Newsletter

'The Spiritual Brain': A response to atheists, materialists

Appleyard, Bryan

2007

Overview

There are plenty of examples. People were terribly excited when a computer beat Garry Kasparov at chess. The machines, it was claimed, were thinking like -- or, rather, better than -- humans. But, of course, they weren't. They were simply aggregating the skills of their programmers. Kasparov was playing a team. Claims about \"God genes\" have proved absurd, attempts to induce religious experiences with magnetic helmets are dubious in the extreme, and temporal-lobe epilepsy explains almost nothing about either religious or high artistic talent. The inflation of scientific claims based on such patently feeble evidence is an embarrassment to the materialists. That said, the claims of the soulists, once we step back from the simple experience of being an aware self, are equally problematic. [Mario Beauregard] uses evidence like near-death experiences (NDEs) and psi - - or paranormal -- effects and his own work on religious experience to show that the self or soul is not simply locked inside the skull. In the case of NDEs, for example, people often report seeing themselves from the outside, typically, reporting a bird's-eye view of an operating theater. One cannot doubt these experiences, but the interpretation that they involve a separation of the self from the body is speculation. In the case of psi effects -- telepathy, psychokinesis -- the evidence is patchy. Finally, it is unquestionable that religious experiences are not the simple pathologies claimed by some materialists, but that is not to say they are demonstrably different in kind from anything encountered in material science.

• Publisher: Tribune Content Agency LLC
• Subject: Beauregard, Mario