Mind over Matter
The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the
Soul
by Mario Beauregard & Denyse O’Leary
HarperOne, 2007
(368 pages, $25.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Tom Gilson
Mario Beauregard wants to overturn the assumptions of his discipline. “Neuroscience today is materialist,” he writes. “The mind is assumed to be a mere illusion generated by the workings of the brain. Some materialists even think you should not in fact use terminology that implies your mind exists.”
You could hardly range farther from common human experience than that, but it’s mainstream neuroscience. Last May, the Washington Post quoted a Harvard scientist’s view that “multiple experiments suggest that morality arises from basic brain activities. Morality . . . is not a brain function elevated above our baser impulses.”
And in a June New York Times report, the prominent neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran said that belief in the soul as “an immaterial spirit that occupies individual brains and that only evolved in humans . . . is complete nonsense . . . basically superstition.”
This is philosophical materialism at work, and it can certainly be challenged on philosophical grounds. Beauregard, who teaches at the University of Montreal, and his co-author, Denyse O’Leary, have chosen, however, to confront it on its own terms. Science, they say, supports belief in immaterial reality.
The Soul’s Debunkers
The Spiritual Brain is written for a general non-specialist audience, though frequent “View from Neuroscience” sidebars supply more technical information. Its first goal is to debunk the soul’s debunkers: scientists who claim that religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences (RSMEs, in the authors’ shorthand) can be fully explained through various materialist approaches.
Several such approaches have been proposed. Some scientists say that a “God Gene” predisposes certain people to RSMEs, others that RSMEs are manifestations of temporal lobe epilepsy.
Still others suggest that they can be triggered by a “God Helmet,” which applies a low-level magnetic field to the temporal lobes and induces mystical states. Richard Dawkins tried the “God Helmet,” hoping finally to get his own taste of the God experience. Not much happened. He was “very disappointed.”
As it turns out, these theories are easy targets: They simply lack supporting evidence. The original “God Helmet” research, for example, was marred by expectations of spiritual experiences, which were planted in the subjects’ minds by the researchers. Swedish scientists tried to reproduce the effect under more rigorously controlled conditions, and came up quite empty. Temporal lobe epilepsy and “God Gene” theories have fared no better under close scrutiny.
Tom Gilson is the National Field Director of Ratio Christi, a student apologetics alliance with a presence on over one hundred college campuses. He is the co-editor of True Reason: Responding to the Irrationality of the New Atheism (Kregel), and he writes the Thinking Christian blog at thinkingchristian.net, as well as the monthly "Worldview and You" column at BreakPoint.org. He, his wife Sara, and their two college-aged children live in Lebanon, Ohio, where Tom and Sara currently attend the Countryside Church of the Nazarene.
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