Re: [asa] Sam Harris: Your Brain on Faith

Yes, I read this earlier today. I find it highly
amusing that an Atheist concluded on the basis of a
scientific analysis that "faith is essentially the
same as other kinds of knowing or thinking." Doesn't
this support our claim that faith is just as
*trustworthy* a means of coming to understand
"reality" as the means by which we "know" that 2 + 2 =
4? I highly doubt that because our belief in 2 + 2 = 4
is an "operation of the brain" that he would suggest
disavowing such knowledge. So why the double standard
for religious "beliefs"? Perhaps all he was going for
was to attack dualism? But in the process, I think he
helped theism...

Would anyone else agree with this assessment?

In Christ,
Christine

--- John Walley <john_walley@yahoo.com> wrote:

> This is a very interesting article on the front page
> of CNN today.
>
>
>
> John
>
>
>
> What Your Brain Looks Like on Faith
>
> Friday, Dec. 14, 2007 By <javascript:void(0)> DAVID
> VAN BIEMA
>
> Brain scan
>
> A scan of a brain.
>
> Owen Franken / Corbis
>
>
>
> Sam Harris is best known for his barn-burning 2004
> attack on religion, The
> End of Faith, which spent 33 weeks on the New York
> Times best-seller List.
> The book's sequel, Letter to a Christian Nation also
> came out in editions
> totalling hundreds of thousands. Last Monday,
> however, the combative
> Californian produced a shorter (seven pages) and
> seemingly calmer
> publication that will be a hit if it reaches 10,000
> readers: "Functional
> Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief and Uncertainty."
> It appears in the
> respected journal Annals of Neurology. And Harris,
> 40, claims it has little
> if any connection to his popular two books.
> Believers, however, may draw
> their own conclusions - and may want to read his
> subsequent neurological
> studies even more carefully.
>
>
>
> The current paper recovers Harris's identity as a
> doctoral candidate in
> neurology at UCLA, his occupation before he
> commenced what he calls his
> "extramural affair jumping into trenches in the
> culture wars." It is an
> addition to the growing field of brain scan trials,
> and Harris thinks it may
> be the first to detail how the brain processes
> belief. At first read, it
> seems less dangerous to Christianity than to another
> cherished pillar of
> Western thought - that "objective" beliefs like "2 +
> 2 = 4" and "subjective"
> beliefs like "torture is bad" belong to entirely
> separate categories of
> thought.
>
>
>
> Harris and two co-authors ran 360 statements by 14
> adult subject whose brain
> activities were then scanned by functional magnetic
> resonance imaging (fMRI)
> devices. It suggests that within the brain pan, at
> least, the distinction
> between objective and subjective is not so
> clear-cut. Although more complex
> assertions may get analyzed in so-called "higher"
> areas of the brain, all
> seem to get their final stamp of "belief" or
> disbelief in "primitive"
> locales traditionally associated with emotions or
> taste and odor. Even "2 +
> 2 = 4," on some level, is a question of taste. Thus,
> the statement "that
> just doesn't smell right to me" may be more literal
> than we thought.
>
>
>
> Harris tested how the brain responded to assertions
> in seven categories:
> mathematical, geographic, semantic, factual,
> autobiographical, ethical and
> religious. All seven provided some useful data, but
> only the ones relating
> to math and ethics produced results clear enough to
> give a vivid picture of
> the way the simple and the complex, the subjective
> and the objective
> intertwine. Regardless of their content, statements
> that the subjects
> believed lit up the ventral medial prefrontal cortex
> (VMPC), a location in
> the brain best known for processing reward, emotion
> and taste. Equally
> "primitive" areas associated with taste, pain
> perception and disgust
> determined disbelief. "False propositions may
> actually disgust us," Harris
> writes.
>
> Is there a practical application here? He speculates
> that if belief brain
> scanning were sufficiently refined it could act as
> an accurate lie detector
> and help control for the placebo effect in drug
> design.
>
>
>
> Harris says there is no critique of faith hidden
> somewhere in his brief
> paper. But his next neurological enterprise may be
> another matter. He is
> planning an fMRI run that will concentrate
> specifically on religious faith,
> which Harris thinks he now knows how to plumb more
> deeply. He also plans to
> set up two different subject groups - the faithful
> and non-believers. "That
> way," among other things, he says, "you can ask, 'Do
> believers believe that
> Jesus was born of a virgin the same way that
> nonbelievers believe that
> Chevrolet makes cars and trucks?'" It may turn out
> that the brain treats
> religious faith as its own special category of
> belief unlike ethics and
> math.
>
>
>
> But that is not what Harris expects to find. He
> suspects the machines will
> show that "belief is belief is belief." And that
> conclusion, he admits, may
> put him at loggerheads with familiar foes. No one,
> he says, could accuse him
> or anyone else of trying to disprove God's existence
> on the basis of an
> fMRI. But faith is more vulnerable. "People who feel
> that religious faith is
> a singular operation of the brain - if they admit
> that it's an operation of
> the brain at all - would object to what I'm doing,
> since it may show that
> faith is essentially the same as other kinds of
> knowing or thinking. The
> whole thing will seem fishy to anyone who thinks we
> have immaterial souls
> running around in our bodies."
>
>
>
> Which, of course, a lot of people do. And despite
> the fact that, as Harris
> puts it, his current literary mode "is not beach
> reading," they may find
> that they are keeping up with his academic writings
> more avidly - and
> nervously - than they do his bestsellers.
>
>
>
>

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Received on Mon Dec 17 23:09:06 2007