Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens—these are the posterboys for what some have called the “New Atheists”.

What’s new about the New Atheists? In his book, Gunning For God, Oxford mathematician John Lennox says it’s their tone and emphasis.

The tone of today’s New Atheists is one of intensity and aggression. They are not out to merely inform. They are out to convert—to de-vangelize. In the The God Delusion, Dawkins admits:

“If this book works as I intend, religious leaders who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” (p. 28)

The fearless polemicist, Christopher Hitchens, visited the University of Toronto in 2006 and—to the roaring applause of the crowd—he rallied his troops with these words:

“I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right.”

In Letters To A Young Contrarian, Hitchens writes:

“I’m not even an atheist so much as I’m an antitheist”.

These words reflect precisely the intention and emphasis of the New Atheists and their disciples: to put an end to religion, or as Sam Harris has put it:

“To destroy the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms.” (Letter To A Christian Nation, p.ix)

But the New Atheists are not the only atheists out there today. Indeed some modern atheists object rather strongly to the tact of their counterparts. Atheist Paul Kurtz, founder of the The Center For Inquiry (a secular humanist organization), is cited as giving the new atheists the following assessment:

“I consider them atheist fundamentalists,” he says. “They’re anti-religious, and they’re mean-spirited, unfortunately. Now, they’re very good atheists and very dedicated people who do not believe in God. But you have this aggressive and militant phase of atheism, and that does more damage than good.” (Barbara Bradley Hagerty, “A Bitter Rift Divides Atheists”)

Another skeptic who has given a critical assessment of the “anti-theist” division of popular atheists, is BBC Radio personality, John Humphrys, an agnostic. Here is how he responds to seven common New Atheist attitudes in his book, In God We Doubt (I have reconfigured the statement/response format for easier reading):

1. Believers are mostly naive or stupid. Or, at least, they’re not as clever as atheists.

To which Humphreys responds:

“This is so clearly untrue it’s barely worth bothering with. Richard Dawkins, in his best selling The God Delusion, was reduced to producing a “study” by Mensa that purported to show an inverse relationship between intelligence and belief. He also claimed that only a very few members of the Royal Society believe in a personal god. So what? Somebelievers are undoubtedly stupid (witness the creationists) but I’ve met one or two atheists I wouldn’t trust tochange a light-bulb.”

2. The few clever ones are pathetic because they need a crutch to get them through life.

To which Humphrys responds:

“Don’t we all? Some use booze rather than the Bible. It doesn’t prove anything about either.”

3. They are also pathetic because they can’t accept the finality of death.

To which Humphrys responds:

“Maybe, but it doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Count the number of atheists in the foxholes or the cancer wards.”

4. They have been brainwashed into believing. There is no such thing as a “Christian child”, for instance—just a child whose parents have had her baptised.

To which Humphrys responds:

“True, and many children reject it when they get older. But many others stay with it.”

5. They have been bullied into believing.

To which Humphrys responds:

“This is also true in many cases but you can’t actually bully someone into believing—just into pretending to believe.”

6. If we don’t wipe out religious belief by next Thursday week, civilisation as we know it is doomed.

To which Humphrys responds:

“Of course the mad mullahs are dangerous and extreme Islamism is a threat to be taken seriously. But we’ve survived monotheist religion for 4, 000 years or so, and  I can think of one or two other things that are a greater threat to civilisation.”

7. Trust me: I’m an atheist.

To which Humphrys responds:

“Why?”

He adds:
“I make no apology if I have oversimplified their views with a little list: it’s what they do to believers all the time.”
 
 
(Image credit: Wales Online)

The overwhelming majority of atheists today are also materialists. Ousting God implies an evacuation of all things “spiritual,” leaving behind only blind, brute, bits of matter. Whichever one arrives at first—whether materialism or atheism—is really inconsequential; one usually follows the other.

Concerning galaxies and stars, materialism seems unthreatening. After all, these are material, natural phenomena that we can understand, explain, and model according to material causes; there’s nothing supernatural about supernovas. But when atheistic-materialism trains its lens upon the human person, something quite puzzling (and frightening) occurs—human subjectivity disappears; that which makes humans human is explained away. The personal pronoun “I” is swallowed up.

Francis Crick called it “the astonishing hypothesis,” namely, that all our thoughts, dreams, imaginings, sensations, joys, and pains are entirely (and without remainder) the product of physiological processes and events occurring in the intricate folds of the brain.¹ Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University, explains further: “The intuitive feeling we have that there’s an executive ‘I’ that sits in a control room of our brain scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion.”²

According to the conclusions inherent in the atheistic-materialistic premises, individual subjectivity, the personal pronoun “I,” turns out to be the illusory byproduct of trillions of crackling neurons. As Carl Sagan once put it, “I am a collection of water, calcium, and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label.” Thus, according to their own worldview, all thoroughly honest atheists and materialists must consent that they themselves, as selves, do not exist. What an odd conclusion!

While Rene Descartes built the edifice of modern philosophy on the bedrock foundation of the individual subject with his famous cogito ergo sum, I want to propose another use for the “I”: a doorstop. While atheistic materialists seek to slam the door of the universe shut, expelling all that is non-material, the fact—and I mean fact—of personal subjectivity, our ability to say “I,” acts like an intruder’s foot that gets wedged between the door and the frame, stubbornly preventing materialism from enclosing the universe within. Who or what is the “I” that declares Carl Sagan to be nothing but a collection of molecules? Does he not speak and assert this truth from a real center, a real subjective focal point? The common experience of being a subject, an “I” in the world, resists the spirit-draining power of the atheistic-materialistic worldview.

This is no incidental fact. Many apologetics projects have been launched to combat the New Atheism in the effort to show the reasonableness of Christian faith. But, before we can dialogue about faith in the Triune God whose nature and essence is union and communion, or in Jesus, who died an ignominious death for the sins of all, or in the very idea of Goodness, Truth, or Beauty itself, a critical step must be taken, one that is often overlooked. Because of the contemporary phenomenon of aggressive materialism, theists must persuasively show that there is more to this world than the mere matter to which scientists and the New Atheists want to reduce it.

In addition to the material stuff of the universe that scientists study and model so well, there is an equally real and infinitely more efficacious force at work that is intrinsically spiritual. There is a spiritual order that eludes scientific investigation or modeling. Recourse to material causes alone is insufficient to account for the universe and the human person. It must be shown that this materially-closed universe, this “nothing but” worldview, inadequately captures reality and lived-experience.

It is my firm contention that for our modern sensibilities, which prioritize the individual, there is no better starting point for this project than with personal subjectivity, with our unique ability to say meaningfully, “I...”

While the atheist-materialist may be able to reduce all being to the level of matter, void of spirituality, he is unable to explain himself away. There is an inherent contradiction built into the atheistic-materialistic worldview that can and ought to be noted. What does that look like?

Take Daniel Dennett for example. He is a philosopher of consciousness and director of the Center for Cognitive Sciences at Tufts University and a staunch proponent of the atheistic-materialistic worldview. He writes in his book, Consciousness Explained:

"Materialism: there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter—the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology—and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon."³

Dennett’s definition of materialism turns out, upon closer examination, to be a metaphysical claim regarding the ultimate nature of things. His materialism, one will notice, is not a discovery or conclusion of science but rather is a methodological presupposition that guides his science and determines what kinds of answers are acceptable. In other words, the scientific project, beginning centuries ago, was launched with an a priori limitation: to only consider and investigate material causes and to only accept material solutions. Naturally then, under this rubric, scientists like Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett himself are forced to draw the following conclusion regarding the brain, the mind, and personal subjectivity:

"The trouble with brains, it seems, is that when you look in them, you discover that there’s nobody home. No part of the brain is the thinker that does the thinking or the feeler that does the feeling...There is no longer a role for a centralized gateway, or indeed for any functional center to the brain...The brain is Headquarters, the place where the ultimate observer is, but there is no reason to believe that the brain itself has any deeper headquarters, any inner sanctum, arrival at which is the necessary or sufficient condition for conscious experience. In short, there is no observer inside the brain."⁴

To state their conclusion another way: there is no for whom consciousness exists; there is no “I” in the brain; there is no dative of manifestation to whom the external world is disclosed—all is sheer brute matter operating according to determined physical force laws, and consciousness happens to be an epiphenomenon of the interplay of specific materials and specific force laws. Scientists, gazing into the brain are unable to locate the thinker of the thinking, the feeler doing the feeling, and so conclude that there must not be a thinker or a feeler...or by extension, a scientist doing the science or a surgeon doing the open-brain surgery. This conclusion should rightly strike us as untenable. Why?

To whom does this thought occur: “there must be no thinker within who does the thinking”? Somebody is thinking this thought! Whose name is it that appears on the front jacket cover of Consciousness Explained, or atop any of their published journal articles, or outside their office door, or on the cover of their syllabi? Is it not their names? When they sign checks, make promises, or marry their spouse, what signs? What promises? What vows and loves?

From out this cloud of whirring, buzzing atoms, somebody acts, speaks, wills, dreams, and loves. What is the nature of this center from which all activities flow? It is obvious: this center is subjective (not in the sense of being relative, but in the sense of belonging to a subject, a person). Springing from Daniel Dennett’s irreducible “I” flow all his thoughts, theories, and books that, strangely enough, seek to prove that he does not exist. Carl Sagan’s quote is not attributed to a collection of molecules that happened to be called, by convention, “Carl Sagan.” No, his words are rightly attributed to him! The adherents of the atheistic-materialistic worldview are a living contradiction, and every time they act, speak, or write, they prove their own theory to be woefully inadequate.

For those encamped within the confines of the atheistic-materialistic universe, all that exists are mechanistic bodies—like Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit; the only problem is, there is no Tony Stark inside or anywhere for that matter within the atheistic-materialistic universe.

Suits without Starks; iron without men.

A theory or worldview that eliminates the possibility of the theorist existing is a bad theory and an incomplete worldview. There may be parts of it that are true, but taken as a whole, the atheistic-materialistic thesis is inadequate and incoherent. So why will the door not close? Because in addition to the matter that comprises my body is a soul, an animating principle that organizes the matter that I am to be the matter of “me,” unique, unrepeatable me. In addition to my stuff, there is a soul, I have an “I,” that persists through time, that began at my conception, and will persist beyond my mortal life. There’s more to me than my mere meat. When I say “my brain,” I really mean my brain, not just any brain belonging to any body, but to a specific body, a somebody, namely me! And you too!

Doorstops do not do anything positive; rather, they prevent something from happening, namely the door being shut. In this case, the atheistic-materialistic worldview cannot close in on itself because the “I” gets in the way. Getting rid of God and spirituality isn’t as simple as it seems at first blush.

It cannot be maintained that the only stuff that exists is matter—the stuff of physics, biology, and chemistry—precisely because this assertion eliminates the theory-making subject. The “I” of every atheist holds the door of the universe ajar, permitting some non-material, spiritual “stuff” to sneak in. If immaterial “I’s” exist, then that begs the question: whence come the “I’s”? Perhaps God? That’s a topic for another article. I thank you!
 
 
(Image credit: Mirror)

Daniel Dennett, one of the “four horsemen” of contemporary atheism, proposed in 2003 that those who espouse a naturalist, atheist worldview should call themselves “the brights,” thereby distinguishing themselves rather clearly from the dim benighted masses who hold on to supernaturalist convictions. In the wake of Dennett’s suggestion, many atheists have brought forward what they take to be ample evidence that the smartest people in our society do indeed subscribe to anti-theist views. By “smartest” they usually mean practitioners of the physical sciences, and thus they point to surveys that indicate only small percentages of scientists subscribe to religious belief.

In a recent article published in the online journal “Salon,” titled "Religion's Smart-People Problem," University of Seattle philosophy professor John Messerly reiterates this case. However, he references, not simply the lack of belief among the scientists, but also the atheism among academic philosophers, or as he puts it, “professional philosophers.” He cites a recent survey that shows only 14% of such professors admitting to theistic convictions, and he states that this unbelief among the learned elite, though not in itself a clinching argument for atheism, should at the very least give religious people pause. Well, I’m sorry Professor Messerly, but please consider me unpaused.

Since I have developed these arguments many times before in other forums, let me say just a few things in regard to the scientists. I have found that, in practically every instance, the scientists who declare their disbelief in God have no idea what serious religious people mean by the word “God.” Almost without exception, they think of God as some supreme worldly nature, an item within the universe for which they have found no “evidence,” a gap within the ordinary nexus of causal relations, etc. I would deny such a reality as vigorously as they do. If that’s what they mean by “God,” then I’m as much an atheist as they—and so was Thomas Aquinas. What reflective religious people mean when they speak of God is not something within the universe, but rather the condition for the possibility of the universe as such, the non-contingent ground of contingency. And about that reality, the sciences, strictly speaking, have nothing to say one way or another, for the consideration of such a state of affairs is beyond the limits of the scientific method. And so when statistics concerning the lack of belief among scientists are trotted out, my response, honestly, is “who cares?”

But what about the philosophers, 86% of whom apparently don’t believe in God? Wouldn’t they be conversant with the most serious and sophisticated accounts of God? Well, you might be surprised. Many academic philosophers, trained in highly specialized corners of the field, actually have little acquaintance with the fine points of philosophy of religion and often prove ham-handed when dealing with the issue of God. We hear, time and again, the breezy claim that the traditional arguments for God’s existence have been “demolished” or “refuted,” but when these supposed refutations are brought forward, they prove, I have found, remarkably weak, often little more than the batting down of a straw-man. A fine example of this is Bertrand Russell’s deeply uninformed dismissal of Thomas Aquinas’s demonstration of the impossibility of an infinite regress of conditioned causes.

But more to it, the percentage of atheists in the professional philosophical caste has at least as much to do with academic politics as it does with the formulation of convincing arguments. If one wants to transform a department of philosophy from largely theist to largely atheist, all one has to do is to make sure that the chairman of the department and even a small coterie of the professoriat are atheist. In rather short order, that critical mass will control hiring, firing, and the granting of tenure within the department. Once atheists have come to dominate the department, only atheist faculty will be hired and students with theistic interests will be sharply discouraged from writing dissertations defending the religious point of view. In time, very few doctorates supporting theism will be produced, and a new generation, shaped by thoroughly atheist assumptions, will come of age. To see how quickly this transformation can happen, take a good look at the philosophy department at many of the leading Catholic universities: what were, in the 1950’s overwhelmingly theistic professoriats are today largely atheist. Does anyone really think that this happened because lots of clever new arguments were discovered?

Another serious problem with trumpeting the current statistics on the beliefs of philosophers is that such a move is based on the assumption that, in regard to philosophy, newer is better. One could make that argument in regard to the sciences, which do seem to progress in a steadily upward direction: no one studies the scientific theories of Ptolemy or Descartes today, except out of historical interest. But philosophy is a horse of a different color, more akin to poetry. Does anyone think that the philosophical views of, say, Michel Foucault are necessarily better than those of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel, just because Foucault is more contemporary? It would be like saying the verse of Robert Frost is necessarily superior to that of Dante or Shakespeare, just because Frost wrote in the twentieth century. I for one think that philosophy, so marked today by nihilism and postmodern relativism, is passing through a particularly corrupt period. Why should we think, therefore, that the denizens of philosophy department lounges today are necessarily more correct than Alfred North Whitehead, Edmund Husserl, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion, all of whom were well-acquainted with modern science, rigorously trained in philosophy and affirmed the existence of God?

I despise the arrogance of Dennett and his atheist followers who would blithely wrap themselves in the mantle of “brightness;” but I also despise the use of statistics to prove any point about philosophical or religious matters. I would much prefer that we return to argument.
 
 
(Image credit: Gawker)

“We have to make this planet as good as we possibly can and try to leave it a better place than we found it.”

The crowd, gathered to hear Richard Dawkins debate the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, responds to the trite apothegm with unsurprising applause. But off-stage, after the cameras are turned off, the proverbial devil of the details rears his ugly head.

A weary Dawkins—one almost gets the sense that he’d rather not talk to anybody at all—kneels besides a disabled woman in a wheelchair, handing her a signed copy of his book and forcing a smile for the camera. The woman looks ecstatic to meet her hero; Dawkins seems to still be busy pummeling on Pell in some dusty corner of the same restless mind that gave rise to The God Delusion almost a decade ago.

We see this all play out in the 2013 homage to the New Atheism, "The Unbelievers", a sort of promotional travelogue which follows Dawkins and fellow atheist Lawrence Krauss around the globe to—like two real-life Hazel Moteses—spread the gospel of unbelief.

But Dawkins recently admitted something about people who, like this particular fan, suffer from a lifelong disability: it would have been better for them to have never been born.

Contemplating over Twitter what a woman pregnant with a Down Syndrome child ought to do, Dawkins said: “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.” The controversial and callous remark—certainly not the first from Dawkins—was not so much walked back as walked forward in his formal apology.

Dawkins is not the only New Atheist that has been mired in public controversy in recent years. From Krauss' cringe-worthy debate with a Muslim scholar to Sam Harris' recent comments about Islam on Bill Maher's show, bizarre, off-color public statements from the New Atheists—often made, or at least said to be made, because of an unflinching commitment to naturalism—are resulting in charges of brutality, misogyny, bigotry, and the same kinds of unflattering associations Dawkins had hoped to keep squarely on God’s head.

Of course, no mountain of personal controversies could discredit the claims of these self-styled “brights” or of atheists more generally. To suggest otherwise would be to engage in the very ad hominem attacks of which some of them are all too fond. But these headlines are, in their way, a visible symptom of what seems to be the diminishing traction and declining vitality of the entire New Atheist movement.

To put it in no uncertain terms: the New Atheism, if not already dead, is quickly dying.

This is first evident in a very literal way, in their fallen ranks. The “fifth horsemen” of the New Atheism, Victor Stenger, passed away a few months ago, but the loss of their leading horseman Christopher Hitchens in 2011 immediately comes to mind.

With Hitchens’ death, the New Atheism lost its scintillating, seductive flair. The wittiest, most likeable new atheist may not have converted as many as he would’ve liked, but certainly won the attention and admiration of many in the Christian community. In one of the first articles at Strange Notions, titled “Why I Loved to Listen to Christopher Hitchens,” Father Robert Barron confesses:

“I think I watched every Hitchens debate that I could find on YouTube; I subscribed to Vanity Fair largely because Hitchens was a regular contributor; I read every one of his books...No one wrote quite like Christopher Hitchens. Whether he was describing an uprising on the streets of Athens, or criticizing the formation of young men in the British boarding schools of the 1950s, or defending his support of the Iraq war, or begging people to let go of what he took to be their childish belief in God, Hitchens was unfailingly intelligent, perceptive, funny, sarcastic, and addictively readable.”

If Christopher Hitchens was the most stimulating New Atheist, the erudite Santa-lookalike Daniel Dennett was always the most scholarly. But, like Saint Nick himself, the philosopher has vacated the public eye so suddenly as to cast doubt on his very existence. Dennett has made no new enemies, inflamed no Twitter wars, and penned no blog screeds about the stupidity of faith. Instead—perhaps with an eye toward securing his legacy as a serious philosopher—he’s been sitting down with respected Christian thinker Alvin Plantinga for a civil, serious dialogue about science and religion.

And here, we see the root cause of the New Atheism’s decline: its lack of a sturdy philosophical foundation. Any organization can withstand its bad press if it’s grounded in something human, something wise, something timeless. But all along, scholars have grumbled that—unlike the writings of a Nietzsche, Sartre, or Russell—the New Atheism lacked intellectual depth and was doomed to self-destruction.

And they were right. Krauss looks like a farm team player brought up to revitalize a crumbling organization, trying (and failing) to recreate Hitch’s signature rhetorical jukes. Meanwhile, Dawkins is resorting to odd trick plays which never get off the ground. (His bizarre mutations of the mind art show comes to mind.) Nothing is meshing the way it used to, and the overcompensation on the part of the remaining leaders—and pushback from their rank and file—is telling.

Meanwhile, less vociferous unbelievers are gladly rushing in to fill that profitable cultural space. Neil deGrasse Tyson, for example, has rightly been accused of bungling the history of the Church with relation to science in his new "Cosmos" series—but he’s also quick to admit that he doesn’t have all the answers when it comes to God. “The only ‘ist’ I am is a scientist,” Tyson says in a Big Think interview. “What is my stance on religion, or spirituality, or God? I would say if I’d find a word that came closest, it would be agnostic...Atheists I know who proudly wear the badge are active atheists. They’re like in-your-face atheists, and they want to change policies, and they’re having debates. I don’t have the time, the interest, the energy to do any of that. I’m a scientist.”

Then there is Thomas Nagel, a renowned philosopher who—going beyond Tyson—is an avowed atheist. Nagel’s recent book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False drove fellow atheists up the wall, not only for its defection from the creed of naturalism, but for its alignment with the arguments of Alvin Plantinga—the same Christian enemy who has been sitting down with Dennett for tea.

Lastly, there’s physicist and atheist Sean Carroll who—going even beyond Nagel—is committed to the materialist conception of nature. Carroll penned an insightful piece recently titled “Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things About Philosophy.” While men like Dawkins, Krauss, and Stephen Hawking routinely dismiss philosophy as obfuscating gibberish that only serves to embolden the theologians, Carroll acknowledges that philosophy adds quite a lot to the modern scientific project. “The point, I take it, is to understand how nature works,” Carroll writes. “Part of that is knowing how to do calculations, but another part is asking deep questions about what it all means. That’s what got me interested in science, anyway...It’s a shame that so many physicists don’t see how good philosophy of science can contribute to this quest.”

This, happily, is the new tenor of the conversation. The apparently intramural rivalry between two fundamentalist spins on the world looks increasingly at odds with the problems and possibilities an open-minded majority face on the ground, and warriors from each side are deigning to say to the other, like Pound to Whitman:

I have detested you long enough...
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root –
Let there be commerce between us.

That’s not to say that passionate disagreement has ended—it hasn’t, and never will. But the tone and style of "The Unbelievers" seems a decade too late; the moment has passed. As celebrities like Bill Pullman and Cameron Diaz offer public support for this un-dynamic duo, and Krauss proudly holds up a tweet from Miley Cyrus with his picture and the quotation “forget Jesus,” the only real message that gets across is that intellectual fashions, like all fashions, come and go.

And as things continue to change where philosophical substance is concerned, the New Atheists and their readers will either change too, or fade away, raging against the dying of the brights.
 
 
(Image credit: YouTube)

"For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man..."
— Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins

Last year, I found myself unexpectedly marveling at an album by Tom “It's Not Unusual” Jones, which featured covers of songs by Tom Waits, Paul Simon, and The Low Anthem. One track, "Soul of a Man," revived a bluesy 1930 song by Blind Willie Johnson that asks one my favorite philosophical questions: what is the soul?

Generally, people fall into one of the following three “camps” on the question of the soul. (Note: By soul, I mean the immaterial aspect of the human being which thinks, feels, and wills. By consciousness, I will mean something more rudimentary, but also apparently immaterial: rich subjective experience, or what philosophers call the “what it is like." This is an important distinction since people often use these words interchangeably. I’ll discuss both.)

1) Materialistic Monists (MMs) – A person is their body; the soul is reducible to the material or simply doesn’t exist.
2) Descartesian Dualists (DDs) – A person is their soul; the soul is a separable, non-material substance that inhabits the body.
3) Aristotelian Animalists (AAs) – A person is their body and their soul; the soul is the non-material form of the body, unified with the body.

MMs have been gaining ground in recent years, especially with advances in neuroscience and the rising prominence of the New Atheists. There are different sub-groups in this camp, but in general, they all doubt that there is anything spiritual or immaterial about man. They're convinced that poetic discourse about your or my “soul” is a form of “folk psychology.”

This view is not new, but in recent years, philosophers like Daniel Dennett have spun a far more sophisticated case with it. His 1991 book Consciousness Explained purports to show through a “multiple drafts” theory that there is no “center” of conscious experience (“I see a blue sky”), but rather a spreading of awareness “drafts” over subsystems in the brain that, through evolutionary and cultural conditioning, have resulted in an illusory unity of subjective experience.

Dennett's work suggests a question: are we gradually explaining with evolution and neuroscience what was almost always thought to be the work of divine providence? Is the soul just one more mystery-mongering domain of theologians to dispel under the hot white light of empirical science? According to Richard Dawkins, the answer is yes. “Science,” Dawkins says, “has either killed the soul or is in the process of doing so." Cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker agrees: “Cognitive neuroscience has pretty much killed [the soul]...Many kinds of evidence show that the mind is an entity in the physical world, part of a causal chain of physical events. If you send an electric current through the brain, you cause the person to have a vivid experience. If a part of the brain dies because of a blood clot or a burst artery or a bullet wound, a part of the person is gone."

But philosophers have been more or less aware of this correlation between brain states and mental states since the ancient world. (You don’t need to be Socrates to see that the mind weakens as the brain decays, or malfunctions when the head is injured.) Yet, most have gone on believing in souls, because correlation does not imply causation. To use a computer analogy, the brain might be like the hardware of your iPhone which transmits the software of Words with Friends. When you smash your phone to pieces (say, because you keep getting all vowels), Words malfunctions and vanishes with it—but your game can continue on your iPad. Similarly, after brain death, the “software” of the soul may not die with it, because it was not caused by it—only transmitted. Pinker’s evidence seems to be a textbook case of the post hoc fallacy.

Neuroplasticity research further complicates the MM's position. There is growing evidence that—in patients with OCD, for example—the brain reshapes under the tutelage of new attitudes and behaviors. But if the soul is to the brain as digestion is to the stomach, why should mental effort execute any top-down causation? In response, materialists are forced to relegate the soul—with its rationality and will—to a sort of illusory, ineffectual middle man in the brain’s modification of itself.

But the biggest problem for the MMs are qualia, or distinctive conscious experiences of things (e.g., the “what it is like” to see yellow, feel hotness, etc.). Even Sam Harris, who like Dennett is one of the leading New Atheists, has emphasized this point. In his essay “The Mystery of Consciousness,” Harris (sounding very Cartesian) says: “[T]he only thing in this universe that attests to the existence of consciousness is consciousness itself.” He concludes that “an analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of consciousness.” Harris indirectly cites the work of two philosophers leading this charge against the MMs: Thomas Nagel ("What Is It Like to Be a Bat?") and David Chalmers (the “hard problem” of consciousness), who are also both atheists. The work of these three eminent, non-religious thinkers yields an inconvenient truth: that the richness of subjective consciousness will not be subdued by materialism, not because the empirical tools of science have yet to advance on it, but because it is inescapably “stuff” of a different order. As Nagel puts it in his latest book Mind and Cosmos, “The existence of consciousness seems to imply that...the natural order is far less austere than it would be if physics and chemistry accounted for everything.”

The irreducibility of consciousness to physics and chemistry seems to push us toward dualism and the DDs: perhaps consciousness is the bulwark of something like the soul, demanding that we acknowledge it?

The notion of dualism stretches back to Plato's Phaedo (360 B.C.) and beyond; but French philosopher and mathematician Descartes, at the birth of modern science, incorporated Platonic dualism into a systematic division of the world between the res extensa (extended thing) and res cogitans (thinking thing). For him, the only thing one could prove existed beyond the shadow of a doubt was the thinking subject. As he famously put it: “I am only a thing that thinks” (which sounds a lot like Johnson’s line, “a man ain't nothing but his mind”).

Many Christian movements (e.g., Gnosticism, and later Puritanism) have been made up of committed DDs. In fact, De Tocqueville once remarked that Protestant America is “where the precepts of Descartes are best applied.” Religious DDs tend to speak of the soul and “the flesh” as one speaks of a prisoner and a jail, and to conceive of everlasting life with God in wholly spiritual terms.

But the trouble for all DDs, religious or not, are legion. The first and greatest is the snare of skepticism. In the DDs framework, where the person is reducible to his or her immaterial self, it seem inescapable that we’re doomed to doubt everything – the existence of other minds (philosophical zombies), the external world (world-as-computer simulation), even our own bodies (brain in a vat). Only philosophers like Chalmers are crazy enough to think about these things—common sense flies in the face of all three—but the problems remain.

Another problem is the relationship between soul and body. How does the immaterial soul or self “operate” the material body? When I decide to raise my arm, and I do it, where is the link between my immaterial thought and my material action? (Descartes’ guess was the pineal gland, which scientists have since deemed an endocrine organ.) DDs are stuck with the Cartesian catastrophe of the “ghost in the machine,” an incoherency that effects oscillation between the two extremes to this day (what novelist Walker Percy, inspired by Jacques Maritain, termed “angelism-beastilism”).

(In an effort to avoid these and other problems presented by dualism, philosophers like Nagel are increasingly considering a sort of Emersonian view called panpsychism, the belief that consciousness pervades all of reality, that it’s “awareness all the way down.” This view may have some explanatory power, but there are glaring difficulties: how could a mini-consciousness, which is simple and indivisible, inhere in the elementary particles which constitute the physical world? And how do the mental aspects of these infinite particles, which constitute even our brain, combine into our one consciousness?)

A third position, which avoids the pitfalls of both materialism and dualism, is that of the Aristotelian Animalists (AAs).

Aristotle wrote in De Anima that the soul is: “(a) the source or origin of movement, it is (b) the end, it is (c) the essence of the whole living body.” For Aristotle, there are different kinds of souls (plant, animal, and human) with varying degrees of biological and cognitive activity. The human soul is the animating form of the matter of the human animal, the actuating “breath” of what a body is and does. Aristotle thus distinguishes the soul from the material body, but not as a ghost from a machine. Unlike Plato, Aristotle concluded that the soul is “inseparable from its body,” although the highest faculty of the soul—the mind—is “immortal and eternal.”

Aristotle's earthy notion of the soul was picked up by scholastic philosophers, most notably Thomas Aquinas. In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas agreed with Aristotle that “it belongs to the notion of a soul to be the form of a body,” and that although a human soul’s rationality points to its subsistence after death, the disembodied soul is a form without matter, and therefore incomplete. Death does not result in the final liberation and fulfillment of the soul, but a dislodging of the body’s essence, our being “not wholly at rest.”

Thomism, informed by this Aristotelian view of the person, has held to this unity of body and soul and fought fiercely against the two alternatives. As one Notre Dame philosopher puts it, the Thomistic view is that “dualism is just as wrongheaded and, in the end, just as pernicious as physicalism.” Why pernicious?

Because dualism “has the dire moral consequence of leaving the body bereft of more than merely external or instrumental moral significance.” Materialism, on the other hand, leaves the apparent “limitlessness and lucidity” of our freedom and rationality bereft of much significance at all. AAs, in contrast, account for the whole person—thought, freedom, will, as well as qualia—a philosophical account which has informed and paralleled Catholic theology (e.g., the sacraments, the resurrection of the dead, and the theology of the body). As the Catechism states it: “spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.”

The position of the AAs seems to be the most coherent and plausible of these three camps, since it leaves us with the fewest problems and has the most explanatory power. Still, asking about the soul and answering it in philosophical terms is one thing. Hearing the question sung from the pit of a soul is another. I have to answer, after everything, “a mystery.”

Based on article originally posted at By Way of Beauty. Used with permission.