Catholic philosopher saint can help neuroscience?

Aquinas in stained glass, Beao, Creative Commons

Here, Dominican Br. Christopher attempts to map 13th century Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas onto modern neuroscience:

It turns out that at least one neuroscientist, Walter J Freeman of UC Berkeley, finds that Thomas’s philosophical foundation for explaining the mind-body problem is the most useful for grounding recent studies in nonlinear brain dynamics. Specifically, it is Thomas’s understanding of intentionality that fills the explanatory gap between the complementary observations of lower-level electrophysiological data and higher-level goal-directed behavior.

An interesting scheme is offered, with the following comment:

This is not, of course, a perfect one to one mapping of terms; however, this attempt at translating between the language of Thomas and neuroscience hopefully will generate dialogue between these two communities. Freeman notes that neuroscientists often don’t have a strong grasp of the philosophical questions and issues that relate to their topic of inquiry: how do we think? At the same time, philosophers generally do not have a firm understanding of the contributions modern neuroscience has made to our understanding of the workings of the brain, which certainly should influence any approach to the mind body problem.

Hey, wait a minute. The main reason, in my experience, that neuroscientists "often don't have a strong grasp" of mind-related questions is that they don't believe the mind exists. That is the starting point of their research.

While editing a book that addresses these issues recently, I was struck by the contempt for philosophers a famous neuroscientist exhibited. Had he expressed himself in such terms about any discipline whatever in science, he would certainly have been thought an ignoramus, regardless of his accomplishment in his own field, but no one questions his saying it about philosophers. Worse, even though neuroscience has a track record of zero to a zillion in explaining consciousness - the subject of his enquiry - his confidence was undiminished.

Unless that problem (proud, studied ignorance) is confronted, it is useless to ask whether Aquina's insights would be a help.

Hat tip: The Sheepcat

Philosophy: God is not dead yet - but some haven't gotten the memo

Here's a really interesting article in Christianity Today by philosopher William Lane Craig on the revitalized debate over the existence of God.

The revitalization owes something, to be sure, to Antony Flew's conversion from atheism to theism, but there is more, as Craig explains,

You might think from the recent spate of atheist best-sellers that belief in God has become intellectually indefensible for thinking people today. But a look at these books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, among others, quickly reveals that the so-called New Atheism lacks intellectual muscle. It is blissfully ignorant of the revolution that has taken place in Anglo-American philosophy. It reflects the scientism of a bygone generation rather than the contemporary intellectual scene.

Actually, some of us had sort of noticed that. Of particular interest to readers of this blog would be the "moral argument" for God's existence,

A number of ethicists, such as Robert Adams, William Alston, Mark Linville, Paul Copan, John Hare, Stephen Evans, and others have defended "divine command" theories of ethics, which support various moral arguments for God's existence. One such argument:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

By objective values and duties, one means values and duties that are valid and binding independent of human opinion. A good many atheists and theists alike concur with premise (1). For given a naturalistic worldview, human beings are just animals, and activity that we count as murder, torture, and rape is natural and morally neutral in the animal kingdom. Moreover, if there is no one to command or prohibit certain actions, how can we have moral obligations or prohibitions?

Premise (2) might seem more disputable, but it will probably come as a surprise to most laypeople to learn that (2) is widely accepted among philosophers. For any argument against objective morals will tend to be based on premises that are less evident than the reality of moral values themselves, as apprehended in our moral experience. Most philosophers therefore do recognize objective moral distinctions.

One of my favourite books, actually, has always been C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, which demonstrates the existence of an objective moral order that human moral orders very imperfectly imitate.

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.