The Spiritual Brain - Book Review - Chapter 1

This is part of a book review. Here are all of the parts of this review:

Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapters 2-4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapters 7-10
Summary
Before I start the review, I want to make a couple comments of my impression of the book after reading the first chapter. The style is quite annoying – it seems to have tangents running off of tangents, and only slightly relevant quotes scatter the pages. It really seems that the authors were just trying to make the book long. The entire first chapter seems like a bunch of straw man fallacies mixed in with irrelevant tangents. The book seems to lack a coherent structure – a huge improvement could be made if the sections that should be grouped together were categorized under a larger section title. Now, on to the content.

Right off the bat, I was quite concerned about the treatment the author gives to free will. "Let us progress, [fans of materialism] say, toward a more humane system that both expects less of humans and blames them less for their failures – failures they can't help anyway, really" (Page 2). The example given of this is that the Center for Naturalism explicitly denies the existence of free will.

Denying free will is not in any way the same as expecting less of humans or not blaming them for their failures, but the authors seem oblivious to this (more about free will near the end of this chapter's review). Perhaps a somewhat childish treatment of free will is warranted in a non-philosophy book, so let's move on to some of the more serious theses of this chapter.

The book brings up that a lot of people claim to be spiritual ("Not many people have enough faith to be atheists", page 6 – I didn't realize it took faith to lack a belief), and materialists need to explain that. Fair enough. The book focuses its gaze on the field likely to offer an explanation: evolutionary psychology.

Bringing up altruism (as it is "usually, though not always, related to spiritual beliefs"), an attack is laid on evolutionary psychology. Well, perhaps it is not so much an attack as an assertion that evolutionary psychology is wrong. The treatment of evolutionary psychology is extremely naïve – the authors seem convinced that a single example of people helping other people who aren't related constitutes a fatal blow for evolutionary explanations of altruism (pages 10-11), and thus evolutionary psychology can't possibly explain human nature.

The next part of the book I found very strange. It spends quite a few pages on the relation between humans and chimpanzees, including a surprisingly lengthy tangent about chimpanzees not being able to breed with humans. The entire point of this lengthy tangent is to try to show how different humans are from chimps.

After a naïve romp through Artificial Intelligence, the authors turn their attention to gathering evidence against materialism. And that's when it happened. The authors cited intelligent design as an example of evidence that the evil materialistic scientists dogmatically ignore. Mentioning Guillermo Gonzalez and Richard Sternberg (both of whom had their stories explored in Expelled, so you can read about them here). The book paints a picture of some giant materialist conspiracy where scientists are all out to protect their fragile little naturalistic framework, despite the evidence. At this point, the credibility of the authors dropped significantly.

Finally, on page 29, the authors decide they should provide some support for the spiritual nature of humans. The support lasts about a page, and a good portion of that is taken up by the random quotes they decided to throw in. It boils down to the authors claiming that since people don't use the words "mind" and "brain" interchangeably, they can't be the same thing, and since people feel free, they must have free will, and if they have free will, they must have a soul.

Not all materialists deny free will – compatibilists accept that we live in a universe determined by laws and random chance, but claim free will is compatible with such a universe. Others deny free will gives us anything we can't have anyways – the ability to choose is not equivalent to the ability to choose freely, because every choice we make is constrained by our tastes and the result of our choices. If our choices were not constrained (i.e. free), and our choices were arbitrary, they would lack any sort of significance. It is only when you add constraints (and take away metaphysical "freedom") that choices are worth making. Denying free will is not the same as denying that people make choices – on the contrary, in some views it is the only way to make choices have any meaning.

So, in summary, I am not impressed yet. There is no serious argument put forward for spiritualism, nor is there a serious criticism of any materialist claims. The authors simply appeal to folk-psychological ideas of the self and free will to back up their assertions. Hopefully future chapters will flush out the argument.