Religion & Law

Brain Drain

By John Pieret

Uh oh, here we go again:

"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."

It looks like ID is morphing again. Irreducible complexity at the cellular level, except among the faithful, is pretty much dead. "Teach the controversy" had a stake driven through its heart in Dover and, although there will likely be a knock-down, drag-out in Texas in the next few months, teaching the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution is on life support after failing in Florida and a numbers of other states this year, with Louisiana's double-edged law being its only success on the path to Texas.

So what will it be this time around? According to The New Scientist, the Discovery Institute is funding research into "non-material neuroscience".

According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one.

We might have guessed! ... given the recent book Denyse (accent on the "deny") O'Leary co-authored with Mario Beauregard, a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Montreal, The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul. Never one to eschew hyperbole, O'Leary calls the study of consciousness "Darwinism's grave." Besides Schwartz and Beauregard and, of course, Discovery Institute stalwarts, O'Leary, Moreland, William Dembski, and neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, another name to look out for among the would be highjackers of neuroscience is Angus Menuge, a philosophy professor at Concordia University, who is getting some of the DI's "research" funding.

James Porter Moreland (who usually publishes as J.P. Moreland), a professor at the Talbot School of Theology and a DI fellow who is usually forthright about the theological content if ID, wrote in Consciousness and the Existence of God:

"I've been doing a lot of thinking about consciousness," he writes, "and how it might contribute to evidence for the existence of God in light of metaphysical naturalism's failure to provide a helpful explanation." Non-materialist neuroscience provided him with this helpful explanation: since God "is" consciousness, "the theist has no need to explain how consciousness can come from materials bereft of it. Consciousness is there from the beginning."

Hmmm. The bare assertion that God exists and "is" consciousness (whatever that might mean), coupled with a denial of any need to explain, piled on naturalism's alleged "failure" (for the moment) to explain consciousness, is evidence for God's existence? A protean combination of circularity, shifting of burden and argument from ignorance.

Schwartz has gone a bit farther:

Schwartz used scanning technology to look at the neural patterns thought to be responsible for [obsessive-compulsive disorder]. Then he had patients use "mindful attention" to actively change their thought processes, and this showed up in the brain scans: patients could alter their patterns of neural firing at will.

From such experiments, Schwartz and others argue that since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material. In fact, these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology - the material brain is changing the material brain.

Needless to say, some are unimpressed, such as Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh:

He and others worry because scientists have yet to crack the great mystery of how consciousness could emerge from firing neurons. "Progress in science is slow on many fronts," says John Searle, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley. "We don't yet have a cure for cancer, but that doesn't mean cancer has spiritual causes." ...

And as Clark observes: "This is an especially nasty mind-virus because it piggybacks on some otherwise reasonable thoughts and worries. Proponents make such potentially reasonable points as 'Oh look, we can change our brains just by changing our minds,' but then leap to the claim that mind must be distinct and not materially based. That doesn't follow at all. There's nothing odd about minds changing brains if mental states are brain states: that's just brains changing brains."

So we're in for another round of picking away at the present unknowns in legitimate science, followed by the unwarranted assertion that any unexplained phenomenon is support for the preconceived beliefs of the IDeologists.

My brain is already beginning to hurt.
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Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on October 22, 2008 (boomark / email).