout Rome, featuring a key portion from Benedict XVI's first homily, including the sentence: "We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is a thought of God." Hundreds of thousands of visitors take them home. Anyone who thinks that the intelligent design controversy is merely a dismissible product of American fundamentalism is whistling down the wind.

Forget the comfortable encomiums that we so often hear from Christian academics that there is "no conflict between faith and science." How weary I used to get listening to that! Of course there is no conflict between faith and science. But my research for By Design or by Chance? showed clearly that there is an irreconcilable conflict between Christianity and Darwinism. And this current book has deepened my awareness. Stay tuned.

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, detailing events of interest in the intelligent design controversy. My most recent published book is By Design or by Chance?, an overview of the intelligent design controversy.

Mythbusters: God spots, modules, circuits, genes, memes ...

A persistent materialist folk myth of recent vintage has been that some sort of God spot, module, circuit, gene, virus of the mind, pattern of electromagnetism, seizure, glitch, or meme can explain religious belief.

Clinical neuroscience may have accidentally given these ideas a boost. But he relationship between clinical neuroscience and theorizing about the neural basis of religion has been somewhat like the relationship between NASA and Roswell.

Now, the sad part about all this silliness is that decades ago, there were some respectable naturalistic explanations for religious belief. Wrong in my view, but at least intellectually reputable. For example, in The Golden Bough(1922), J.G. Frazier helpfully elucidated the relationship between primitive cults and the desire to control nature.

Even today, in Religion explained Pascal Boyer attempts to come up with a naturalistic explanation that at least makes sense: Religious ideas are formed in the same ways as other ideas are formed but they are formed about religious subjects.

The fact that this can be treated as an original idea tells you how much nonsense has been given a free pass in recent years.

Anyway, my co-author, Mario Beauregard with the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007) and his doctoral student Vince Paquette went to the trouble to study, using neuroscience tools, contemplative nuns who were recalling a mystical experience (recalling an experience activates many of the same neural pathways as were previously active):

Beauregard says that some researchers have theorized that religious experiences involve epilepsy-like seizures in temporal lobes. But the mystical condition activated dozens of brain areas involved in perception, emotion, and cognition, he and Paquette reported last week in Neuroscience Letters. The pair also conclude that although there is much overlap with the feelings of peace and love from the control condition, the mystical condition has its own signature, with "relatively different regional patterns of brain activation."

So, according to their research, people who have mystical experiences do enter an altered state of consciousness, but their experience is a complex one, as most human experiences are. There is no spot, module, or gene that simply activates it.

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