There is a new book out Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves by James LeFanu (HT TG). I have not read this book (yet anyway) - but it has received a fair bit of attention lately. It was also cited by AN Wilson in the interview Scot linked to in Weekly Meanderings last Saturday.
James LeFanu is a medical doctor, a general practioner, in London. He also writes a weekly column for the Daily Telegraph. The central theme of Why Us? questions the validity of an "exclusively materialist view of Man." This doesn't make LeFanu a creationist or a "closet creationist". In fact he points out in his blog that he doesn't deny the basic facts:
This is not to deny the 'fact' of evolution as there can be nothing more self evident than that the history of the universe is an evolutionary history - from the simplest elements of matter to the evermore complex. Nor is it to deny the 'fact' of natural selection, as again it is self evident that nature selects the strong and robust over the frail and vulnerable.
Yet he claims:
But the findings of genetics and neuroscience of the recent past have changed all that, buttressing the commonsensical scepticism about Darwin's (evolutionary) 'Reason for Everything' with the extraordinary revelations and hard empirical data of the Genome Projects and the findings of sophisticated brain scanning studies. Memorising, perceiving and interpreting the world out there. Together they tear away at science's façade of knowing to reveal the depth of our radical ignorance of the most elementary principles of genetic inheritance and brain function.
You can find an interesting review of the book from The Literary Review here and a more critical review from The New Scientist here.
Is there a profound mystery in nature of human experience and conciousness?
From the Literary Review article by John Cornwell:
His aim is to debunk purely materialist, reductionist accounts of what it means to be a human person. ... Daniel C Dennett boasts of having 'explained' consciousness in a purely materialist, scientific fashion, yet neglects to describe its central mystery. In essence, [LeFanu] argues, Dennett's failure consists in his inability to explain how the 'monotonous firing of neuronal circuits can give rise to qualitatively different experiences as the smell of a rose or a Bach fugue'. Dennett would say that the 'onward march of science will decipher the code ... then all will become clear'. But another philosopher cited by Le Fanu, Colin McGinn, responds that such is the nature of consciousness that science, in principle and forever, cannot explain it, since objective descriptions can never entirely encapsulate subjective states.
LeFanu takes a somewhat dualistic approach separating body and soul as he wrestles with what it means to be human - and Cornwell disagrees with this in his review. Yet he notes:
To be unhappy with mind-body dualism, however, is not necessarily to be on the side of the demons. One of the interesting aspects of contemporary neuroscience is its insistence on the idea of the soul being 'embodied'. This is nothing new. Aristotle believed that the soul was the 'form of the body', and he was followed in this by Thomas Aquinas. It has taken new brain science to challenge Cartesian dualism, which reduced the body to a kind of machine, while relegating the soul to a kind of spooky stuff. The idea of an embodied soul is closer to Judaic and early Christian construals of the human person than Descartes.
What do you think - is there a body-soul duality or is the "soul" embodied an inseparable from material existence?
And - whether the soul is embodied or not - is the nature of human experience and conciousness ultimately the most significant evidence for design in the universe?
If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail [at] att.net.
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TRavis, I agree, dreams to exist in a sort of half-way house. My point should have been that our conscious self - i.e. the thing that we consider to be ourselves, is not existent during the time period when we are fully non-consciouss. i.e. coma/deep sleep. This seems to counter the idea of a temporally continuous, non-material soul.
It appears to me (emphasis on appers, in can't be sure, im en environmental scientist, not a neuro-scientist!!!) that what holds us together is the memory of what has occurred before. Dreams seem to be a type of partly consciouss sleep where we can form memories. Without formation of memories, we'd be a 'new' person each day. See the famous medical case of Clive Wilding for more details on what happens when memories don't form.
I'm also in a hurry, and my previous post contained more spelling and grammar errors than a text message. . .. apologies.
Why the jump from "this isn't understood scientifically yet" to "this can't ever be understood scientifically"?
Before the 1700's, was it reasonable to say that God (or Thor, or the Thunderbirds, or Zeus, or Seth, or what have you) caused lightning? No, the proper response to "What causes lighting?" was "Darn if I, or anyone else, knows... yet." Then Franklin came along...
RJS (#8):
Nonreductive physicalism: "mind" is an emergent property of neuorobiology, which is capable of exerting downward causation on the biological system from which it emerges, and hence cannot be reduced to that system. Representative theologians: Nancey Murphy, William Hasker, Joel Green
Reductive physicalism: "mind" is an epiphenomenon of neurobiology. If we had all the information, "mind" could be explained reductively entirely with reference to neurobiology.
Holistic dualism: "soul" is a spiritual property imparted by God in some way apart from biology, but the soul is inextricably intertwined with the body (biology) in such a way that neither soul nor body exist independently. Representative theologian: John Cooper
Substance dualism: "soul" is a separate substance from the body that can exist independent of the body. Representative theologian: J.P. Moreland
Re: Ted M. Gossard (#3)
One thing that impressed me in my work in campus ministry was the fluidness of "knowing"; or to put in other terms, the role of passion and excitement in knowing. I saw this most clearly in seeing Cal De Witt speak about Creation to hard headed scientists. The "wonder and awe" he expressed in his presentation of naturalistic phenomena as just that, helped him pierce the hard skins of some of these folks. Once he caught them up in the wonder and awe of the relationships he described, they were much more amenable to what they might be about. (Please note that this was not any kind of instantaneous conversion, but a foot in the door sort of pheneomenon).
Peace,
Randy G.
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