10.28.08
ID confusing the issues
Creationists declare war over the brain
In June, James Porter Moreland, a professor at the Talbot School of Theology near Los Angeles and a Discovery Institute fellow, fanned the flames with Consciousness and the Existence of God. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about consciousness,” he writes, “and how it might contribute to evidence for the existence of God in light of metaphysical naturalism’s failure to provide a helpful explanation.” Non-materialist neuroscience provided him with this helpful explanation: since God “is” consciousness, “the theist has no need to explain how consciousness can come from materials bereft of it. Consciousness is there from the beginning.”
To properly support dualism, however, non-materialist neuroscientists must show the mind is something other than just a material brain. To do so, they look to some of their favourite experiments, such as research by Schwartz in the 1990s on people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Schwartz used scanning technology to look at the neural patterns thought to be responsible for OCD. Then he had patients use “mindful attention” to actively change their thought processes, and this showed up in the brain scans: patients could alter their patterns of neural firing at will.
From such experiments, Schwartz and others argue that since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material. In fact, these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology – the material brain is changing the material brain.
We have been critical of scientists on the brain/mind question, but it is important to redress the balance a little bit by protesting the pernicious confusion created by injecting ID into still another subject.
THE ID ARGUMENT DOESN’T HELP. Intelligent design is an ancient metaphysical argument, whatever its status, honored by such as Socrates disputing the Pre-Socratics.
Its metaphysical status has subjected to critical skepticism, to be sure. We can’t arrive at any conclusion, we can’t take an inch of ground in the dialectic arising over its status. But at least its history shows a kind of hoary venarability.
But, now, what do we have? A massive conservative thinktank movement trying to leverage the inevitable confusions of science here with the whole crud of sophistical and sly manipulation of an argument that once drew Kant’s respect but is now an attempt to deceive innocent people without philosophical training.
Now we face the prospect of the same crappy tactics in the question of dualism and the brain. It is worse than censorship because it eliminates discourse not included in the large propaganda routines. Creating the false impression that the problems with brain science are once again grounds for stupid theology from the right…it gets exhausting and destroys those who won’t conform to the manipulation of public opinion.
I don’t think they will get away with it in the field of neuroscience. If materialism is incoherent, the alternative from the opposite camp is worse.