Faith and the Brain

[jackofallgeeks]

So there's an author, one Sam Harris, who I think I want to read up on. He
apparently wrote two books generally attacking faith and religion, The
End of Faith and Letters to a Christian Nation, and has now
returned to doctoral work in neurology, where he claims to be finding
more-damaging evidence. At least, that's what this
article on Time.com claims.

Harris has been making fMRI brain scans of people as he asks them different
questions from seven categories: mathematical, geographic, semantic,
factual, autobiographical, ethical and religious. (I'm not exactly sure how
'factual' differs from mathematical or geographical, but maybe it's a
miscellaneous category.) He claims that, though some concepts get 'special
treatment' in 'higher' parts of the brain, belief and disbelief are each
marked by activating two distinct parts of the brain. Belief activates the
same area that's associated with smell and pleasure, and disbelief activates
the area associated with taste and pain (or 'disgust' in general). This is
the same regardless of if the question is one of addition or the ethical
status of torture.

That's all well and good, but in particular, toward the bottom, Harris makes
the remark: "The whole thing will seem fishy to anyone who thinks we have
immaterial souls running around in our bodies." And that is what I take
issue with, actually -- because I don't see anything wrong here, and nothing
seems fishy. And I strongly believe in spiritual reality.

I guess I just don't understand why there must be a conflict between faith
and reason -- why there's a strong, implicit battle between religion and
science. I guess, in this case, I understand it almost in terms of
psychosomatic illness or, more accurately, the give and take between
physical and mental illness. Someone can develop symptoms for diseases they
don't have if they really believe they have it. It comes down to the
fact that I believe body and soul to be a unit, and if we concede that one
part of a person's makeup and affect other parts, how is it troubling or
even really surprising that the soul and biologic brain work in concert?
Why is it even a concern at all to say, "see, your thoughts activate areas
of your brain?"

Comments

[dikaiosunh.livejournal.com]

To play devil's advocate for the conflict side...

While I think you're right that there's no necessary conflict between, say, brain scans and immortal immaterial souls, there is a sort of practical tension.

I think it's similar to why many religious folks feel that evolutionary theory is threatening. Sure, it's entirely possible to look at evolution and say, "G-d set everything up so precisely that billions of years of random interactions would create humans finally - that's WAY more bad-ass than just molding humans directly out of dust!" (full disclosure: back when I was a theist, that was essentially my position) But if you believe in evolution, there's a temptation to say, "sure G-d is *consistent* with all of this, but if we can explain how humans got to be the nifty sort of things we are without ever explicitly appealing to G-d, even if we *could* slot the divine in somewhere, it starts looking like a superfluous hypothesis."

Similarly with brain scans, etc. If we can explain everything that the mind does by reference to the brain, that doesn't rule out the soul, but it leaves it in a sort of epiphenomenal position. Souls may still be possible, but if by "working in concert" you end up meaning something like, "the brain does all this cool stuff and I guess the soul helps... er... somehow... in way that we can't observe... and that we don't need to explain anything... and thoughts activate brain areas on a 1-1 basis, so that even in principle all soul activity adds nothing to brain activity explanations..." souls may seem superfluous.

[bsgnome.livejournal.com]

I got the same reaction from that closing statement as you, in fact, I thought to myself "Funny, it seems to me that it would be the Objectivists (and/or atheists) who would get a bad taste from the notion that Faith and Reason occupy the same regions of the brain."

That said, historically, by and large, Catholicism (in general; there's no accounting for select individuals) has always been the Faith most accepting of Scientific discovery, regardless of how seemingly contrary to the Faith. So it's no wonder to me that this would be the case for us. After all, Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics, was a Catholic priest.

[surichan.livejournal.com]

I've read a bit of Sam Harris; not The End of Faith, but about half of Letter to a Christian Nation (something I picked up on a shift at B&N and had to put back down, but always wanted to finish, especially given what a short book it is). I don't remember much of Letter to a Christian Nation, but what I do remember, I remember liking. Maybe it's just that part of the agnostic in me agrees with part of the atheist in Harris, and appreciates several of his arguments. I need to pick up the book again and read it cover-to-cover.

I also remember thinking that Harris, like so many of the atheists with whom I disagree, was devoting an awful lot of his intellectual energy to actively disproving God to believers instead of just accepting within himself that he didn't believe and moving on. Maybe it's an understandable reaction, given that so many hundreds of thousands of people throughout time have had to deal with the concept of the Christian God being shoved forcibly into their lives, and now the atheists are having their justifiable revenge, trying to tear God down as much as he's been spread throughout the world.

And maybe, as so many are fond of saying, my discomfort in that kind of activity stems from the fact that agnostics are just "atheists without balls" - more content to hide behind the conciliatory wall of "c'mon, guys...nobody knows" instead of picking a side on which to fight the battle. Given my own struggles with faith (and the lack thereof), I know that to not be the case in my own life...but as with so many things, people will think whatever they want to. As for me, I think entirely too much energy is spent on trying to prove or disprove God. If there is such an entity, isn't it silly to attempt to empirically prove its existence? Let those who choose to believe believe, so long as they do not harm the freedom of others - and likewise, let those who choose to not believe not believe, so long as they also do not impinge upon the freedoms of others.

But then, to quote the great Ranter: "That's just my opinion...I could be wrong."