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.

. . . .

We are hard at work on the next issue of Salvo. Subscribers will be familiar with the “Blips” department where we offer some short notes on books and movies of interest. Also included in the Blips section is a full-page review on a book or movie we think is of particular importance.

This time for the featured Blip, Salvo contributing editor Terrell Clemmons reviews a book by Larry Taunton. You’ll have to wait to get the full report, but I did want to share this with you. I came across it while searching for more info on Taunton. Apparently, he debated the late Christopher Hitchens a number of times and the two became quite good friends. You can read what he has to say about Hitchens here:

My Take: An evangelical remembers his friend Hitchens

I first met Christopher Hitchens at the Edinburgh International Festival. We were both there for the same event, and foremost in my mind was the sort of man I would meet.

A journalist and polemicist, his reputation as a critic of religion, politics, Britain’s royal family, and, well, just about everything else was unparalleled. As an evangelical, I was certain that he would hate me.

When the expected knock came at my hotel room door, I braced for the fire-breather who surely stood on the other side of it. With trepidation, I opened it and he burst forth into my room. Wheeling on me, he began the conversation as if it was the continuance of some earlier encounter:

“The Archbishop of Canterbury has effectively endorsed the adoption of Sharia law. Can you believe that? Whatever happened to a Church of England that believed in something?” He alternated between sips of his Johnnie Walker and steady tugs on a cigarette.

My eyebrows shot up. “‘Believed in something?’ Why, Christopher, you sound nostalgic for a church that actually took the Bible seriously.”

He considered me for a moment and smiled. “Indeed. Perhaps I do.”

read the full article . . .

This friendship between Hitchens and Taunton exemplifies a sentiment expressed by Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Juriprudence at Princeton. HT: This quote was brought to my attention by way of a Facebook post from a friend of Salvo.

Quote of the Day from Robert P. George on friendship and civility with those whom we disagree with:

“I have always found Lincoln’s closing words of his First Inaugural Address to be profoundly moving–and true: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”

Our culture is divided today, just as it was in Lincon’s time, by differences over profound moral issues. Yet, even as we fight for what we believe in, as in conscience we must, with energy and determination to win, we are morally obligated to treat those with whom we disagree as we would have them treat us: with civility and respect.

This is what I try to do, though not always with perfect success, and, as you know, what I preach to my students. Deep moral differences can be gravely dangerous to social solidarity and cohesion. Those differences cannot, however, be eliminated without destroying liberty–a “cure” worse than the disease.” So we must learn to live with them and manage them. Maintaining friendships across the lines of division is, I believe, part of how we do that. The moment we think that maintaining such friendships constitutes a “sell out” of the causes to which we are dedicated, we are in deep trouble. There are very good reasons we must not “break our bonds of affection.”

One more thing on the Reason Rally. A few days ago Signs of the Times featured a post about how its organizers refused to host a debate between Richard Dawkins and William Lane Craig. Now, if they don’t want any Christians there defending themselves, that’s their right I guess. It’s their party. However, by then turning around and inviting the *Westboro Baptist Church protestors to be there (which they did), they’re revealing their strategy. It’s not hard to see why they would want to do it this way. It’s a lot safer for them represent “religion” with a sideshow circus act than it is to have an actual (and intellectual) main event.

*Click here to get an idea of what Reason Ralliers wish religious people were like.

Dr. Jerry Coyne explains:

. . .

The absence of real choice (ed: or free will) also has implications for religion. Many sects of Christianity, for example, grant salvation only to those who freely choose Jesus as their savior. And some theologians explain human evil as an unavoidable byproduct of God’s gift of free will. If free will goes, so do those beliefs. But of course religion won’t relinquish those ideas, for such important dogma is immune to scientific advances.

Finally, on the lighter side, knowing that we don’t have free will can perhaps temper our sense of regret or self-recrimination, since we never had real choices in our past. No, we couldn’t have had that V8, and Robert Frost couldn’t have taken the other road.

Although science strongly suggests that free will of the sort I defined doesn’t exist, this view is unpopular because it contradicts our powerful feeling that we make real choices. In response, some philosophers—most of them determinists who agree with me that our decisions are preordained—have redefined free will in ways that allow us to have it. I see most of these definitions as face-saving devices designed to prop up our feeling of autonomy. To eliminate the confusion produced by multiple and contradictory concepts of free will, I propose that we reject the term entirely and adopt the suggestion of the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky: Instead of saying my decision arises from free will, we might say, “My decision was determined by internal forces I do not understand.”

. . .

I wonder if there are greater implications to this discovery that we’re not considering here. Tom Gilson explained in the last issue of Salvo:

Science journalists must love this reductionist story; they keep telling it over and over again. Four years ago, for example, the Washington Post reported on brain research and ethics, telling us that when volunteers thought about donating money to charity, their brain scans revealed that

the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.²

The article went on to wonder about the “troubling questions” this gave rise to:

Reducing morality and immorality to brain chemistry—rather than free will—might diminish the importance of personal responsibility. Even more important, some wonder whether the very idea of morality is somehow degraded if it turns out to be just another evolutionary tool that nature uses to help species survive and propagate.

See: Hunter-Gatherer Nut Cases: Let’s Just Reduce Our Altruism, Morals & Love to Brain Waves by Tom Gilson from Salvo 19 Winter 2011.

***Ok, I couldn’t help myself. This title made me think of Conspiracy Keanu.

This piece from author Sarah A. Hoyt is definitely worth a read. It’s quite a salvo on all of this “war on women” talk.

Let me tell you what war is, okay?

War is where the enemy decimates your numbers – like, say in China where abortion is killing mostly females.

War is where you are kept from learning – like in most Arab countries, where women have restrictions placed on their education.

War is where your houses are burned, your children taken away into slavery, your goods looted, and you are dragged away in chains.

In the United States, right now, women have preferential treatment – by law – in any company that gets federal funds (which heaven help us, right now, is most of them.)  Women live longer than men.  Cancers that affect females get more money and more attention than those that affect only men.  Women have the right to be sole deciders on abortion, and if they decide to keep the child and make the man pay, he pays.  (This by the way is a complete reversal of the “penalty” of sex which used to fall mostly on women.)  And if he doesn’t pay, he goes to jail.  Divorce courts award custody to mothers overwhelmingly.  Oh, and in college campuses, women outnumber men.

If this is war it is war on men.  And I’ve had just about enough of everyone who claims otherwise.

And please don’t come back and say women have to carry babies and this is unfair.  Or that men are stronger and this is unfair.  Or that…  This is NOT kindergarten.  LIFE is unfair.  NATURE is unfair.  Civilization and society can only go so far to compensate for the basic inequality of nature.  It is not the job of nature or government to turn us all into neuters with the exact same aptitudes and abilities.  And I, for one, am glad.  If you’re not, consider your relationship with your own gender.  I suggest your war is mostly internal.

Read the entire post at her website: War Is Hell

Blogger Wintery Knight brings to attention this article at Public Discourse. Vanderbilt’s Right to Despise Christianity:

Vanderbilt University has decided that Christian student groups that hold traditional Christian religious views are not welcome on campus. They will no longer be recognized as valid student organizations. Vanderbilt’s reason is that such groups require that their leaders be Christian—that is, that their leaders embrace certain core principles of Christianity and try to live according to these principles. In Vanderbilt’s view, religious beliefs and standards “discriminate” against those students who do not subscribe to them. Therefore, student religious groups with religious beliefs and standards are banned.

The situation would be unbelievable—were it not true. continue reading . . .

Salvo subscribers will remember this story from the last issue when A. W. R. Hawkins wrote about it (Members Only: Can an Atheist Join a Christian Campus Fellowship?). It seems that the situation has progressed since then. We made a fake ad attempting to poke fun at Vanderbilt and its idiotic policy. I mean, are they gonna let someone who hates chess and doesn’t know anything about the game be the captain of the chess club?

This situation is starting to get less funny.

From Salvo 19: