God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (50 page)

34
. Jared Diamond, “Vengence Is Ours,”
New Yorker
(April 21, 2008): 74–87.

35
. Dan Barker,
Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists
(Berkeley, CA: Ulysses Press, 2008).

36
. Rodney Stark,
For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch Hunts, and the End of Slavery
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 365; Dinesh D'Souza,
What's So Great about Christianity?
(Washington, DC: Regnery, 2007), pp. 70–72; D'Souza,
Life after Death: The Evidence
, pp. 195–98.

37
. Hector Avalos,
Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship
(Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011).

38
. Ibid., pp. 286–87.

39
. Collins,
The Language of God
, p. 218.

40
. C. S. Lewis,
Mere Christianity
(Westwood, NJ: Barbour, 1952 [New York: HarperCollins, 2001]), p. 21.

41
. Collins,
The Language of God
, p. 29.

42
. Sam Harris,
The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
(New York: Free Press, 2010), p. 13.

43
. Steven Pinker,
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
(New York: Viking, 2002).

44
. William Grassie,
The New Sciences of Religion: Exploring Spirituality from the Outside In and Bottom Up
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 91.

45
. Shermer,
The Science of Good and Evil
, p. 31.

46
. Collins,
The Language of God
, p. 23.

47
. Harris,
The Moral Landscape
, p. 170.

48
. J. M. Nunez et al., “Intentional False Responding Shares Neural Substrates with Response Conflict and Cognitive Control,”
Neuroimage
25, no. 1 (2005): 267–77.

49
. Harris,
The Moral Landscape
, p. 97; K. A. Kiel et al., “Limbic Abnormalities in Affective Processing by Criminal Psychopaths as Revealed by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging,”
Biological Psychiatry
50, no. 9 (2001): 677–84.

50
. Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene
, pp. 3, 201.

51
. D'Souza,
Life after Death: The Evidence
, p. 181.

52
. For a nice review of the history of morality and an outline of a proposal for a natural morality, see Jeff Schweitzer and Giuseppe Notarbartolo-di-Sciara,
Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World
(Los Angeles: Jacquie Jordan, 2009).

11. MATTER AND MIND

1
. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,
Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
(New York: Basic Books, 1999).

2
. Dinesh D'Souza,
Life after Death: The Evidence
(Washington, DC: Regnery, 2009), p. 106.

3
. Ibid., p. 107.

4
. Ibid., p. 110.

5
. Steven Pinker,
How the Mind Works
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 21.

6
. Ibid., p. 121.

7
. Frank J. Tipler,
The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead
(New York: Anchor Books, 1994).

8
. Patricia Smith Churchland,
Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).

9
. D. Kapogiannis et al., “Cognitude and Neural Foundations of Religious Belief,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
106, no. 12 (2009): 4876–81.

10
. William Penfield and T. Rasmussen,
The Cerebral Cortex of Man: A Clinical Study of Localization of Function
(New York: MacMillan, 1950).

11
. David E. Comings,
Did Man Create God? Is Your Spiritual Brain at Peace with Your Thinking Brain?
(Duarte, CA: Hope Press, 2008), pp. 348–54.

12
. K. Dewhurst and A. W. Beard, “Sudden Religious Conversions in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy,”
British Journal of Psychiatry
117 (1970): 497–507; Comings,
Did Man Create God?
pp. 355–66.

13
. V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee,
Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
(New York: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 179.

14
. Comings,
Did Man Create God?
pp. 362–66. See Comings for a full discussion of the connection between religious experiences and the brain.

15
. William Grassie,
The New Sciences of Religion: Exploring Spirituality from the Outside In and Bottom Up
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 104.

16
. Andrew B. Newberg and Eugene G. D'Aquili,
The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999); Andrew B. Newberg et al.,
Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief
(New York: Ballantine Books, 2001); Andrew B. Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman,
Born to Believe: God, Science, and the Origin of Ordinary and Extraordinary Beliefs
(New York: Free Press, 2007); Andrew B. Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman,
How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist
(New York: Ballantine Books, 2009); Andrew B. Newberg,
Principles of Neurotheology
(Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010).

17
. Newberg et al.,
Why God Won't Go Away
.

18
. M. A. Persinger, “Religious and Mystical Experiences as Artifacts of Temporal Lobe Function: A General Hypothesis,”
Perceptual and Motor Skills
57 (1983): 1255–62.

19
. Pehr Granqvist et al., “Sensed Presence and Mystical Experiences Are Predicted by Suggestibility, Not by the Application of Transcranial Weak Complex Magnetic Fields,”
Neuroscience Letters
379, no. 1 (2005): 1–6.

20
. L. S. St-Pierre and M. A. Persinger, “Experimental Facilitation of the Sensed Presence Is Predicted by the Specific Patterns of the Applied Magnetic Fields, Not by Suggestibility: Reanalyses of 19 Experiments,”
International Journal of Neurosciences
116, no. 9 (2006): 1079–96.

21
. A. T. Barker et al., “Non-Invasive Magnetic Stimulation of Human Motor Cortex,”
Lancet
1, no. 8437 (1985): 1106–1107; Alvaro Pascual-Leone et al., “Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation in Cognitive Neuroscience—Virtual Lesion, Chronometry, and Functional Connectivity,”
Current Opinion in Neurobiology
10 (2000): 232–37; Mark Hallett, “Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and the Human Brain,”
Nature
406 (2000): 147–50; Vincent Walsh and Alvaro Pascual-Leone,
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: A Neurochronometrics of Mind
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

22
. See Vincent Walsh and Alan Cowey, “Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and Cognitive Neuroscience,”
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
1 (2000): 73–78 and references therein.

23
. Harris,
The Moral Landscape
, pp. 158–59.

24
. B. Libet et al., “Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Readiness-Potential): The Unconscious Initiation of a Freely Voluntary Act,”
Brain
106 (1983): 623–42.

25
. Chun Siong Soon et al., “Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain,”
Nature Neuroscience
11, no. 5 (2008): 545.

26
. Stanislas Dehaene, “Signatures of Consciousness,”
The Reality Club
, November 24, 2009,
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dehaene09/dehaene09_index.html
(accessed December 27, 2009).

27
. Bernard J. Baars, “The Conscious Access Hypothesis: Origins and Recent Evidence,”
Trends in Cognitive Science
6, no. 1 (2002): 47–52.

28
. C. M. Fischer, “If There Were No Free Will,”
Med Hypotheses
56, no. 3 (2001): 364–66; Daniel M. Wegner,
The Illusion of Conscious Will
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Daniel M. Wegner, “Précis of the Illusion of Conscious Will,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
27, no. 5 (2004): 659–92; Harris,
The Moral Landscape
, pp. 102–106.

29
. Kurt Gödel, “Some Basic Theorems on the Foundations of Mathematics and Their Implications,” in
Collected Works: Kurt Gödel, vol. 3
, ed. Solomon Feferman (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 304–23.

30
. Roger Penrose,
The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics
(Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

31
. Roger Penrose,
Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness
(Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

32
. Victor J. Stenger,
The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), pp. 273–80.

33
. Rick Grush and Patricia S. Churchland, “Gaps in Penrose's Toilings,” in
On the Contrary: Critical Essays, 1987
–
1997
, ed. Paul M. Churchland and Patricia S. Churchland (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 205–30.

34
. Solomon Feferman, “Penrose's Gödelian Argument: A Review of
Shadows of the Mind
by Roger Penrose,”
Psyche
2, no. 7 (1995); David J. Chalmers, “Can Physics Provide a Theory of Consciousness? A Review of
Shadows of the Mind
by Roger Penrose,”
Psyche
2, no. 9 (1995); Stanley A. Klein, “Is Quantum Mechanics Relevant to Understanding Consciousness? A Review of
Shadows of the Mind
by Roger Penrose,”
Psyche
2, no. 3 (1995); Tim Maudlin, “Between the Motion and the Act: A Review of
Shadows of the Mind
by Roger Penrose,”
Psyche
2, no. 2 (1995); John McCarthy, “Awareness and Understanding in Computer Programs: A Review of
Shadows of the Mind
by Roger Penrose,”
Psyche
2, no. 11 (1995); Daryl McCullough, “Can Humans Escape Gödel? A Review of
Shadows of the Mind
by Roger Penrose,”
Psyche
2, no. 4 (1995); Drew McDermott, “[Star] Penrose Is Wrong,”
Psyche
2, no. 17 (1995); Hans Moravec, “Roger Penrose's Gravitonic Brains: A Review of
Shadows of the Mind
by Roger Penrose,”
Psyche
2, no. 6 (1995); Gregory R. Mulhauser, “On the End of a Quantum Mechanical Romance,”
Psyche
2, no. 5 (1995).

35
. Roger Penrose, “Beyond the Doubting of a Shadow: A Reply to Commentaries on
Shadows of the Mind
,”
Psyche
2, no. 23 (1995).

36
. Taner Edis, “How Gödel's Theorem Supports the Possibility of Machine Intelligence,”
Minds and Machines
8 (1998): 251–62.

37
. Max Tegmark, “The Importance of Quantum Decoherence in Brain Processes,”
Physical Review E
61, no. 4 (2000): 4194–206.

38
. S. Hagan et al., “Quantum Computation in Brain Microtubules? Decoherence and Biological Feasibility,”
Physical Review E
65 (2002): 061901.

39
. Penrose,
Shadows of the Mind
.

40
. Travis John Craddock and Jack A. Tuszinski, “A Critical Assessment of the Information Processing Capabilities of Neuronal Microtubules Using Coherent Excitations,”
Journal of Biological Physics
26 (2010): 53–70.

41
. Elisabetta Collini et al., “Coherently Wired Light-Harvesting in Photosynthetic Marine Algae at Ambient Temperature,”
Nature
463 (2010): 644–47.

42
. Tegmark, “The Importance of Quantum Decoherence in Brain Processes.”

43
. Brain scans have shown that some structural changes in the brain take place near the antenna of cell phones, but while the mechanism is still unknown, it cannot be the direct result of the photons emitted by the antenna breaking chemical bonds. See Nora D. Volkow et al., “Effects of Cell Phone Radiofrequency Signal Exposure on Brain Glucose Metabolism,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
305, no. 8 (2011): 808–12.

12. METAPHOR, ATHEIST SPIRITUALITY, AND IMMANENCE

1
. Aubrey Moore, “The Christian Doctrine of God,” in
Lux Mundi
, ed. C. Gore (London: Murray, 1891), pp. 41–81.

2
. As quoted in R. C. Lewontin, “In the Beginning Was the Word,”
Science
291, no. 5507 (2001): 1263–64.

3
. Taner Edis,
An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007).