Denyse O’Leary talks about the just-released Spiritual Brain

Interesting podcast, though I'm afraid I was only able to download 85% of it. I'm not sure whether that was due to a problem with my computer, or with the system. As for the materialist comment about God being a product of evolution, that was refuted nearly a century ago. Rudolf Otto attacked it in his great book The Idea of the Holy at about the time of the First World War, see the chapter on 'The Holy as an A Priori Concept'. I suspect part of the materialist attack on consciousness from an evolutionary perspective comes from the great fear of many evolutionary biologists of teleology. If consciousness is irreducible, and mind does not equal brain, then there is a teleological process operating in evolution akin to the vitalism of Henri Bergson. Sir Alister Hardy stated this quite clearly in his book The Biology of God . Julian Huxley took teleology very seriously indeed, despite his Humanism, and was savagely attacked by Peter Medawar and others when he publicly endorsed the views of Teilhard du Chardin. In actual fact, the idea that mind guides evolution contra the materialists has a very respectable pedigree indeed, dating from the 19th century. Hardy cites even arch atheist evolutionists like Jacques Monod as showing that changes in behaviour - the product of mind - come before physiological changes. I suspect the Selfish Gene and similar attempts to dispel mind were part of the general attempt to exorcise God and teleology from the universe.Beast Rabban

September 6, 2007

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