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The Spiritual Brain: An Argument Against Materialism
“The fact is materialism is stalled. It neither has any useful hypotheses for the human mind or spiritual experiences nor comes close to developing any. Just beyond lies a great realm that cannot even be entered via materialism, let alone explored.” (xiv) Canadian neuroscientist Mario Beauregard notes at the beginning of his book The Spiritual Brain, co-authored with journalist Denyse O’Leary, that he belongs to a small minority of nonmaterialist neuroscientists. He is upfront about the fact that he “went into neuroscience in part because [he] knew experientially that such things [religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences (RSME)] can indeed happen.” Driven by his curiosity about what is happening to the brain during RSME, Beauregard and his colleague studied the spiritual Read More ›
You Just Can’t Make This Stuff Up
This Just In: People are smarter than monkeys. Film at 11.
MSNBC Jumps on the Transhumanist / New-Age Evolutionary Bandwagon
MSNBC loves to promote the view that humans evolved from anthropoid ancestors (see here or here for a couple examples). Now MSNBC has created an online exhibit (and accompanying article) entitled “Before and After Humans” that not only promotes standard views of humans evolution, but also supports transhumanism: the view that humans will evolve into a new, higher species. MSNBC’s “possible futur[e]” for the human species goes something like this: Within one million years, global gene mixing eliminates the races and the “Unihumans” develop a global “monoculture.” That sounds reasonable enough. Next some global catastrophe kills off large portions of humanity, and the “Survivalistians” must adapt to extreme conditions, evolving “night-vision” and “radiation-shielding skin.” If that sounds a little weird, Read More ›
Baylor University Denies Research Scientist’s Academic Freedom
“Baylor University has proven yet again that academic freedom has been thrown off campus and academic persecution is now the norm,” said Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin in reaction to Baylor University’s deletion of a professor’s research website, which focused on evolutionary systems and informatics. “It is simply unconscionable that a major university would so trample a scientist’s right to freedom of scientific inquiry,” Baylor University has taken offline the Evolutionary Informatics Laboratory website that had been administered by Robert Marks, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor, because the administration claimed there were anonymous complaints linking the lab to intelligent design.
Nine Gorilla Teeth and a Confession of Evolutionist Ignorance
As I’ve noted before, it is often only after Darwinists report a new fossil discovery that they retroactively admit how little they previously knew about a given evolutionary transition. This happened again recently as a team of paleoanthropologists reported finding 6-7 million year-old fossil gorilla teeth that Nature News claimed “helps to fill in a huge gap in the fossil record.” Accompanying this find, however, was a striking admission of ignorance regarding the evolution of humans: “The human fossil record goes back 6 to 7 million years, but we know nothing about how the human line actually emerged from apes,” the researchers said in a statement on Wednesday that accompanied publication of their study in the journal Nature. “Chororapithecus gives Read More ›