Atheist-materialist Dr. Steven Novella is confident: all of our experiences and awareness arise from brain matter. There is no soul, no immaterial mind, separate from the brain itself. According to Dr. Novella, a neurologist at Yale, the debate is over, and all that is left to do is to eradicate a few stubborn pockets of resistance to the theory that the mind is merely a secretion of the brain, just as bile is a secretion of the liver. Dr. Novella declares:

Materialist neurologist Dr. Steven Novella recently took Deepak Chopra to task for Chopra’s support for mind-body dualism. Chopra, a respected physician and professor of medicine who has written and lectured extensively on spirituality in medicine, had pointed out the numerous problems raised by a dogmatic materialist understanding of the mind-brain problem. Materialists believe that the mind in a sense doesn’t exist as a separate entity; it’s merely a state of the brain, caused entirely by neurons and neurochemistry. Novella states:

P.Z. Myers recently put up another post supporting censorship of criticism of Darwinism in public education. Democratically elected school board officials in Florida and Texas are moving closer to policies that would include teaching students that some aspects of Darwin’s theory can be questioned scientifically. In other words, they’re proposing that Darwinism can be taught just like any other scientific theory. Florida State School Board Member Linda Taylor put it this way: I would support teaching evolution, but with all its warts. I think that some of the facts have been questioned by evolutionists themselves. I would want them taught as theories. That’s important. They could be challenged by others and the kids could then be taught critical thinking and Read More ›

Mac Johnson is a columnist at Human Events who writes columns with which I often agree. Last month he posted a column with which I, and many commentators on his blog, disagree. His column, Intelligent Design and Other Dumb Ideas, attacks a theory not held by any advocate of Intelligent Design. Perhaps I can help clear up his misunderstanding. Intelligent Design in biology is a straightforward idea — one that Mr. Johnson, who is a medical researcher and is well acquainted with the methods of science, should have no trouble getting right. Understanding what advocates of intelligent design are saying is a necessary prelude to a thoughtful critique, which Mr. Johnson has not yet offered.

Juno Walker at Letters from Vrai has responded to my post Dr. Pigliucci and Fundamentalism in Science Education. Dr Massimo Pigliucci published an essay in The McGill Journal of Education in which he made the absurd claim that effective science education would dissuade students from a belief in Heaven. I pointed out in my post that Heaven wasn’t exactly a proper subject for the scientific method and that the assertion that science education was even applicable to a belief in Heaven was fundamentalism — a kind of atheist fundamentalism. The conflation of methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism — science and atheism — is no more acceptable pedagogy than the conflation of science and creationism. Atheism and creationism are philosophical inferences, Read More ›