Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 12 November 2002

Mind and Brain

Fuller now turns to a central problem for Christians and that is to maintain, contrary to all well established physical evidence, that the mind operates independently of the brain. Christians again call those who accept the scientific evidence reductionists. It is meant to be an insult, but those called it should take it as a label to be proud of in the face of the obfuscators of truth calling themselves Christians. Christians do not like to be reminded—indeed mainly they deny—that the dark ages were brought about by the Christian preference for filth and ignorance, because cleanliness and knowledge were considered vanity. Curiously nowadays Christians are just as ignorant of Christian history as they ever were but they are not so keen on filth. Even some of the vainest of people, those in the fashion business, are Christians, though in name only.

Behold, they are all vanity; their works are nothing: their molten images are wind and confusion.

Isaiah 41:29

If they read their bibles they would find that whole books of it like Job, Psalms and Ecclesiastes, are devoted to decrying vanity, the very business they are in. It is equated with lies and disturbing the spirit. Do they know this? Not a chance. They haven’t a clue what their religion means having just joined it as a self-admiration society. That is true of most recently “converted” Christians. Yet in an utterly true way, if vanity is lies, Christians are the vainest people that exist because they are and always have been habitual liars. They take the Preacher to be giving them a motto to live by when he declaims:

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

What then does Fuller have to say in obfuscating the nature of human beings? Those who think the body is a material entity subject only to the laws of Nature are reductionists, although it “cannot be denied” that the reductionist attitude has been “very satisfying”. What he means is that it works satisfactorily, and a good many of these Christian obfuscators might not have been alive now but for scientific advances in medicine.

For centuries before science asserted itself, Christians followed the example of their earthly God in His Holy Word Part II where, despite being omniscient, he thought disease was caused by wicked demons that had to be beaten out of their victim—as the gospels make clear. Not unusually the results of the exorcists’ attention to the afflicted body were worse than the illness. More enlightened Christians, after a struggle, accepted the teachings of some classical doctors like Galen, who was not a Christian but believed in a divine purpose, making him acceptable to Christianity. Later still, after the Enlightenment, they were obliged to bow to the discoveries by practical scientific methods of Harvey and Lister. Needless to say, making progress against people deluded enough to think they know what God knows—and anything else is human hubris—is hard indeed. Fuller shows us why.

He cannot deny that materialist treatments of human illness have worked, so where does he go from there? First, to make sure that his gullible lambs do not forget it, he renames materialism as “reductionistic materialism”. Such is the childishness of theology, but then the lambs cannot be assumed even by their holy teachers to be too bright. They would not be lambs if they were. Those who believe in a big invisible Harvey in the sky, and a little invisible one at their shoulder cannot be too clever. Yet our most venerable academic institution offers courses in Harveylogy, except they use the Greek name for Harvey.

Souls

Fuller now gets to the point. Do we have souls or spirits? The scientist, now renamed as a “reductionistic materialist”, ever respectful of his principles, remains skeptical and demands clear evidence, if it is to be believed. Christians, happy to accept as true any distorted or mistaken impressions that they personally experience, say they know they are a spirit confined in their body and looking out. Though Christians usually decry “dualism” in any form, here they are happy to accept it as allowing the belief in a soul independent of the body, and therefore a basis for the Christian reward of eternal life.

Science has often had the problem of showing that everyday impressions are wrong, and Christians are among those who accept the perceptual changes science has proved—the earth is not flat, the sun does not travel round it, the heart is not the seat of intelligence, and so on. In those cases they have no axe to grind. On the question of the soul, they have an axe they need to keep sharp. This is a basic reason why Christianity cannot find common ground with science. Christians will not give up faulty impressions that are essential to their beliefs, although they will do it readily when they are not thus essential. It shows that their decisions are arbitrary, being based solely on what suits their superstitious fears and fancies.

It is not surprising that we have an impression of looking out of our bodies because that is what we are doing, soul or no soul. Visual input comes from our eyes which are directed outwards, away from our bodies. Visual input is not the only one, but all of them are “inputs”—the senses send signals from outside into our body where they are registered somewhere, often the brain. It is the conscious activity of the brain that gives the impression of something independent of the body. As soon as we get conscious, our impressions are thereafter of looking away from our bodies. It would have been miraculous indeed if our impressions were of looking down from the ceiling.

That brings us to the Christian evidence for the soul. Some people, but by no means most, recover from the verge of death to report peculiar experiences in their unconscious state. Such reports are called near death experiences, or NDEs. One of these is that they left their body and looked down on it from the ceiling. It turns out that Fuller does not want to fight this corner so immediately retracts it as evidence—nothing “too much should be read into them as scientific evidence of life after death”. It is an example of the “objection overruled” argument. It aims to plant an idea that cannot be substantiated into the heads of the jury. The judge overrules it as legally invalid but the idea has been planted. It is a common ploy that Christians use in their apologetic books knowing that their sheep will follow any hint at all that supports their prejudices. A scientist would call it deceit, but Christians call it witnessing.

He uses the same ploy immediately by saying that some eighteenth century doctors tried to prove the soul by weighing people as they died. A few grams of weight were lost at death, they claimed, showing that a soul had left and that it was not incorporeal at all, just low in density. It has never been substantiated, and Fuller concedes that no “physically measurable force or entity” has been detected vivifying a body, and “neither is it at all likely” to be found, but the idea has been planted.

Some Authorities

It sounds as though Fuller has allowed his scientific training to emerge for once, but no! He has an “alternative” to the other two hypotheses. Temporarily forgetting his point, he does not pursue this yet and returns to examples of “dualism”. One never expects the holy ghost to speak either truly or coherently. A “philosopher” called Richard Swinburne reiterates that we are body and soul. It is hard to see why this man’s opinion should count for anything at all, but Christians love to cite authority. They think it is the same as truth.

Another authority is an Australian neuro-scientist called Sir John Carew Eccles, whose own cleverness is proved by a certificate from the Nobel Committee. That is sufficient to equate him with God for the obsessive authority citers, and that is what they do. More remarkable is that is what Eccles does! Eccles did valuable work on the synapses of nerves, showing that they transmitted signals chemically, not electrically, except in so far as the chemicals were ions. It was important work, but hardly putting Eccles close to God, or even necessarily close to understanding consciousness. Yet Eccles said that because he had not worked out what consciousness was, God must be responsible for it!

Fuller has been showing scientists, or at least the nineteenth century ones he is willing to take on, as overweeningly arrogant, but here it is his own scientific witness who is arrogant, so he does not object. Eccles is so arrogant that whatever he cannot work out himself must be God’s work. Eccles—in his own assessment—is only one rung removed from the Almighty Himself. Fuller does not mind here because Eccles is resting his case with God. “He is one of us!”

Science is a continuous and progressive endeavour so there are gaps that it has not yet filled. The details of consciousness is one. So it becomes a gap filled by God. It is the “God of the Gaps”, the position long abandoned by Christians as a hostage to fortune. The Christians who once used it against the scientists found it embarrassing that the gaps slowly disappeared from God’s realm into the realm of science, each one exposing Christianity as false. Modern Christian theologians do not even hint at it, but Fuller wades in where even angels fear to tread—except the archangel Eccles—resurrecting the God of the Gaps. By all means, let us keep this gap in the public eye.

Fuller recapitulates the “reductionistic materialist” view, citing the philosopher, John Searle, and the quantum chemist, Peter Atkins, as upholding the mind as a function of the brain. All the evidence favours it except this vague impression that we look out of our bodies. Yet even though the disembodied soul of a supposed NDE can see quite well from the ceiling, the soul within the body cannot see without eyes, and is aware of nothing certain when the brain is unconscious. It is the brain which receives the information, not any soul, explaining the impressions too.

Now, at last, Fuller comes to his third “alternative”, but it is hugely disappointing, so it is easy to see why he has been putting it off. The brain is responsible for mind, but in such a complicated way, it cannot be understood. There! So, Fuller explains to us why Sir John Eccles is not an archangel after all, but how does this differ from the “reductionistic materialism”, aka science, that we already have? According to science the brain cannot be understood—yet!

Fuller wants scientists to be portrayed as believing that complex systems are “nothing but” the sum of their parts. Science has no illusions that things are not complicated, although apparent complexity is far simpler than at first it seems. Consequently, science teachers, so as not to scare off their charges, might use expressions like those highlighted by the theologians. Their aim is to show up the essential simplicity of many even complicated looking things.

Fuller wants us to believe that Christian primary teachers who are meticulous about the use of words would never say that the sun is nothing but a ball of fire in the sky, or that water is no more than oxygen and hydrogen combined. Fuller wants us to believe that Christian teachers go about saying to children that they should not imagine the sun is just a ball of fire in the sky, and here are the works of Fred Hoyle in explanation.

No wonder ordinary citizens think that science is beyond them. They have to be told that science is even harder than they think. It is full of emerging properties that are hard to understand, exceot the highest emerging property of all, which is easily understood especially by the simplest people. It is God.

To pretend, though, that scientists do not appreciate that the whole is more than its parts is a Christian calumny, so self-evidently falsified by every technological development we see about us that only the intellectually blind, deaf and daft could try to argue otherwise. We know who does.

Antireductionistic Materialism!

These infantile conjurers come up with what they call a new position with a new word to describe it. It is “antireductionistic materialism”. It seems they have accepted the materialistic position, but convinced that their new word “antireductionistic” stands for something deeper. They think it is an acceptable type of materialism—a sort of non-materiastic materialism! The mind is a function of the material brain, but the relationship is non-causal. That must answer it all because it is all you get. Fuller now turns to the bible to find some Christian evidence.

The authors of the bible are unknown but Christians think it was the holy ghost, an aspect of God who makes everything the best it can be—perfect and infallible in the case of the bible as far as most Protestant sects are concerned, and lacking only a Christian divine to interpret its fuzzy bits according to Catholics. No scientists can accept any such nonsense as:

• everlasting spirits,
• infallible books,
• infallible people.

Moreover, a cursory examination of the infallible books in the light of modern scientific discoveries shows them to be anything but infallible. They are full of errors and downright impossibilities. The books are full of ancient myths and tendentious history, supposed prophecy, obsolete temple rituals, laws and hymns, murder, mayhem and miracles, all supposedly to tell Christians about God. They were plainly written by priests to frighten the people into keeping them rich by bringing spotlessly perfect animals to the temple as gifts to God, meaning the priests themselves, in practice. That is how they got rich and stayed fat while everyone else nearly starved. Fuller prefers all this primitive mumbo-jumbo to the discoveries of modern science, showing that he is no longer a scientist whatever he once was.

Ancient Babylonians and Syrians thought an explanation of the world and humanity was that superbeings made them, so that the humans would relieve them of drudgery by being their slaves. Slaves are servants and have to serve their God. That is why church rituals are called services until this day. They thought their God would live forever, but it never occurred to them that the world itself could have been eternal.

Happy in God?

Fuller does not want to discuss whether his beliefs are reasonable, but he wants to tell his readers what they are, a curious desire since his readers must be entirely hair-brained Christians, and therefore ought to know what the beliefs are. Still, he insists on boring us to distraction by telling us how God loves us and only wants to relate with us, and how Christians love Him and relate with Him, and can hardly wait to return to Him. A medley of authorities prove what he is saying to be true:

If man was not made for God, why is he only happy in God?

Blaise Pascal

Pascal is a typical example of a man who wasted a good part of his short life in pointless meditation and religious posturing when he was a talented mathematician and physicist. He had a reason, however, that might excuse him—he was sickly and died young. Perhaps God was a comfort to him, but he made the mistake characteristic of Christians of projecting what was good for him on to the rest of us.

In any event, a close shave turned him forever to God and away from science, but he did not jump into the nearest fast river as anyone wanting to be happy “in God” should have. Nor are other Christians so enamoured with being “in God” that they jump into fast rivers or out of light aeroplanes. Presumably Christians say they want to be “in God” because they mean it. No one can deny that the Moslems who blow themselves up expecting to go immediately to heaven also believe it, but no sane person, Christian or atheist, can admire them for it. Yet Christians should admire such dedicated faith. No one is urging Christians to jump from tall buildings, but the fact that they do not shows they have no compelling desire to be “in God”. Christian faith is not so strong that they actually want to act on it, but whether they do so or not, the delusion is the same.

Pascal did not only speak for himself but for the whole of mankind. It is the most obnoxious aspect of Christianity. Christians are not content to believe whatever absurdities they choose, but insist the rest of us should be the same. It is like madmen insisting we should all be mad, or crooks insisting we should all be crooks. Christians are often both, but they want to recruit sinners so that will be why. In fact, millions of people in Christian societies are no longer Christian, although even in the US, the “Land of the Free”, many do not feel free enough to admit it. Christian students quite openly intimidate other students over this. They are different only in degree from the Taliban.

Billions of non-Christians in the world reject the Christian idea of God and His son. Are they all unhappy? They might well be unhappy, not because they miss Christianity, but because Christian bankers and multinational corporate bosses take their money and their livelihoods. People in the Third World would be better off without Christianity. Christians are too smug and self-centered to even think of this.

Fuller adds the view of Friedrich Schleiermeyer, a Christian theologian, who announced that everyone felt dependent on God. Fuller does not pronounce on the monstrous arrogance and presumption displayed by Christians like these. Only scientists are arrogant, and when they do not feel dependent on God—as they should in the Christian scheme of things—then they are fallen men! The whole purpose of the death of the man later entitled Jesus Christ was to repair the damage done to the relationship between God and humanity by this fall, illustrated by the Jewish story about Adam and Eve. God, of course, had the power to foresee it all, and the power to stop it by making the archetypal humans dufferently so that they would not have fallen. Since they did fall, He could have used any method He chose to rectify the situation. The solutions he chose—the Christian one—must be among the worst. In believing this, Christians take their Almighty God to be a fool. If God is Almighty, He could have done better.

The Origin of Soul

Fuller skates quickly away from the bible in which the gospels scarcely have any reference to a soul, the idea there being that the whole body, not some incorporeal shadow of it, is resurrected on earth. Christians nowadays are of a type of spiritualist but for a long time the resurrection of the whole body was believed. Catholics still do, but some time in the future at a general resurrection, and meanwhile the spiritualist sojourn of the soul in heaven will suffice. It is too popular an idea for any variety of Christianity to reject.

The original resurrection ideas of the Essenes from whom Christianity came, were polluted with Platonist ideas of the soul, initially thgrough the influence of Gnosticism which was a religious adaptation of Platonism. The earliest books in the Christian part of the bible are plainly influenced by Gnosticism to vaying degrees. They are the letters attributed to Paul. The central idea of Gnosticism, that of a redeemer sent by God, was how they interpreted the Essene leader of the Jews who rebelled against the Romans in Judaea, defeated them briefly, and was crucified for his effrontery.

Fuller speaks of the “divine spark” which Gnostics considered as the soul. Then he seeks the equivalent idea in God breathing life into Adam who, until then, was just a clay statue. God breathed the vitality or “vitalism” into Adam. Thus the statue was made to live. Fuller does not think it worth observing on the meaning of the words used for spirit—now universally considered an incorporeal being, but not originally.

“Spiritus” is the Latin for breath. It is the translation in the Vulgate of the Greek word, “pneuma”, used in the Septuagint and the Greek New Testament. That in turn is the translation into Greek of the Hebrew word, “ruach”, used in the Hebrew scriptures of the Jews. All of them mean “breath”. The ancients believed that the vitalism of living things was their breath. Of course, they were close to being right. Whatever does not breathe is not alive, and they deduced that in their myths God had to supply their initial breath to make them live. It is a primitive attempt to explain life.

In the story of Adam and Eve, the homunculus made by God needed to be given its first breath to make it live. God gave it it. Once the homunulus took a breath, the one given by God, it lived. The later Christians, influenced by Platonism via Gnosticism, identified this “pneuma” with the soul, an arbitrary philosophic invention based on the idea of perfect “forms” from which material things were copied. Now the false ideas of ancient Gnostics are accepted as God’s infallible Word by Christians who reject anything more sensible because they are too hidebound to change their mistaken ideas.

Beam Me Up, Scottie!

Fuller now returns to the idea of emergence to explain mind and brain, and soul and body. He quotes Dostoevsky as his authority against a mechanistic view of humanity.

…if it was proved to them by science and mathematics, even then they would not see reason, but on the contrary would deliberately do something out of sheer ingratitude, in order, in fact, to have their own way… If… reason could hold sway—in that case men would deliberately go mad, so as not to pursue reason, and thus still get their own way!

Fuller seems not to notice how closely this citation matches the obtuseness of Christians with respect to scientific evidence, even though it is meant to be the response of the “reductionistic materialists” presumably. Fuller is himself proof enough, that they just will not see reason, even when they are supposed to have been trained as scientists. They thrash around in all directions to find desperate ways not to see reason. Christians would indeed rather go mad than accept rheir belief is superstition and incompatible with reality.

It turns out that what we take to be soul is really a property of the “physico-chemical functioning of our bodies”. It is a collective noun for character, emotion, aesthetic response and religion. Fuller assures us that this does not deny the “validity of modern scientific thinking” and nor does it because modern scientific thinking has nothing to say about imaginary, unnecessary and untestable hypotheses. Maybe Fuller is doing his conjuring tricks with words again, identifying the soul with something that science does accept. Well, then, so be it, but it simply shows that these Christians are intent on obfuscation. There is no possible advantage to science in confusing a clear issue by introducing the word “soul” as something already well defined. There is, of course, an advantage to religion.

Here the master conjurer brings the big bunny out of the hat. Eternal life is that we live forever as memories in the mind of God. Excuse the uncontrollable laughter. God remembers the “pattern” of our atoms and so can resurrect it in another world of His choosing—including a world of boiling sulphur that Christians call hell. Sorry, this is the other great magician, not Tommy Cooper, but John Polkinghorne, another scientist indoctrinated into Christianity during his upbringing and unable to cast it off despite a career in science. He gets his inspiration for theology from Star Trek.

The new Star Trek idea does not solve old resurrection problems, and one is: What will be resurrected? What of the many “patterns” of atoms that have fitted anyone in their lifetime will be resurrected? Does someone who dies old and senile get resurrected old and senile? If, as people like to imagine, they are resurrected as they were in their prime, then God must have a way of tallying when anyone’s prime is, and what if you did not enjoy life in your prime, and want to be resurrected at a different stage? Do you have a spiritual conference with God to agree what your resurrected appearance would be, then God makes the appropriate changes?

Which of your wives would you be resurrected with. Would your dead daughter be resurrected too, even if your prime or preferred age was how you looked after she had died? Or was Jesus right in the New Testament in denying that we were resurrected in the same form as we were on earth, but as sexless angels unconcerned with our earthly partners, however many there were? A thousand questions like these can be asked, and theologians can find a thousand answers for each one, none of which have any value because they are conjecture from start to finish—desperate and unnecessary conjectures. Fuller seems to recognise that death means death, then tries to resurrect eternal life by having God beaming us back to life, Scottie! It is all unnecessary except for those who are terrified of dying.

Afterlife

It is interesting in connexion with this that in the following section on Freud’s work, Fuller digresses into a discussion of the notion of the afterlife in religion. He tries to make out that early religions did not have the idea of an afterlife, citing someone called John Bowker, as his authority. Bowker is apparently an authority on what death means, not a hard certificate to get, one imagines. Apparently Bowker has discovered that the earliest forms of religion had no concept of the afterlife, and when it arrived, it was in a “shadowy and unexciting” place.

Fuller at this point cites Psalms 39. It can only be to illustrate Bowker’s point, and perhaps suggest that Bowker too is using the Jewish scriptures as his infallible source. It would completely explain why he is talking transparent nonsense.

Doubtless, these sad people still cling to the idea that the psalms were written by a great Jewish king who lived about 1000 BC, and was called king David in the scriptures, where he was depicted as an astonishingly literate poet for his time and situation. Even then, 1000 BC is nowhere near the time of the earliest religion, so the relevance of the psalms is less than clear. Archaeologists know the psalms were still being collected by the Qumran sectarians who stored the Dead Sea Scrolls, and so they are most certainly all written after the Persian conquest and most of them will have been written after Alexander’s conquest.

The Christian attitude to history is just as ungrateful, as Dostoevsky put it, as it is to science. They do everything possible to obfuscate true history, and even to deny it to uphold in its place their set of Babylonian and Jewish myths called the Old Testament. Many Jews are willing to concede, for example, that David was no more than a primitive tribal chief, later magnified to become a mythical founder of the Jewish state. Christians do not agree, preferring to cling to their illusions.

The supposedly primitive psalm was written in the advanced tradition of the Greeks, in the Hellenistic period, as much of the Jewish scriptures were. The Greek idea of the afterlife was Hades which is the same as the Sheol of the Jewish scriptures. These people sensibly did not look forward to death, and only heroes had a chance of a decent afterlife. We are talking here of only a few hundred years before the gospel period. How then is this the earliest religion? Does Bowker seriously think that the Jewish scriptures are older than the Egyptian inscriptions and books that tell us about their funereal interests?

The Egyptians were obsessively concerned with the afterlife 2000 years earlier. Even before the Egyptians, members of another species were concerned with life after death tens of thousands of years before. Neanderthal burials were arranged with the corpse in a foetal position and surrounded by flowers. It is admittedly not conclusive, but to carefully place a corpse as if it were a new born child suggests a desire or even an expectation of a rebirth. That is still a life after death. The fact is that Professor J W Bowker tells us things about ancient beliefs in death, that no other historian holds. His is typical of the special pleading of religious professors. It is not scholarship.

The reason why Bowker’s view had to be upheld is that Freud took the established view that people are often worried about death, and mythologies arose around it to alleviate its threat. The Greeks who have shown by their philosophical genius that they were a down to earth and rational race, had little concern about death. We appear to decay and return to the earth, and burial seemed the proper thing to do to dead bodies. The place for the dead was therefore always under the earth, and was a gloomy place where even God could not penetrate, because God was normally identified with the sun. That is precisely the tone of some of the psalms that refer to Sheol. Even so, people there were not unconscious, though they were not necessarily fully conscious or sane, in Greek thought at any rate. They were shadows—shades—of the living person. Despite this shadowy existence, the living often thought that they needed to be sent off on their journey properly, and properly prepared for it.

It was the appearance on the world scene of the Persians that introduced the traditional views of Christians about heaven and hell, and even purgatory. These views were imposed on the Canaanites of Yehud by the Persian colonists, so the idea of a heaven and a hell preceded or accompanied the compilation of the original Jewish scriptures. Alexander destroyed the books of the Zoroastrians however, and there is little doubt that the Persian version of the Jewish scriptiures was rewritten under Greek influence. This is when the idea of Sheol was substituted for the Persian ideas in the Deuteronomic books and the psalms. So, contrary to Bowker and Fuller, who base their ideas on the literal reading of the bible and not on scholarship, the shadowy concept of Hades is late and the product of more rational minds who extrapolate what they see happening in life—elderly people losing their reason, their weight and their senses—into death.

Freud and Jung

Religion is a dangerous illusion, stimulated by people’s desire to defy death and to be rewarded for injustice in life. That religion is dangerous is proved daily, and the historic evidence would fill a library. Freud identified religion with obsessional neuroses. Neurotics can never diagnose and cure their own illness. The value Freud saw in religion was that, by indulging in a mild mass neurosis, a serious personal one might be avoided.

Freud attampted to be scientific by carefully recording his observations and hypotheses, and his methods had practical value in curing people. Christians are ungrateful that a non-religious technique should step on the toes of their religion and even diagnose it correctly. Jung, howerver, whom many Christians admire, was a fantasist, unscientific and religious in his outlook. Jung formulated mysticism such as mental archetypes and collective unconscious. He formulated no testable hypotheses, and his disciples today are a conglomeration of new age and happy clappy confidence tricksters and those tricked by them. “God is an obvious psychic and non-physical fact”, Jung wrote. One could say the same about every word in the dictionary. They are communal ideas, but that does not necessarily mean that they have some form of reality outside the imagination. He also writes:

Religion means dependence on and submission to the irrational facts of experience.

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