In the Winter 2011 issue of Salvo, Tom Gilson writes about the reductionist interpretation of neuroscience findings:

In 2007, Scientific American reported on “Your Brain in Love,” including this wisdom:

Researchers have revealed the fonts of desire by comparing functional MRI studies of people who indicated they were experiencing passionate love, maternal love or unconditional love. Together, the regions release neuro­transmitters and other chemicals in the brain and blood that prompt greater euphoric sensations such as attraction and pleasure.⁴

Apparently no poet, artist, novelist, or philosopher ever knew where the fonts of desire were to be found. How could they? They didn’t have functional MRI (fMRI) machines.

There is a predictable reductionist sameness about these articles. You or I could almost write them before we read them: Brain researchers study human experience y, and discover that human experience y is nothing but some region x lighting up in our brains. Admittedly, I’m taking a rather reductionist approach of my own: I’ve reduced all this research and journalism to a neat little formula.

. . .

1. Ethics and morality reside in the brain.
2. We look in the brain, and we find regions lighting up under stimuli.
3. Therefore, ethics and morality, at their core, are probably nothing but parts of the brain responding to stimuli.

. . .

This article came to mind while I was reading a conversation between Alan Saunders, host of The Philosopher’s Zone, and John Finnis, Emeritus Professor of Law at University College Oxford and a professor at the University of Notre Dame in the States. They discuss how human beings regarded such things as the self, the mind, and free will before MRI machines were around. Excerpt from the “Shakespeare, Identity and Religion” transcript over at the Radio National website:

. . . .

Alan Saunders: But let’s turn to Aquinas, because we’re going to talk about personal identity. Can you outline his theory of personal identity?

John Finnis: Well, neither Aquinas nor Shakespeare use the term in that sense, and that’s one of the interesting things, I think, about Shakespeare, and indeed about Aquinas, that they have concepts which we know of and use ourselves with different terms. I think that’s a philosophically interesting and important point, that one can have a concept without having a term that locks onto it one-to-one. In both Aquinas and Shakespeare you find a conception of personal identity expressed in terms of other concepts; in the case of Shakespeare like the thing I am, or the self, and similarly in Aquinas you have a very, very strong conception of self-determination by free choice. That’s, I think, the master concept in Aquinas.

Alan Saunders: So…

John Finnis: One’s choices last in one’s, what we would call, character, in one’s, what we would call, identity.

Alan Saunders: So presumably I have an identity that is something to do with who I was born as, but the rest of it is my choice?

John Finnis: Yes. I’m part author of myself, and partly not author of myself, but constituted, what I am, by my birth as a member of the human species, and I have the identity I have, according to Aquinas, because of the material basis, the bodily basis, of my existence, and because that is informed and shaped and active by virtue of my human soul. So, I have this body and soul unity which is me, a human being, and that’s my nature as it’s given to me, and then there’s the nature that I…the sort of second nature, that I establish by my choices.

Alan Saunders: Returning to bodily matters, Shakespeare never loses sight, does he, of the fact that the personal identity that each of his characters has, that character has by being this living body rather than that living body?

John Finnis: No, he never does. He of course is capable of playing around with the idea of spirits, fairies and so on in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but he always brings us back to that bodily reality.

Alan Saunders: On ABC RN you’re with The Philosopher’s Zone and I’m talking to John Finnis, Professor of Law at Oxford and at the University of Notre Dame in the States about Shakespeare, religion and identity. John, despite one’s bodiliness, for both Aquinas and Shakespeare one can, as it were, be present to oneself, can’t one?

John Finnis: Yes, that’s an extremely important concept and dialectical, argumentative device in Aquinas. Aquinas’s controversies with the radical, partly Islamist, Aristotelians of the University of Paris are marked by his appeal to this understanding of oneself, this presence to oneself, which identifies one as oneself and not others, and not simply a fragment of some vast single soul, which was the concept of the radical Aristotelians. The idea of presence to oneself, of course, everyone knows is there in Shakespeare, in the form of the soliloquy, and you get soliloquies like the soliloquy of Richard III just before his final battle and death at Bosworth in which he talks in a remarkable way about the self and it’s his conscience in this case and his struggle with his conscience, all expressed in terms of myself.

. . . .

You may have noticed the blog has been a little slow lately. Well, there are a few reasons for that. The first is that our friend Robin Phillips (author of this excellent article in Salvo 21) has had to cut back a bit from his writing here, although you can still read his work at his blog. The second reason is that we are all hard at work on the next issue. I can’t say much on that now, but check back here to find out what’s coming your way from Salvo.

While I haven’t had much time to browse much online, I did come across this gem. It’s a roundup of articles that Dr. Edward Feser wrote in response to the work of Alex Rosenberg, author of the book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions. Some highlights from Dr. Feser’s posts are Part III [On Rosenberg’s attempt to account for the existence of the universe in terms of quantum mechanics and the multiverse theory] and Part VIII [On Rosenberg’s appeal to neuroscience, and in particular to “blindsight” phenomena and Libet’s free will experiments, in order to cast doubt on the reliability of introspection]. The whole list can be found at Dr. Feser’s blog:

Rosenberg roundup

Having now completed our ten-part series of posts on Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, it seems a roundup of sorts is in order.  As I have said, Rosenberg’s book is worthy of attention because he sees more clearly than most other contemporary atheist writers do the true implications of the scientism on which their position is founded.  And interestingly enough, the implications he says it has are more or less the very implications I argued scientism has in my own book The Last Superstition.  The difference between us is this: Rosenberg acknowledges that the implications in question are utterly bizarre, but maintains that they must be accepted because the case for the scientism that entails them is ironclad.  I maintain that Rosenberg’s case for scientism is completely worthless, and that the implications of scientism are not merely bizarre but utterly incoherent and constitute a reductio ad absurdum of the premises that lead to them.

Here’s one from the current issue of Salvo that you may have missed:

Mass Appeal
On How the Vastness of Space Makes It Possible for You To Be Here
by Hugh Ross

Scientists seem more difficult to please than the golden-haired girl of fairy-tale fame. While Goldilocks troubled herself over the just-right porridge, chair, and bed, astronomers appear preoccupied with the size of the universe.

In the days before telescopes, when an observer could count a few thousand stars in the night sky, many considered the universe too small and unimpressive to be the work of an almighty, all-knowing Creator. Only an infinite cosmos, they said, would befit an infinite deity. But then, others argued, an infinite cosmos might eliminate the need for a Creator.

Thanks to the Hubble space telescope, scientists now see that the universe contains roughly 200 billion large- and medium-sized galaxies and about a hundred times as many dwarf galaxies. The stars in those galaxies add up to about fifty billion trillion, and they comprise a mere one percent of the mass of the observable universe.

read the entire article. . . .

by James M. Kushiner

Tom Bartlett reports at the Chronicle of Higher Education that Dan McAdams, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, is pushing a new explanation for evolution’s lack of success in convincing many to become true believers: It has no story to tell.

McAdams’s research focus is narrative psychology—specifically, the development of a “life-story model of human identity.” As he writes in his book The Redemptive Self,“People create stories to make sense of their lives.” When you think about it, we tell stories to make sense of pretty much everything. The problem is that evolution doesn’t fit neatly into the narrative box. As McAdams puts it: “You can’t really feel anything for this character—natural selection.”

It may well turn out that the most-read story having anything at all to do with evolution isn’t really about evolution–Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, which is much more interesting that On the Origin of Species.

At the very least, though, evolution’s weakness as a story creates a PR opportunity for creationists. For example, one Christian Web site tries to fit evolution into a standard fairy-tale narrative, telling the intentionally absurd tale of an amoeba’s transformation from salamander to monkey to man, all thanks to a character called Mutation who waves a magic wand. It doesn’t read like it was written by someone with a background in biology, but it’s hard to disagree with the conclusion that evolution is a “strange story.”

If you take these thoughts and transfer them over to human lives, you see something similar: who would want to tell the story of how a family came into being, meeting, courtship, marriage, and children, from a purely materialistic, biological point of view? Now unlike some, perhaps, I think I am willing to let the facts convince me of evolution. So far, the facts had their best shot at me a few decades ago, but since then, as I read what scientists are discovering about genetics, DNA, and organisms, the questions about the abilities of something called natural selection to drive amoebas to become novelists only multiply, while answers, such a Tree of Life, once thought solid are slowly fading to black.

On April 21^st , an eighty-year-old Charles Colson passed from this life.

Alongside C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, Colson will go down to history as one of the foremost apologists of the 20^th century.

The author of more than 30 books, he pursued a relentless schedule of traveling and speaking.

His Prison Fellowship Ministries helped to reach millions of prisoners with the gospel and to bring prison reform to the United States.

He built a program for training lay leaders in worldview thinking, called Centurions.

Through the Colson Center website, he sponsored and published research on how the Biblical worldview relates to everything from literature to food.

His BreakPoint radio commentaries have inspired millions of Christians to think more deeply about their faith and how it relates to current events.

He worked to bring reforms in the U.S. criminal justice system, as well as spearheading work in prisoner rehabilitation.

When Christians of the late 20^th and early 21^st century were becoming confused by postmodernism and the emergent church movement, Colson brought Biblical clarity.

In the 90’s, he teamed up with Richard John Neuhaus to spearhead ecumenical work between evangelicals and Catholics, culminating in a joint statement of faith titled, ‘Evangelicals and Catholics Together: Toward a Common Mission.’

In 2009 he was the principal writer and driving force behind another ecumenical statement, known as the Manhattan Declaration. This called on believers from the three main branches of Christendom not to comply with rules and laws permitting abortion, same-sex marriage and other matters that go against their consciences. (more…)