2006 postings to Numenware are now available in book form for the low, low price of $19.95. What better belated Christmas present for your loved one or even yourself to read in the tub.

From the intro:

2006 was the year with the greatest density of neurotheological content on the blog, and these articles, taken as a whole, would I hope represent a meaningfully significant, if somewhat quirky, overview of the field.

Loyal readers of Numenware who read posts as they went up may have missed the discussion in the comments section, many of which are extremely informative. These comments have been included in the book, typos and all.

Buy Numenware 2006 from Lulu.com now. 140 pp., with an extensive (10 page) index. Digital version available for three bucks and change.

The word must be out about what Daddy’s interested in because under the tree for me at Christmas-time were two, count ‘em, two books by Andrew Newberg, MD, namely “Why We Believe What We Believe” and “Why God Won’t Go Away”. Picked up the first one and started in on Chapter 1, “The Power of Belief”. The first story was about a guy for whom a cancer drug worked when he believed it would and didn’t when he didn’t. That seems a little off-topic–the book’s supposed to be about “Why We Believe”, not “What Belief Does”, but hey, let’s give Andy the benefit of the doubt. But then he undercuts his own case by quoting estimates that such spontaneous remissions occur only one in 3,000 or perhaps as few as 100,000 medical cases. And that’s even before you’ve eliminated spontaneous remissions not associated with “belief”. Why exactly are we supposed to be so concerned with something that might, or might not, be responsible for healing some infinitesimally tiny fraction of sick people?

(more…)

I called Sam Harris’ “The End of Faith” a “critically insightful” book. Now Sam has come up with a slight volume titled Letter to a Christian Nation.

The book has a bit of an identity crisis, however. The title would indicate he’s addressing Christians, but actually, as Sam himself says, it’s meant to “arm secularists”. As a result, the book has a preaching-to-the-choir flavor. But it’s interesting to consider: what is the long-term process by which the world can be brought to stop believing in magic? In particular, is it through arguments? I doubt it. The people on either side of this divide are talking different languages.

First, we need to separate the biological and cultural tendencies towards religion. It’s widely accepted—and the premise of this blog—that religion has a heavy biological component. To the extent it does, only evolution can address that problem. But it is not biology that compels people to believe that Mary was a virgin or that poverty-stricken Africans should be taught abstinence. We can accept that we will continue to have biological tendencies that leave us in awe of the unknown, or govern the neural processes associated with personal development, while still attempting to address the culturally-dependent aspects of religion which are causing people to kill each other, among other things.

So let us draw a roadmap for achieving a society where people no longer believe in counter-productive, harmful, and obviously stupid things. Given the arc of human civilization, I suggest this roadmap needs to extend over a century or more. Such a roadmap will alert us to what needs to be done now to promote the process.

A key element is the teaching of religion to children. This was highlighted by Dawkins in The God Delusion as well as by Sam in his new book. Although there is a natural attrition away from religion even among children of religious parents (rather extreme in my family’s case, where by my count only two of eight children maintain their parents’ beliefs), it probably averages less than 25%. Those that have discarded magical beliefs, however, are unlikely to have even one child who reverts to them. The issue, then, becomes the ratio at which religious belief decays. If it is 25% per generation, over a century the number of believers would be reduced by only 60%. If, however, the attrition ratio could be raised to 50% per generation, the number of believers a hundred years later would be reduced to a manageable 10%. But how can we bring one out of two people per generation into the ranks of the “brights”?

Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris appear to believe that the right approach is to talk real loud and take no prisoners. However, as mentioned above, that is unlikely to work.

We need a more sophisticated approach. We need to manage the conversation in a way which resonates with those we are addressing. We need to control the terms of the discussion. We need to establish simple, compelling themes which will resonate. A large part of this is semiological in nature—what are the words and messages which we want to create and disseminate?

For instance, consider the message “God does not exist.” We can embellish this message with all kinds of details, as Dawkins does, rebutting each and every argument that He might in fact exist. But the believers will simply tune this out. We need a message which, jujitsu-like, take advantage of the gullibility and proclivity to believe on the part of those we are trying to address.

I like messages of the form “God is X.” Such messages start off by accepting the premise that God does in fact exist. helping to guarantee their acceptance.

For instance, take “God is mean”. This leverages the nagging feeling shared by everyone that there is something a little bit wrong about a God that lets Katrina happen, that lets babies die, that watches over planes smashing into skyskrapers, and basically fucks all of us over more than we care to admit. It can’t be sugar-coated. Let’s spread this meme, gently.

Another example is “God is too busy”. Let’s face it—worrying about six billion souls is just too much work for One Guy. And that’s even before you think about the 10^23 other stars in the universe he has to worry about, a point made brilliantly by Carl Sagan in “Varieties of Scientific Experience”, which I’ll review in the near future. He’s so busy, he’s probably not really taking care of me like He should be, or listening really closely to my prayers.

Then we could go with “God is not that smart.” I mean, look at all the mistakes He’s made. We know he created Adam from dust and Eve from Adam’s rib, but let’s face it, in the physiological design department we can’t exactly give Him an “A”. Just ask my knee doctor, who says one of these days I’m going to need a replacement.

Let’s spread these memes, focusing on them with laser intensity and refusing to dilute our message. As they spread and gain credence through society, people will not suddenly switch sides and start disbelieving—they will just stop caring about a God who is mean, too busy, and not that smart. That can get us to the 50% attrition per generation level and reduce believers to 10% of the current level over the next hundred years, at which point they will be nothing more than a minor nuisance.

Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (Amazon) is a snappy, readable book about, basically, how God doesn’t exist (or exists only with vanishingly low probability). Greater minds than my own have already reviewed the book (NYT) and pronounced it brilliant or stupid or flawed or whatever. Here I’ll confine myself to neurotheological and Buddhist aspects.

The most basic problem with this book is that it completely fails to take into account the connection between religion and any process of personal development and/or the biological “correlates” of that process. To the extent religion is to some extent a highly corrupted version of meaningful, biologically-based insights about how to be happier, many of Dawkins’ points would need to be modified or recast.

On p. 37 Dawkins claims he will not be “concerned at all with other religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism. Indeed, there is something to be said for treating these not as religions at all but as ethical systems of philosophies of life.” That’s a great distinction to be made, but at the same time Buddhism and Western monotheism are similar in that they are both socially dominant systems of belief and thought, and rather than arbitrarily excluding one, why doesn’t Dawkins incorporate Buddhism into his thinking as a way to better define the topological contours of religion and religious behavior?

Surprisingly for a biologist, Dawkins mentions “neurotheology” only once, in a dismissive tone. On pp. 168-169, he says:

The proximate cause of religion might be hyperactivity in a particular node of the brain. I shall not pursue the neurological idea os a ‘god centre’ int he brain because I am not concerned here with proximate questions…If neuroscientists find a ‘god centre’ in the brain, Darwinian scientists like me will still want to understand the natural selection pressure that favoured it.

This seems like a particular devious way to dodge neurotheological questions. Perhaps the existence of a ‘god centre’ (more accurately, religiously-connected neural circuitry or structures) can be considered a “proximate” issue, but attempting to understanding it, rather than simply ignoring it, could help in grasping the “ultimate” cause, which for Dawkins is the Darwinian one. Would Dawkins focus on the evolutionary reason for the existence of the visual faculty without bothering to learn about the structure of the eye?

The cutest idea in this book, new at least to me, is that religion survives due an evolutionary tendency for children to believe what their parents say. This provides a scenario for a gradual decline over decades and centuries of Bible-thumping religions, as in each generation some percentage of believers, however, small, discard the religion of their parents and produce non-religious kids, as I did—to the extent that one day my oldest son came home from elementary school and asked me, “Daddy, who is this guy they were talking about in class today called ‘Cheeses’?”. Compare this to Dennett in Breaking the Spell, who provides no roadmap other than that people will or should stop believing just because he thinks religion is so stupid.

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Zen-Brain Reflections is James H. Austin’s follow-up to his definitive Zen and the Brain. As always, Austin is learned and thorough. The book has great value. It is almost certainly the best survey of research in the field of neurotheology, or perhaps we should use Davidson’s term “contemplative neuroscience.” But ultimately it’s closer to a set of research notes than a book. It presents tantalizing ideas and intriuging possibilities, but few hypotheses or frameworks. We’re left with a lot of information, but little understanding.

According to the description:

Zen-Brain Reflections takes up where the earlier book left off. It addresses such questions as: can neuroimaging studies localize the sites where our notions of self arise? How can the latest brain imaging methods monitor meditators more effectively? How do long years of meditative training plus brief enlightened states produce pivotal transformations in the physiology of the brain? Austin reviews the latest studies on the amygdala, frontotemporal interactions, and paralimbic extensions of the limbic system. He then explores different states of consciousness, both the early superficial absorptions and the later, major “peak experiences.”

Numenware readers are busy people. So here’s a handy, one-paragraph summary of Daniel C. Dennett’s new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, to save you the hours required to plow through its 400 pages and the $25.95 you’d have to spend to buy it:

I’m Daniel Dennett, and I think religion is stupid, and everybody should stop believing in it right now, because I’m real smart and I say so. Besides, it’s just an evolutionary and cultural thing according to some books I read. Don’t get me wrong, though: some of my best friends are religious, and a lot of them are real nice people!

Dennett spends the first chapter talking about an alleged vast conspiracy striving to prevent people like him from looking at religion objectively. That’s odd, given the centuries of research on the topic.

Dennett argues vociferously for a scientific analysis of religion. Which is doubly odd, since he’s obviously made up his mind already. And the only scientific “evidence” he himself quotes is cribbed from people who actually did work on the topic, such as Boyer (earlier post) and Atran (earlier post). He gives a sloppy summary of their work.

Triply odd is what Dennett leaves out of his “daring and important” new book, which is anything about what people experience in religion. He fails to mention, much less categorize or analyze, any transcendental experiences beyond those of the beautiful sunset variety.

Dennett gives short shrift to the biological seat of religious experience—the brain. His treatment of the topic is limited to the mention of one paragraph in Atran’s book. He dismisses D’Aquili and his “AUB” (Absolute Unitary Being) concept with its neural correlates in a single sentence.

The book is desperately in need of a fact checker, an editor, or, preferably, a ghost writer. Dennett is unable to maintain one train of thought for one section, much less an entire chapter. The book is cluttered with distracting soliloquies and asides. He doesn’t understand the concept of a scientific theory, imagining that it becomes a “fact” after it’s “proven”. He calls Jared Diamond a “pioneer who did scientific work on religion.” He refers to “Shinto temples of surreal intricacy and precision” (Shinto has shrines, not temples, and they’re austere in the extreme). He conflates the evolutionary and cultural aspects of the development of religion by treating genes and memes, of which he is much enamored (to the point of including in the book a disconnected appendix in their defense), as equivalent selective mechanisms.

Dennett thinks that a historical account of how religion might have developed is equivalent to understanding what it means—an odd stance for America’s putative leading philosopher.

Dennett waves off criticsm with gratuitous displays of feigned modesty, weak calls for “further inquiry”, and, in the ultimate irony, pre-emptive attacks on those who might disagree—proclaiming some of them infidels unworthy of even casting their eyes on his holy writ.

It’s really too bad. Someone with Dennett’s intellect and clout could have written a book on this timely topic that would really have changed the terms of the discussion. Myopic, slovenly, repetitive, disorganized, and biased, this book disastrously fails to fulfill that promise.

Jared Diamond (picture, Wikipedia entry) has written Collapse, a book about how societies fail, following on the heels of his previous Guns, Germs and Steel, which addressed the other side of the same question—why some societies succeeded. (That book, by the way, has a great section on the Incan empire and its defeat by the conquistadors.)

My interest is in how religion relates to a society’s success or failure. Unfortunately in “Collapse” Diamond deals with this question only tangentially. The examples he gives, however, do not speak well for religion. For instance, he attributes much of the blame for the collapse of the Norse society which existed in Greenland during the first half of the last millennium to the overinvestment in Christian infrastructure: the building of large churches, the undertaking of dangerous expeditions to acquire walrus tusk to trade for religious ornamentation. Similarly, the death of the civilization on Easter Island can also be attributed to religious factors, at least to the extent the motivation for building the huge stone statues was religious in nature. Building the statues consumed huge amounts of manpower and natural resources. In contrast, the societies he presents as relatively successful—including Tokugawa-era Japan, which he praises for its forestry policies—had weak religious infrastructures.

At the same time, it’s worthy of note that none of the societies Diamond identifies as political and environmental disasters are Buddhist.

Overall, “Collapse” is a worthy successor to “Guns, Germs and Steel”, although it tends to bog down in places. The focus is overwhelmingly on ecological/environmental issues, which account for three of the five causes Diamond identifies for societies collapsing:

1. environmental damage
2. climate change
3. hostile neighbors
4. friendly trade partners
5. society’s response to environmental problems

Fine, but in his conclusions—basically, that the world faces an environmental crisis that threatens its collapse, albeit one that he bravely claims we can deal with—he entirely ignores his third factor, hostile neighbors, which would seem to be of prime importance given the current wave of global terrorism. He mentions terrorism of course, but only in the context that environmental depradations and the ensuing poverty can give rise to it. But the Saudis who flew airplanes into buildings suffered from neither.

Concerning his fifth point, society’s response to environmental problems, Diamond does mention political and organizational factors in the form of e.g. NGOs working to conserve natural resources, but, oddly, fails to address how a country’s political system affects its response (other than mentioning how poorly the USSR did environmentally). He does praise the conservation policies of noted autocrat Balaguer in the Dominican Republic, but fails to ask the obvious question: to what extent is democracy the best political system for dealing with environmental issues? Presented with a potential choice between some political prisoners rotting in jails and environmental devastation destroying a society, which would you choose? And of course Diamond talks at length about the impact of overpopulation on the environment, but fails to address how either it, or technology which allows information to be transmitted instantaneously and virtual groups to be formed overnight, affect the political and decision-making dynamic.

The elephant in the room, of course, is the impact of race. “Guns, Germs and Steel” went to great lengths, to the extent it can almost be read as an anti-racism manifesto. to make the point that Europe did not succeed because the Caucasians there were smarter than, say, native Americans, but rather because of factors such as flora, fauna, and geography. In “Collapse”, we are similarly told that Haiti is a failed country not due to any lack of giftedness on the part of its citizens but rather as a result of colonial history, climate, and the like.

But as the world becomes flat, in Thomas Friedman’s term, and globalization continues its inexorable progress, with people, information, products, resources, and money flowing like water across borders, making historical and geographical factors less important than ever before, what are the remaining factors that will dictate a country’s success?

Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon is due out at the beginning of February.

As one of America’s leading contemporary philsophers, Dennett’s choice of this topic gives it great legitimacy. The book will be a must-read for anyone interested in the area (although personally I’ve always found Dennett’s writings tough sledding).

Dennett is not just out to explain religion here. That would have been a different book, probably very much like Boyer’s “Religion Explained”. No, Dennett wants to stomp out religion. It’s a prehistoric vestige, overgrown belief in ghosts, a bunch of old superstitions gussied up with guys in mitres. Look at the title again: Dennett wants to break the spell. He “elegantly pleads for religions to engage in empirical self-examination to protect future generations from…ignorance” (right). In one interview, Dennett stated: “I have absolutely no doubt that the secular and scientific vision is right and deserves to be endorsed by everybody, and as we have seen over the last few thousand years, superstitious and religious doctrines will just have to give way.”

I’m sympathetic to this line of reasoning as far as it goes, but it does not nearly go far enough. As I mentioned in my review of Boyer’s book, this type of strictly static evolutionary and sociological analysis omits two critical factors from the equation: transformation and transcendence. Looking past traditional religions and doctrines to a spectrum of belief systems, practices, and frameworks, where do they map onto the space of types of personal transformation? And what is the nature of transformative, transcendant experience, and in particular what is its biological basis, if it does in fact have one as neurotheology assumes?

Without looking at questions like these, we are left with a crippled, fragmentary account of religions. We cannot understand Christianity, even as it exists today in its calcified state, without thinking about what happened to Jesus during his 40 days in the wilderness. We cannot understand Buddhist thought without reference to its tradition of introspective practice. And we can understand neither completely without a model of neurobiological precedents or consequences.

Has anyone by fussing in front of the mirror ever gotten taller by so much as an inch? All this time and money wasted on fashion—do you think it makes that much difference? Instead of looking at the fashions, walk out into the fields and look at the wildflowers. They never primp or shop, but have you ever seen color and design quite like it? The ten best-dressed men and women in the country look shabby alongside them.

That’s the translation of Matthew 6 from “The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language” (Amazon), by Eugene Peterson (Wikipedia entry), said to be directly translated from the Greek and Hebrew texts.

Predictably, people either love or hate this. (Bono of U2 fame apparently loves it and has sung some of its lines.) The two sides are aptly summed up in an Amazon commentary by Allan Smalling:

…I am really disappointed in the newly-released, full-volume work of Eugene Peterson’s bible account, marketed as “The Message.” Ironically, many of the most biblically sophisticated people will love “The Message” and praise it for its freshness and relevance to today’s world.

Ummm…why was that ironic again?

We can argue over which, if any, of [many extant translations] is the best, the inspired, the most correct or inerrerant Bible. Regardless, if you have read any of the above, you can honestly say you have read THE Bible.

Gee, I wonder what these capital letters are supposed to mean. In addition to THE Bible, is there also the BIBLE and THE BIBLE?

In my opinion “The Messsage” is not a bible at all…way beyond a paraphrase, more of a morphing of the bible text into late 20th-Century American Culture.

Well, any translation is “way beyond a paraphrase”, because it’s taking one language into another. All translations are “morphing”. And if you were not going to take the text into late 20th century American culture—which is where the people reading it happen to live—where would you prefer? Seventeenth century England?

Our reviewer grudgingly admits, though, that:

The power and the passion do get through. And I must admit with no trace of irony that people who are far better biblically versed than I will probably like “The Message” better because they crave a new way of hearing God’s Word…

Very odd. You think Bible-knowledgeble people will like this free-form translation better, and yet—you still say it’s “not a bible at all”?

The Universe in a Single Atom is the Dalai Lama’s latest book, subtitled “The Convergence of Science and Spirituality.”

I liked this book. It was lots of fun. but pretty disorganized. It contains a lot of interesting stuff about the Dalai Lama’s childhood in Tibet, his exile to India, his international activities after that. But it’s also somewhat of a random mind dump.

If I had to say what the overarching theme of this book was, it would be honoring humanity. The Dalai Lama uses expressions such as “impoverish the way we see ourselves” with regard to e.g. scientific materialism, which he unfairly conflates with nihilism. He contrasts a view of ourselves as “random biological creatures” with that of “special beings endowed with the dimension of consciousness and moral capacity”, claiming that this decision will “make an impact on how we feel about ourselves”.

But…ummmh…we are random biological creatures. I thought Buddhism already accepted that. “How we feel about ourselves” is some grade-school self-esteem issue—do we need to affirm our unrandomness in order to feel good about ourselves?

“Humans may be reduced to nothing more than biological machines, the products of pure chance in the random combination of genes, with no purpose other than the biological imperative of reproduction.’”

Frankly, this sounds more like the Pope than the Dalai Lama.

In the interest of making my posts shorter and more readable, I will stop here, but threaten to analyze the remaining 90% of this book here later.