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

I have a hard copy of the article but have not had a chance to read it yet.
I do know that many authors of studies like this are often crticized for an
overzealous interpretation of their findings.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christine Smith" <christine_mb_smith@yahoo.com>
To: <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Monday, December 17, 2007 11:08 PM
Subject: 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 Tue Dec 18 05:40:11 2007