Great review of The Spiritual Brain in Quill and Quire
The November edition of Canadian litmag Quill and Quire has a wonderful review of The Spiritual Brain by James Grainger:
Read through the Ideas or Books section of any weekend paper these days and an unquestioned orthodoxy quickly asserts itself from behind the veneer of open- minded enquiry. That orthodoxy is the doctrine of scientific materialism, the belief that the great questions of human existence that have troubled us for millennia have been, or are about to be, answered by science. Why we love, why we hate, why we believe in God: scientists have proven that these seemingly complex yearnings are merely by-products of evolution, genetic coding, and brain chemistry. Case closed.
Questioning this orthodoxy will likely get you laughed out of the smart cocktail set, so one can only imagine the professional and personal risks that Mario Beauregard, a neuroscientist at the Université de Montreal, is running by publishing a book that claims not only that there is scientific evidence for the existence of God and the soul, but that the tenets of scientific materialism are based on bad science and wild speculation. Beauregard is too good a scientist to claim that he can prove, once and for all, that human beings possess a soul that exists both inside and apart from the material world. The same goes for the existence of God, whether conceived of as the paternalistic deity of monotheistic religion or the more abstract “ground of all being” of Buddhism.
It gets better. I will post the link to the rest later, when available. Reviewer James Grainger loves our book, and best of all he loves it for the same reasons as we wrote it: The things we all need to know about our real selves.
Labels: James Granger, Spiritual Brain