The Logical Atheist

I just saw this quote from Patricia Churchland, a professor of neurophilosophy: "To understand the mind, we must understand the brain." Now this leads one's thoughts in perhaps unintended directions, although Churchland might not disagree with anything I'm about to say. It seems to be equally valid that to understand the brain, we must understand the mind. We must understand, in other words, what it means to understand, which is a mental, but not a brain, activity, as well as a state of being.  I don't see how it can make sense to try to understand what it means to understand if all we talk about is the brain. That sounds like a category mistake: how could neuroscience explain what understanding -- that is, comprehension -- is? Neuroscientists can talk from now till the end of time about what goes on in the brain when we engage in mental activities, but that is nothing like explaining what those activities are in themselves. I am not aware of my brain activity, bu...

Neither brains nor souls reflect, intend, deliberate, analyze, think, rank, choose, and act. Persons do. Brains are not atheists. Persons are. Souls are not theists. Persons are. If your worldview keeps you from distinguishing persons from brains and souls, you ought to think about revising your worldview. If your model clashes with undeniable facts -- facts you cannot deny without self-contradiction -- you might want to take a new look at your model. "A myth is, of course, not a fairy story," Gilbert Ryle wrote in The Concept of Mind . "It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them." When atheists deny plain facts instead of providing naturalist explanations for those facts, they discredit the cause of secularism.

When atheists and theists argue, sooner or later someone will pull the old brain-in-the-vat trick. Typically, the atheist will criticize the theist for offering unfalsifiable arguments for God and use the brain-in-the-vat as an analogy, saying something like, "If we were all brains in vats (or living in Keanu Reeves's  Matrix ), we couldn't possibly know it. So it wouldn't matter." How that refutes the theist, I'm not sure, but it's certainly true that any empirical theory that is said to be consistent with any and all conceivable states of affairs is worth little. It tells us nothing if it rules out nothing. But more can be said on the brain/vat matter. First, in serious discussion no room exists for the arbitrary. An assertion proffered without a smidgen of evidence is inadmissible. As I've said before , "what if ...?" in itself is not an argument. The brain-in-the-vat "challenge" is supposed to introduce doubt about what we have ...

From Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained :  I will explain the various phenomena that compose what we call consciousness, showing how they are all physical  effects of the brain's activities, how these activities evolved, and how they give rise to illusions about their own powers and properties. It is very hard to imagine how your mind could be your brain -- but not impossible. [Emphasis added.] Well, actually it is impossible. The brain is not what we mean when we speak of the mental activities we attribute (metaphorically) to the mind. (Remember, mind  is a verb, not a noun.) Seeing cannot be reduced to anything physical. I see  a thing, dammit! What am I to make of a philosopher or neuroscientist or physicist who has the gall to tell me I'm not really seeing it, but rather my brain is up to such and such, say, sorting out "sense data"? Dennett commits what philosopher Gilbert Ryle -- Dennett's teacher! -- called a "category mistake." Any norm...