COGITO ERGO ?

Putting Our Faith in Science: When it comes to spirituality, biologists and physicists are in over their heads (Andrew Klavan, July 25, 2003, LA Times)

[N]othing science has come up with challenges our inner experiences of the divine. Most scientific arguments against these experiences boil down to the mistaken idea that if the mechanics of an internal phenomenon - the mind, say, or religious ecstasy - can be detailed, the phenomenon itself has been explained away. That is, if the "mind" is caused by the behavior of brain cells, then our experience of our selves is an illusion. If religious ecstasy can be photographed in a scan, then there's nothing real to be ecstatic about.

This line of reasoning is what physicist-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead termed "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness," in which the abstract understanding of an event is mistaken for the event itself. "This is the ultimate irony of some modern science," British theologian Keith Ward says, "that it begins by trying to explain and understand the rich, particular, concrete world as experienced by humans, and ends by seeing that phenomenal world as an illusion."

It is this fallacy that ultimately confounds MIT psychologist Steven Pinker in his book "The Blank Slate." Pinker derides the notion that human nature might be part of anything like a soul - the "ghost in the machine," as he calls it.

Yet even he can't finally disentangle his materialistic explanations from the mysterious phenomena they supposedly explain.

"These puzzles have an infuriatingly holistic quality to them," he writes with touching frustration. "Consciousness and free will seem to suffuse the neurobiological phenomena at every level. Thinkers seem condemned either to denying their existence or to wallowing in mysticism."

It's strange that the faithful are so often dismissed as small-minded when it's the rational who can't wrap their minds around this conundrum.


MORE:
New-yet-old ideas about the soul: Thinkers who question if there's a self separate from the body say they're faithful to biblical roots. (Tirdad Derakhshani, July 20, 2003, Philadelphia Inquirer)

Some scholars, primarily liberal Protestants but also some evangelicals, insist the Hebrew Bible presents an integrated picture of the self that does not draw sharp distinctions between soul and body. This has led some of them to reject the concept of the soul as a separate substance.

"What we are saying is that there is no such thing as a soul," said Murphy. She and Warren S. Brown, a neuropsychologist and director of Fuller's Travis Research Institute, are coeditors of Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, a provocative collection of essays.

They say they are committed to evangelical Christian teachings, yet believe developments in cognitive science and evolutionary biology call into question a dualistic definition of humans.

"As neuroscientists associate more and more of the faculties once attributed to mind or soul with the functioning of specific regions or systems of the brain, it becomes more and more appealing to say that it is in fact the brain that performs these functions," Murphy writes in the book's introduction.

"Nearly all of the human capacities or faculties once attributed to the soul are now seen to be functions of the brain." [...]

Brown, whose research has focused on the structure connecting the left and right brain, said, "I basically believe that humans are physical beings and would not think that the soul is a psychical entity, a little ghost in the machine."

He defends a complex position called "non-reductive physicalism," which holds that human beings are physical through and through. But he also maintains that we have developed cognitive and emotional capacities that cannot be reduced to biological or chemical processes.

These capacities, which he calls our "soulishness," enable us to be relational beings. "Soul language in traditional religious talk is suggestive of relationship with one another and our internal self-relationship, and our relationships with God," he said.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 28, 2003 11:05 PM