Skeptic’s Review of The Spiritual Brain

Doug Mesner writes asking me to respond to a review of The Spiritual Brain which he published in Skeptic Magazine, and he has now helpfully made the review available on line. He writes,

The book distresses me in that I see in it an early Creationist assault on the Cognitive Sciences, and the formation of the false scientific arguments that may be brought to the stem cell debate in years to come.

Mesner sounds like a male Amanda Gefter. (Hey, I am all for equal opportunity, so that's fine with me.)

He wants a free exchange of views, but sadly, one thing that is not free is my time just now, so I must decline.

I am not sure why he references the stem cell debate, but if people like Gefter and Mesner are entitled to private definitions of creationism, I guess they can apply their definitions and worries to the stem cell debate, wind energy, or the assignment of parking spaces in municipally owned garages - or anything else they want to.

Having almost finished Alva Noe’s thoughtful Out of Our Heads Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness and having read Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself, I would say that the skepticism (= materialism) espoused by Mesner is dead in the water and electrification of the corpse by a long discussion will not help. Things have just moved on.

The Spiritual Brain: A "great primer" on the mind-body debate, says reviewer

Here's a review of The Spiritual Brain by Denver Seminary student Jeff Stauffer (June 2008). I loved this part:

One does not have to possess a Ph.D in the medical field to grasp the philosophical nature of this issue, nor to follow the arguments presented.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Jeff Stauffer! The Spiritual Brain is not hard to understand. Hard for some to accept, perhaps, but not hard to understand. He concludes,

I found this book to be compelling in terms of showing the nature of the mind to be more than mere atoms-in-space. As Christians, we need to incorporate scientific findings into our worldview if we are to hold to a realist, correspondence view of truth. Beauregard's book helps in this regard by positing a dualist notion of mind/body as the best explanation of the evidence from neuroscience. Overall, Beauregard does a much better job of critiquing a materialist account of nature than he does of providing empirical evidence for a spiritual brain. However, I do not take this to be an argument from ignorance, but one where a non-materialist account seems to be the best hypothesis going based on the evidence. This is a refreshing position from within the academic world on a subject that, oddly, many strive to eliminate: the existence of the human mind. I would encourage this book to those interested in the mind/body debate as a great primer on the subject.

Hmmm. What Mario and I did is called an "inference to the best explanation." In many situations, a slam dunk proof is not possible, but we can infer reasonable conclusions from a line of evidence.

For example, if spirituality is clearly and obviously good for human health (see Chapter 8), that suggests (though it does not prove) that spiritual forces underlie the universe. The alternative is to assume that a delusion is good for one's health - but all other medical evidence shows the contrary. So the assumption that spiritual forces underlie the universe is not proven by the fact that spirituality is good for health but it is far more consistent with that fact.

The rest of the review is here.

The Spiritual Brain is not a brainiac menace!

Here are some kind words about The Spiritual Brain from Brian T. Olszewski of the National Catholic Reporter's Book Club column:

For the initiated ... The Spiritual Brain is a fascinating exploration of relationships between God and neuroscience. Since it is not possible to determine how God "thinks," the exploration that takes place does so through the eyes and experience of science. Even those for whom discussions of God and neuroscience are foreign matter might be intrigued by such questions as "Is there a God program?" and "Does the God module even exist?"
Beauregard and O'Leary are thorough in presenting the cases, and in demonstrating for their peers how God, despite science's best efforts, still transcends the laboratory, the research and the theories.

Actually, while Olszewski really likes our book, he makes The Spiritual Brain sound much more formidable than it actually is. Look, if that book were half as learned as he makes out in his column, I could never have co-written it.

Here's an easy test: This is the Introduction . It actually does not get harder than this. And parts of it are very, very funny - but it was mostly materialists supplying the fun, not usually intentionally.

Introductory Chapter at a Glance

The Spiritual Brain: Introduction
Part One: Neuroscience as if your mind is real
Part Two: Who has enough faith to be a materialist?
Part Three: The uses of non-materialist neuroscience
Part Four: Materialism is running on empty

Zombie lurches across screen intoning "The ... Spiritual ... Brain ... is ... not ... a brainiac ... menace ... " No wait, cut, cut! That graphic is for a different blog.

The Spiritual Brain reviewed in Jesuit thinkmag America

I was a bit nervous when I heard that our Spiritual Brain had been reviewed in America. Mario Beauregard is a research scientist and I am a journalist. Our evidence is good, but a philosopher could probably tie me up for hours in mind games (though he might not fare as well with Mario).

However, John F.Kavanaugh, S.J., reviewed the book and actually had good things to say about it, for example,

The fact that most humans report religious, spiritual and mystical experiences has sent some materialists on a scavenger hunt for a "God-spot" in the brain, a "God-gene" hiding in some chromosome and even a "God helmet" that stirs up an electromagnetic field to give the brain a spiritual buzz. Beauregard's fMRI work shows that, while all human cognitive experience is accompanied by firings in the neural network, the experiences themselves are utterly unlocalizable.

The workings of the brain accompany spiritual experience but do not fully account for it. What is more, although human experience requires the brain as a necessary condition for our embodied personal acts of self-consciousness, mindfulness, freedom and love, the brain cannot adequately explain them. Beauregard examines cases of the paranormal, the placebo effect and therapeutic auto-suggestion, all under fMRI conditions, to show that the brain-driven content of our experience is different from our self-directed consciousness of the content. Most remarkable here is the report of a near-death-experience of someone clinically dead, with a flat EEG but nonetheless aware.

Kavanaugh, who teaches medical ethics at St. Louis University, Mo., is himself the author of Who Count As Persons? (Georgetown Univ. Press, 2002).

And more. I don't think this article is on line yet, but you can register to read the whole for free.

Psychiatrist reviews The Spiritual Brain in The Anglican Planet

The Anglican Planet, a Canadian Anglican publication, edited by Toronto photojournalist Sue Careless, published a review of The Spiritual Brain by Toronto psychiatrist John McCormick which said, among other things,

Dogmatically holding that only physically observable phenomena are real is incompatible with honest, open scientific inquiry. Studying mystical experiences can and should be done using a harmonized framework of biological, psychological, social and spiritual approaches. The brain may be seen as a transducer of spiritual realities, rather than an originator of them, much as a television set receives and interprets radio waves broadcast from elsewhere.

I recommend this book for the thoughtful general reader. It is an excellent review of the philosophical questions faced by people who take their science and religion seriously. It has helped me further pull together related fields that are too often not on good terms with each other.

Enough technical material is presented to support its contentions but not to overpower the reader. The depth of scholarship is apparent in the 146 pages of references and notes. A six-page glossary is not exhaustive but covers some of the main anatomical, psychological and philosophical terms. A number of black and white diagrams orient the reader to the main neuroanatomical structures. Sidebars give further detail to technical concepts. As one who works daily with patients, I found this book heavy and substantial reading, but well worth the effort. It is one book I plan to read several times.

And, while we are here, I recommend The Anglican Planet to all who are interested in global Anglican/Episcopalian affairs. (Anglicans (called Episcopalians in the United States) are the English-language Reformation church.)