Wednesday, December 10, 2008

BOOK REVIEW: Apologetics instead of Exploration

I don't know if the authors of The Spiritual Brain are Christians, but their methodology of advancing their ideas is close enough to Creation science. I'm on cd5 now and so far all I have heard are attacks on materialist ideas of the brain; accusations of dogmatism, the angry attacks on heretics by materialists, intolerance and persecution of pure hearted, well intended, scientific explorers of the soul.

The less than amusing feature of this method is that, so far, I have yet to hear any new ideas about the spiritual brain.

In all honesty, I recall feeling stimulated by a few points, but they are buried in my mind by the inundation of anti-materialist science rhetoric.

Actually, I do remember one bit mentioned a couple of chapters ago, Karl Popper said that there is something called 'promisory materialism' and this sounds like a very interesting critique of certain tendencies in science, especially considering Popper's reputation as a skeptic interested in epistemology.

But that's not from the authors of the book, they just employ the quote in the process of showing that atheists and people who explain god through neurological phenomena are, suprise suprise, the real practitioners of faith.

The earliest I can recall hearing this “So you believe in science! Ah hah! You have faith in science!” was from the head of the Christian club at Cerritos High School. Science is a religion! Well, there goes my denial of the Christ's, who is the same substance as god, according to experts, came back to life and ascended to heaven. In actually, my response then is still more than sufficient for me: The concept of god as I it is generally defined is self-contradictory, and it's proponents say as such, thus it has no clear meaning, or way of evaluating it's validity. Therefore, as a metaphysical proposition, it's nonsense.

I'm listening to the book now, and I just heard another tired point: that materialist explanations of god take away right and wrong, and leave only our base desires. A bit after that comes the logical conclusion of scientific explanations, who all we atheists know and love: Pol Pot.

Pol Pot dehumanized his victims, and do you know why? Not because of some analytic interpretation of the workings of his mind. Not because people, on the whole, are equally capable of helping and hurting each other. Of course, the reason is that Pol Pot didn't have a spiritual view of the soul and morality.

Religion, on the other hand, upholds the value of each life, except for when the gods kill us in their wars, or when the Judeo Christian God is offended and floods the planet or tells his star pupil Joshua to kill his disobedient neighbors.

Christianity, whose anti-science apologetics this book resembles, has many strands that claim that man is unworthy of redemption, unworthy of God's forgiveness, but only saved through the grace, the charity, the whimsical forgiveness of God. Why are we unworthy? Because, we disobeyed!

I think the God family needs counseling.

Anyways, this book is still going on about how materialism is wrong. I was really interested in hearing scientific evidence for a non-materialist view of the mind, but apparently these guys have been too busy crouching under the assault of Dennet, Dawkins, Ramachandran, and all the other unscientific adherents of the religion of materialism.

This is why the authors of the Spiritual Brain have, halfway through the book, declined to mention one single testable hypothesis.

It's the same old shit: You guys can't PROVE we are wrong, so therefore... you know, stop being mean.

Meanwhile, the scientifically rigorous advocates of the, apparently scientific content-less Spiritual Brain continue to attack scientists who take the brain as being identical with the mind.

I thought he was going to get to some evidence just now, but he's just going off again on how scientists who claim to have identified neural correlates of consciousness, at various times, have been shown to be wrong, or drawing false conclusions from their experiments.

He's talking about OCD now, and the cingulate, ganglia, and neuronal plasticity. Let's see... I'm guessing something's coming about how the scientists who thought they could fix OCD by identifying the NCC's of OCD failed, and therefore, the default implication is god!

I have recently listened to the audiobooks Unweaving the Rainbow and Ancestor's Tale.

(Now he's arguing for free will......I assume that's what his opponents are denying and what can only be located in the non-material spirit)

Anyways, in the two Dawkins books, he didn't spend his time attacking non-materialist views of biological diversity. On the contrary, he talked about the topics indicated by the title of each book. He also spent a fare amount of time criticizing certain aspects of thinking among scientists. He spends even less time attacking religion.

Of course, there is a book in which Dawkins attacks all religion. That is The God Delusion. Here again, the book is about the title. And, although he does, at times, make strong, declarative statements against religion and it's adherents, he is also reasoned and precise in his description of what he opposes and why he opposes it.

I became an atheist for philosophical, primary epistemological reasons, back when I was into Ayn Rand and Objectivism, so I was always inwardly dismissive of scientists speaking on the issue of God.

It was, for me, what it still is: an issue to be analyzed on the grounds of it's assertions, which are fundamentally and eternally non-empirical. Thus, the whole discussion of religion in conjunction with the realm of science is offensive and shameful, unless they are finally going to say. “We think God is real, this experiment will test it. If the data conclusively holds up in contradiction of our god hypothesis, we will give it up.” Theists don't think this and, insofar as they discuss or revere Science in conjunction with religion, they are nothing but frauds.

But, after hearing Dawkins, I forget where I first heard him, I was impressed by his way of talking and listened to the The God Delusion. I was even more impressed by the lovely, beautiful diction and accuracy with which he discussed everything. As far as the content, he dealt with many accusations against evolution and science by religious people in a way that I hadn't thought of.

I ve listened to hours and hours of anti-evolution, Christian lectures.

(this guy on the book just said something to the effect of In the decade of the brain, it had already been shown that the Mind can significantly influence the Brain!!!! That's fucking great. On one hand, we have an idea that what we experience is actually a phenomena of the brain. On the other hand, we have this guy saying that the brain is not the mind, and he demonstrates that by showing errors of scientists. Oh dear, while I was typing the previous few sentences, he has been showing how much medical treatment of psychological conditions are placebo effects! Mind over matter. That hasn't been working as indiscriminately as our African ancestors must have had faith it would, when they were faced with death, the neanderthals closing off the northern border of the continent, or any of the little shit that we still face every day. Insofar as it has been verified, it has been verified by quantitative measurement, and empirical observations. Once again, it reminds of me Dawkins, when he says that if a headline announcing that scientists had proof of God appeared tomorrow, you can be sure that the vast majority of theologians would be trumpeting it to their flocks, but, otherwise, they will deny the right of science to evaluate religious claims.)

Anyways, listening to all that Christian Anti-evolution, even though I was listening to it out of enjoyment of ideological apologetics of all kinds, started to grow on me, and I began to think Evolution was insignificant. But I had never thought of it as significant anyways. Now I have really begun to see the beauty and intellectual pleasure of contemplating the complexity of the natural world. But how would I have acquired this if I believed that the most important source of understanding of the world is faith, which, is not demonstrable or experienced as anything other than an emotion or feeling?

(he's still on the placebo effect!)


Alright I'm tired of this now. I want to find a text version of this book so I can scan it to see if there are any interesting conjectures about the actual spiritual nature of the brain. These assholes opened the book with a promise to tell me about the brain in conjunction with it's spiritual nature. But, now it seems to be the typical, oh so typical boasts of those who oppose science in the name of defending ideas they have no intention of giving up, and for which they declare the impossibility of reason to deny.

The fucked up thing is that I am really, sincerely interested in God, that was my first topic on this Blog. But I cannot stand to be cheated with the promise of scientific discussion of a spiritual brain when I'm all I'm getting is stale, logically embarrassing, criticisms of various scientists.

If the authors had said that's what they were going to do for half, or all of the book, then I might still be interested, since it is always useful to go over old criticisms of the things that seem correct to me. I have a bunch of new Advanced HSK books in front of me. I shall let them comfort me. There are also Greg Egan's Distress, which has finally dragged me in, and the Mandarin version of The Yellow Lighted Bookshop to fall back on if studying fails me.

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