There are many who despise atheist professor of philosophy, Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design, and even want to see him fired. He explains:
The degree to which I have been attacked is actually pretty ludicrous. I gave a public lecture on intelligent design here at the University of Colorado, and a number of the school’s biology professors demanded that I be fired.
Perhaps such intolerance should become grounds for their own firing. However, in this present politically correct (PC) climate, this is not likely. Instead, PC enables intolerance of a different nature. Monton explains that:
Some atheists exhibit a fundamentalism that prevents them from even imagining that someone reasonable, rational and intelligent could hold views different from their own.
I find the arguments of the opponents of ID too emotionally driven and not as intellectually robust as one would hope. I get upset with my fellow atheists who present bad arguments against intelligent design and then expect everyone to believe that they have somehow resolved the debate with these bad arguments.
No wonder he is hated by the PC crowd! This brings to mind the many dogmatic, atheistic assertions that evolution is a proven fact, beyond discussion, or that the multiverse is an adequate explanation for the fine-tuning of the cosmos. Meanwhile, Monton maintains that the theories of:
Infinite universes are insufficient when it comes to explaining away the apparent design of our own universe.
Monton was recently asked, in an interview conducted by Salvo Magazine, what type of evidence would lead him to fully embrace intelligent design. He responded:
Now, if it is found that [a non-material] mind plays a role in our brain processes alone, that by itself wouldn’t make me believe in God, though it would certainly make me more open to the idea. But if we were to discover that mind is intervening in other places in the world besides our brain processes, then that would pretty much be the smoking gun (Salvo Supplement, Fall 2013, 50).
Monton wants evidence that a non-material mind is interacting with a material, neutrally-wired brain, and I think that such evidence is available.
The late neuroscientist, Wilder Penfield, was a dualist. He found evidence for the brain-mind distinction. He would electrically stimulate the brain but noted that there were responses that seemed to be extra-physical:
Penfield would stimulate electrically the proper motor cortex of the conscious patients and challenge them to keep one hand from moving when the current was applied. The patient would seize this hand with the other hand and struggle to hold it still. Thus one hand under the control of the electrical current and the other hand under the control of the patient’s mind fought against each other. Penfield risked the explanation that the patient had not only a physical brain that was stimulated to action but also a nonphysical reality that interacted with the brain (Dinesh D’Souza, Life After Death: The Evidence, 108).
Penfield found that his patients could distinguish between responses that had been electrically stimulated from those self-stimulated:
Invariably the patient would respond, by saying, “I didn’t do that. You did…No matter how much Penfield probed the cerebral cortex, he said, “There is no place…where electrical stimulation will cause a patient to believe or to decide.” That’s because those functions originate in the conscious self, not the brain. A lot of subsequent research has validated this. When Roger Sperry and his team studied the differences between the brain’s right and left hemispheres, they discovered the mind has a causal power independent of the brain’s activities. This led Sperry to conclude materialism was false (J.P. Moreland, interviewed by Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator, 258).
If the brain is entirely a physical entity, we should expect that every type of mental activity could be stimulated, but this isn’t the case. While researchers have been able to stimulate a vast array of neural reactions, they haven’t been able to stimulate thoughts or beliefs.
Also, the very notion of freewill contradicts strict materialism. It affirms the fact that our choices aren’t totally determined by chemical-electrical responses, suggesting that there must be another reality present in order to explain it
The freewill problem is so daunting for the materialist – one who believes that everything is matter and energy. His narrow worldview leaves no room for freewill, something self-initiated, and therefore, many opt to deny its reality. Biologist E.O. Wilson writes:
The hidden preparation of mental activity gives the illusion of free will.
Illusion? If freewill is an illusion, we are merely dialoguing with sophisticated but morally non-responsible bio-chemical machines. (Jokingly, I tell such people that I don’t talk to machines – a reasonable choice, I think!)
Materialism requires the denial of dualism – the mind-brain distinction. It also requires the denial of near-death-experiences (NDEs), which strongly suggest the existence of a body-independent mind.
Raymond Moody published Life after Life in 1975 based upon 150 interviews with people who had claimed NDEs. Cardiologist and assistant professor at Emory University School of Medicine, Michael Sabom, had been highly skeptical. However,
Over a five year period he interviewed and compiled data on 116 persons who had had a close brush with death. Of these, 71 reported one form or another of near-death experience…Sabom conducted extended interviews with the ten who had detailed recollections, either of resuscitations or surgery. The results were astonishing. In every case, the accounts jibed with standard medical procedures; moreover, where medical records were available, the records of the procedures and the accounts of the patients perfectly matched. In all of these cases, [unconscious] patients observed details that they could not possibly have observed from their physical vantage point. (Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence, 103-104)
Materialism also denies the testimonies of many indigenous cultures who have claimed extra-body experiences.
Our sense of having an unchanging personal identity, despite that fact that almost all of our molecules are replaced every several years, and our bodies undergo vast changes over the years, seems to suggest that we also possess something unchanging – a non-material soul. Even if we suddenly lose both of our legs, we still regard ourselves as the same person.
Meanwhile, it seems that a mind-brain distinction would best explain all of the above evidences.
Daniel, I ordered that book through the library. I can check the bibliography then. I appreciate your help.
Thank you for your post Daniel. Brad was my speaker for CU’s Philosophy Club…and a very thoughtful one as well. While discussing his take on Personal Identity through moral intuitions, we discused the variety of opinions about the existence of the soul/immaterial mind, even among Christians.
Question: do you have an original source for Penfield’s work? As I am in the middle of Michael Tooley’s Metaphisics class, and just finishing up on “mind”, I would like to give him that as something to think about.
Thanks,
Lisa
Lisa, I’m sorry, but the only two references I have for Penfield’s work are the two sources I have already noted in my post.
Thank you for responding Daniel. I may scrounge around and see if I can find the original article. Sorry, but Salvo won’t go far for Tooley. 😉
Lisa, I tried to find my copy of D’Souza’s book to find his reference. Sadly, I couldn’t.
Once again, a professor of philosophy is trying to tell real scientists, ‘Yer doin’ it rong.’ ID is religion because it is a faith-based position. It’s not science. Evolution is science, the best science, a science better informed that the understanding that produces cell phones and computers. ID is not equivalent to a scientific theory but it’s opposite – a belief in appearances informed by assumptions and wishful thinking. When Monton fails to account for the overwhelming evidence that leads us to concluding evolution is true, he tries to shift the blame for this failure he makes, he endorses, he promotes, on to others and claims the fault lies with their shortcomings. And you, Daniel, are no different in tactics. It’s so tedious because it is dishonest if we’re trying to figure out how reality works. But that’s not the motivation for either Monton or religious apologists, is it? (It’s to find support for your religious beliefs.)
Tildeb: “ID is not equivalent to a scientific theory but
it’s opposite – a belief in appearances informed by assumptions and wishful thinking.”
There are several problems with this statement:
1. All science deals with appearances – what can be detected, perceived, quantified and replicated.
2. Admittedly, we do proceed with assumptions, but all experimentation is guided by theories, assumptions, worldviews, or paradigms. None of us perceive reality directly. Instead, we perceive through our lenses – our paradigms or gestalts. (Our brains are not blank.) Instead, the question therefore becomes this – “Which set of lenses brings reality best into focus, and which lenses obscure reality?” In this regards, I
think that the Christian faith offers an excellent set of lenses.
One indication of this is the statement of British scientist Robert Clark:
“However we may interpret the fact, scientific development has only occurred in Christian culture. The ancients had brains as good as ours. In all civilizations—Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, India, Rome, Persia, China and so on—science developed to a certain point and then stopped. It is easy to argue speculatively that, perhaps, science might have been able to develop in the absence of Christianity, but in fact, it never did. And no wonder. For the non-Christian world believed that there was something ethically wrong about science.” (“Christian Belief and Science,” quoted by Henry F. Schaefer, 14)
Also, I have found that C.S. Lewis’ comments about the
Christian lens to be very revealing:
“I believe in Christianity as I believe in the sun—not only because I see it,
but because by it I see everything else.” (Guinness, 27)
This has also been verified repeatedly by my own personal
experience.
Note the problem in comprehension here: I said ID is “a belief in appearances” that you thinks means “deals with appearances” – making ID equivalent to science. It’s not because it doesn’t investigate these appearances of design but simply lays a conclusion over them: because it looks designed, it must be designed by a Designer (blessed be His name… assumed by almost everyone who believes this except for disingenuous atheists, faitheists, apologists, and accommodationists like Monton).
Experimentation is useless if we use steadfast belief to be our arbitrator. We must use reality to be our arbitrator (to the very best of our limited abilities) for it to be considered science. That’s why empiricism plays such an important role, as does some means of verifiability independent of the person doing the science. That’s why teh method of science is to try to figure out how reality works for everyone everywhere all the time before we begin to invest great confidence in explanations we derive from this arbitrating, adjudicating reality.
But this isn’t how ID proponents work. They don’t submit experimentation for peer review that successfully isolates and defends the designing factor variable. They don’t offer us any means for verification (other than insist that the Designer did it). They don’t provide experimentation for independent verification. They don;t account for contrary data. They try everything in their power to do an end-around the scientific method by avoiding it, by avoiding criticism and proper journal review, by avoiding having to show its explanatory power through repeatability of its experiments, avoiding any means to falsify its conclusions, failing to demonstrate how its explanatory power increases human knowledge by offering us new avenues of inquiry, by avoiding going through the critical review of the scientific community and utterly failing in every regard to build scientific consensus by overwhelming data explanatory in its favour; instead, they try to excuse their lack of science by proclaiming there is some great scientific conspiracy at work that has EXPELLED those who have demonstrated their failed scientific approach to inform ID with anything other than false confidence.
ID is not some banished hypothesis but a failed one that explains nothing. It asserts a belief and fails to substantiate it at every turn. Sure, some proponents have argued sophisticated complexity suggest irreduciblility but these suggestions have been shown to be factually wrong. In good science, we throw away failed hypotheses; in religion we grasp them every tighter and call them faith as if this were a virtue rather than the vice it is.
When you peer through the lens of belief using this methodology, you can convince yourself of anything. When you look at reality through the method of science, you can’t. The former is a guaranteed way to fool yourself because you allow no means to differentiate delusion from reality; the latter provides you with a method that does. And that’s why r3eligion produces zero knowledge while science continues to pump out technologies, applications, and therapies that have the bad manners to work for everyone everywhere all the time. These are not equivalent methods because they do not produce equivalent knowledge. And that’s why the conclusion of ID are held in scientific contempt, and anyone who continues to promote it in the face of its glaring scientific weakness are held to be less than honest, less concerned with understanding how reality works than upholding beliefs about it. And those who suggest ID is an equivalent kind of ‘lens’ through which to view reality has already stopped looking out there and has replaced reality with a personal religious belief to be its substitute.
Tildeb, I have read many such allegations that ID is not
science, while the naturalistic paradigm is science. I fail to see anything of weight or consequence in any of these arguments.
You are guided by your naturalistic paradigm to understand nature/creation, while we are guided by a supernaturalistic one (ID).
Ironically, there is not one shred of evidence that would
support a naturalistic worldview. (While I think that there is much that can be said for ID, as many atheists have acknowledged. In calling them “accommodationists,”
you are being needlessly judgmental.)
In fact, by its very nature, naturalism is anti-science.
Whatever naturalistic explanation that might be offered falls prey to the problem of infinite regress. Explanations always require a prior explanation, ad infinitum. Besides, the naturalistic explanations are invariably inadequate,
because they fail to postulate a cause that can account for the effect.
However, ID avoids this by positing an eternal, omnipotent
God who requires no prior explanation.
One can find bigotry on both sides of the culture war.
Evangelicals should, however, really refrain from judging other people
http://lotharlorraine.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/evangelicalism-intellectual-honesty-and-academic-freedom/
Otherwise, it is stunning that Daniel gave us a very one-sided picture of the free-will question.
Bejamin Libet and many after him carried out experiments strongly suggesting that decisions are first made in our brain:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet
Greetings.
Lothar, What if our electro-chemical reaction outruns our responses?
If there isn’t room for an individual’s freedom of thought, and spirituality, then the world is doomed – well and truly doomed!
I agree! I don’t think that the belief that our thinking is totally bio-chemically determined will further society. Instead, it will enslave it. If we are merely animals or machines, albeit sophisticated, then we can be treated as animals or machines.