About two weeks ago I called attention to a new book by Charles Murray, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, famous (or infamous) for his book coauthored with Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve (1994). Murray apparently had long neglected the god-shaped hole in his being, but eventually found God (implying the Christian God), and wrote a book about his conversion to belief, Taking Religion Seriously (click on book cover below to go to its publisher):
Murray followed with an excerpt in the Free Press called “I thought I didn’t need God. I was wrong.” As I mentioned in my piece about the FP article, Murray relied heavily on God-of-the-gaps arguments, finally filling his “God-sized hole” (yes, he uses those words), by encountering difficult questions whose answers, he averred, pointed toward the existence of divinity. These questions are familiar: they include “Why is there something instead of nothing?” and what accounts for “the mathematical simplicity of many scientific phenomena—most famously E = mc2″?
Murray finally settled on a Quaker-ish god:
Quaker teachings are also helpful in de-anthropomorphizing God. They emphasize that God is not a being with a location. He is everywhere—not just watching from everywhere but permeating the universe and our world.
But if God is everywhere, the god-shaped hole must be pretty damn big! Of course of all the gods in all the world’s religions, Murray settled on the one for which there can be no evidence. (As Victor Stenger pointed out, most gods can be investigated empirically.)
Well, so be it. Murray is free to adopt his superstition, so long as he doesn’t bother anybody else with it. Unfortunately, he has: not only issuing a book, but also the Free Press excerpt above and now an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Here he adduces adduces another hard question—consciousness—as evidence for a human “soul”, ergo God.
Click below to read it if you subscribe to the WSJ, or find Murray’s misguided piece archived for free here.
Of course Murray is not the first person to use the phenomenon of consciousness as evidence for a “soul”—something he actually never defines. But for evidence beyond consciousness he gloms onto the supposed phenomena of near-death experiences and “terminal lucidity”, defined below.
A few excerpt from Murray’s piece, which he starts by saying he used to be a materialist. And then. . . .
I’ve been back-pedaling. Writing “Human Accomplishment” (2003) forced me to recognize the crucial role transcendent belief had played in Western art, literature and music—and, to my surprise, science. Watching my wife’s spiritual evolution from agnosticism to Christianity, I saw that she was acquiring insights I lacked. I read C.S. Lewis, who raised questions I couldn’t answer. I scrutinized New Testament scholarship and was more impressed by the evidence supporting it than that discrediting it.
I’m curious what that evidence is, since there are no contemporary accounts—and there should be—of Jesus’s miracles, crucifixion, and resurrection. (This, by the way, makes me think that Murray is a secret Christian.) And then he pulls out his “evidence” for God.
Example: A central tenet of materialism is that consciousness exists exclusively in the brain. I first encountered claims to the contrary in the extensive literature on near-death experiences that grew out of Raymond Moody’s “Life After Life” (1975). The evidence now consists of dozens of books, hundreds of technical articles and thousands of cases. I read about Ian Stevenson’s cross-national studies of childhood memories of previous lives. He assembled a database of more than 3,000 cases, and more has been accumulating in the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies.
The evidence for both near-death experiences and childhood memories of previous lives is persuasive in terms of the credibility of the sources and verified facts, but much of it is strongly suggestive instead of dispositive. It doesn’t reach the standard of proof Carl Sagan popularized: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” This led me to seek a subset of cases that exclude all conceivable explanations except that consciousness can exist independent of the brain.
But Murray is most impressed by “terminal lucidity”:
Certain near-death experiences approach that level, but the most robust, hardest-to-ignore evidence comes from a phenomenon called terminal lucidity: a sudden, temporary return to self-awareness, memory and lucid communication by a person whose brain is no longer functional usually because of advanced dementia but occasionally because of meningitis, brain tumors, strokes or chronic psychiatric disorders.
Terminal lucidity can last from a few minutes to a few hours. In the most dramatic cases, people who have been unable to communicate or even recognize their spouses or children for years suddenly become alert and exhibit their former personalities, complete with reminiscences and incisive questions. It is almost always followed by complete mental relapse and death within a day or two.
The phenomenon didn’t have a name until 2009, but case studies reach back to detailed clinical descriptions from the 19th century. Hospices, palliative-care centers, and long-term care wards for dementia patients continued to observe the condition during the 20th century but usually treated it as a curious episode that didn’t warrant a write-up. With the advent of social media, reports began to accumulate. We now have a growing technical literature and a large, systematic sample compiled by Austrian psychologist Alexander Batthyány.
Two features of the best-documented cases combine to meet Sagan’s standard: The subjects suffered from medically verified disorders that made their brains incapable of organized mental activity; and multiple observers, including medical personnel, recorded the lucidity.
A strict materialist explanation must posit a so-far-unknown capability of the brain. But the brain has been mapped for years, and a great deal is known about the functions of its regions. Discovering this new feature would be akin to finding a way that blood can circulate when the heart stops pumping.
Given the complexity of the brain, is it surprising that we don’t fully understand what it’s capable of? Murray assumes that we do, and so has abandoned a materialistic explanation of consciousness. He ends by adducing the divine once again:
We are identifying anomalies in the materialist position that must eventually lead to a paradigm shift. Science will have to acknowledge that even though conventional neuroscience explains much about consciousness under ordinary circumstances, something else can come into play under the extreme conditions of imminent death.
The implications are momentous. Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow observed that for a scientist trying to explain creation, the verification of the big-bang theory “ends like a bad dream”: “As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” Neuroscientists who have been trying to explain consciousness may have to face their own bad dream: coming to terms with evidence for the human soul.
“MUST eventually lead to a paradigm shift”? Murray is pretty damn sure that our ignorance of the brain and its capabilities will lead us to a pantheistic God (or a Christian one; it’s not clear)! And what on earth does Murray mean by “a soul”? Is it this undefined “soul” that somehow permeates the brain, making us conscious and sometimes producing terminal lucidity. He doesn’t say, and I don’t feel like reading his book to find out. After all, if he’s advancing an argument for God, the Free Press and Wall Street Journal article should suffice to summarize Murray’s arguments.
A few of us, including Steve Pinker and Michael Shermer, were discussing Murray’s conversion and his “evidence”. Steve emailed a short rebuttal of Murray’s thesis, which he allowed me to publish here. It’s a good attack on the “soul of the gaps” argument:
Pinker (I put in one link):
Let’s assume for the moment that the reports of terminal lucidity are factually accurate. At best Murray would be making a “soul of the gaps” argument: There’s something we don’t understand, therefore the soul did it. But when it comes to the brain and its states of awareness, there’s lots we don’t understand. (Why do you wake up in the middle of the night for no reason? Why can’t you fall asleep even when you’re exhausted?)
The brain is an intricate, probabilistic, nonlinear dynamic system with redundancies, positive and negative feedback loops, and multiple states of transient stability. If circuit A inhibits circuit B, and if A deteriorates faster than B, then B can rebound. If A and B each excites itself while inhibiting the other, they can oscillate unpredictably. Now multiply these and other networks by several billion. Should we be surprised if uneven deterioration in the brain results in some quiescent circuit popping back into activity?
Contra Murray, these dynamics are nowhere near being understood by neuroscientists, since they may be the most complex phenomena in the universe. Yet we can be sure that with 86 billion neurons and a trillion synapses, the brain has enough physical complexity to challenge us with puzzles and surprises, none of them requiring a ghost in the machine. A graduate student in computational neuroscience with a free afternoon could easily program an artificial neural network which, when unevenly disabled, exhibited spontaneous recovery or unpredictable phase transitions.
All this assumes there is a phenomenon to explain in the first place. Claims of “terminal lucidity” consist of subjective recollections by loved ones and caregivers. But we know that people are extraordinarily credulous about the cognitive abilities of entities they interact with, readily overinterpreting simple responses as signs of nonexistent cogitation. The first primitive chatbot, Eliza, simulated a therapist in the 1960s using a few dozen canned responses (e.g., “I had an argument with my mother” → “Tell me more about your mother”), yet people poured their hearts out to it. With so-called Facilitated Communication, therapists and patients were convinced they were liberating the trapped thoughts of profoundly autistic children with the use of a keyboard, oblivious to the fact that they were manipulating the children’s hands. When there’s desperation to commune with a loved one, any glimmer of responsiveness can be interpreted as lucidity, exaggerated with each recall and retelling. What Murray did not report was any objective indicator of coherence or lucidity, like an IQ test, or a standard bedside neurological battery, or a quiz of autobiographical memory with verifiable details.
A great irony in the attempt to use rigorous scientific reasoning to support some theory of an immaterial soul is that the theory itself (inevitably left unspecified) is utterly incoherent. If a dybbuk can re-enter a ravaged brain as a gift to loved ones longing for a last goodbye, why are just a few people blessed with this miracle, rather than everyone? Why did the soul leave in the first place, sentencing the loved ones to years of agony? Why can’t the soul just stay put, making everyone immortal? What about when the deterioration is gradual, as when my disoriented grandmother thought she was lost and searching for her parents in the country she had left sixty years before, bursting into tears every time we told her her parents were dead? Was she missing a soul? Was the God who blessed others with a last lucid goodbye punishing her (and us) for some grievous sin?
The theory that the mind consists of activity in the brain, that the brain has a complexity we don’t yet understand (though we understand why we don’t understand it), and that the brain, like any complex entity, is vulnerable to damage and deterioration, has none of these problems.
Michael Shermer is also skeptical, as he evinced on his podcast below with Murray about the book. In the podcast Shermer also cites this post on terminal lucidity by Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, which is doubtful about the phenomenon but says it needs to be studies neurologically, along with other phenomena associated with death. In the interim, Zeleznikow-Johnston mentions observer bias (a “will to believe”) and ignorance as materialistic explanations of terminal lucidity.
Murray and Shermer’s discussion of terminal lucidity, in which Shermer offers a naturalistic explanation, begins 1 hour 24 minutes in the podcast below.
And I’ll leave it at that, but will add a quote from a letter by the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed by the Nazis:
. . . . Weizsäcker’s book on the world view of physics is still keeping me busy. It has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know;. . . . .
An immaterial soul that can cogitate would make the brain redundant. But we know that the brain is heavily involved in cogitation…if you injure it severely your cogitation is also severely affected.
To me, claiming that cogitation (which is a huge part of consciousness) happens independently of the brain is like saying that bile production happens independently of the liver. Maybe there is an immaterial bile-producer that hangs out along side the soul.
You remind of the opening lines of Winged Victory, Yeates’ semi-autobiographical story of Camel pilots (Sopwith, not dromedary):
Time to re-read it. I had to look up the quote, rather than having it word perfect.
After 30 years of being an atheist I have come to conclusion that being a religious person or a non-religious person has nothing to do with being a rational person. There are irrational people in all camps.
Pinker’s remarks remind me why I utterly reject the Transhumanist (are those people who identify as Humanists, but aren’t really?) claims about the Singularity, where we will be able to put our consciousness into machines and live forever. How on Earth can we hope to do that if we don’t even understand the mind, yet? And if we don’t understand the mind, how can people claim that it can be transferred into a machine?
I’m also a fan of Pinker, and dislike many things about the transhumanist movement. Note, however, that they have various ideas for preserving minds, not all of which depend on understanding how the mind works.
One could ruminate on personal day-to-day experience, and how unpredictable it all is vis-à-vis individual experience and how one feels and pushes oneself from day-to-day. One might say that yeah, there might be some kernels of truth in religious thought – some point where you have to admit it feels like there’s some component to life beyond one’s control that no theoretical data-dump will anticipate, an imaginary component (analogous to i perhaps) that might lube the gears for you but nobody really cares exactly how (could that be a soul?), at least before it gets discovered.
But such a cherry-picked New Age religious cult doctrine will be embarrassing or worse – you gotta go with the off-the-shelf God, off-the-shelf afterlife, full Seven Deadly Sins, off-the-shelf souls like everyone else ….
… if you want that book to be taken seriously!
Well, Charles Murray is getting ever closer to the end of his life. He obviously loves his wife and respects her opinions. I think this book may be a love letter to her and possibly to his children. A final set of thoughts to ease both his and his family’s minds as to the inevitable end that is coming. I agree that he may have always been a closeted christian and now, at the end of his career, he is trying to let everyone know it. Because of the dearth of evidence as we all know is the case, he’s done this using only the poor tools he has at his disposal, somewhat outside of the rigor we are used to seeing from him. To be fair, he’s not not a biologist/chemist/physicist, even though he seems to understand a lot about evolutionary biology. Mortality can cause rational humans to think/behave irrationally. This pattern of great thinkers going outside their area of expertise in the later parts of their lives is one I’ve seen a lot. I’ll give Charles a mulligan. He’s still a very important person whose work has added a lot of value/understanding to my worldview.
I’m not sure what you mean by giving him a “mulligan,” but it sounds as if you’re making excuses for this nonsense, which is published in TWO widespread news sites and in a book.
Sorry, but nobody is immune from criticism even if they’re “old.”
You are correct in that it is harmful and will give those people looking for “evidence” another book to cite from someone who is respected for the work they’ve done in other areas. Shermer was overly accommodating/non confrontational in his talk with Charles, perhaps out of respect. I am just slowly coming to the realization that many intelligent people whose backgrounds aren’t in biology end up not having the proper tools to address these type of questions with rigor. They often go astray. I fear no amount of criticism from our end will convince these believers to change course and move down the road towards the truth because they don’t have underlying knowledge to appropriately asses situations such as the belief in a God. Your point about criticizing the “old” is correct. Perhaps I’m just hoping Charles’ reach is limited at this point in time.
‘Mulligan’ is a golfing term. I should not speak for Brandon, but I think he is just being polite and respectful to age. As I put it after your first article on Murray:
I agree with you. I’ll give him a mulligan also. I wrote/twittered to him about the book, explaining my atheism and that I do listen to smart religious people so I read his article. He said I was the exact person he wrote the book for. I like his other work.
Watched the interview with Shermer the other day. Not bad. The end of life stuff was not convincing though, my thoughts were similar to Pinker’s about chaotic systems, though not as eloquent.
D.A.
NYC
If he’s near EOL then he doesn’t have much time for a do-over. Better get on with it.
I wish someone would write a spoof book about realizing they have a “god-shaped hole” in their heart or whatever, and go searching and convert to…Cthulhu worship (or maybe Azathoth or one of the other Lovecraftian deities) and explains it all in a fashion similar to such book of religious apologetics.
As I once heard, “Ah, yes, I especially enjoy the whistling sound my god shaped hole makes on windy days.”
So a guy “finds God” and feels that he has to write a book about it. Oy.
Yeah. Look at all the trouble Saul of Tarsus caused with that.
The Bell Curve is from 1994, not 1964.
I fixed it, thanks.
I don’t think this is a fair expectation. We are lucky to have several surviving accounts about Jesus’ life by contemporaries like St Paul. Belief in miracles was also widespread enough at the time that they would not have been considered inherently implausible, but rather as confirming for a divine connection. (There are also miracle stories about Roman emperors, and Pythagoras is said to have been able to be in two places at once.)
Paul never claims to have met Jesus and does not give any account of Jesus’s life. Indeed he seems oblivious to the concept of Jesus as a recently-lived human (as opposed to a divine being known from scripture and visions). Indeed we have no accounts of Jesus by anyone who claims to have met him. It is quite possible that gospel account by “Mark” was made up as an allegory in the aftermath of the AD71 war, and that all the other accounts of a human Jesus were theological embellishments on “Mark”.
Based on a Bart Ehrman book, and a quick search suggests the text backs this up.
Paul shows no awareness that the people he met had lived alongside Jesus. He never distinguishes between “disciples” of Jesus and “apostles” of the faith. He never tells us that he got information from people who had met Jesus, indeed he says the exact opposite, saying he got nothing from them and is openly contemptuous of their authority, which makes no sense if he was aware that they had lived alongside Jesus. Your claim that Paul met “eyewitnesses” to Jesus is mostly hopeful thinking by Christians, not established fact.
Let’s keep in mind that the idea that “Paul… personally knew eyewitnesses of Jesus” is a conclusion we are supposed to draw from the stories about the Jerusalem apostles in the gospels — but those were written well after Paul’s death. Paul certainly never read those stories, and it’s pretty clear that he’d never even heard about the real-world Jesus described therein. What Paul actually says is that Jesus could only be known through private revelation, and only by uniquely gifted individuals (such as himself of course) — “the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed” (Romans 16:25-26).
There are exactly zero “surviving accounts about Jesus’ life by contemporaries, like St. Paul”. Paul never met Jesus. He claims, without evidence (I’m detecting a theme here), that he saw him in a vision some years after his crucifixion, which he wrote of 20 years after the supposed event.
Just as Murray’s Bell Curve book can be discussed objectively, updated, and supported/refuted/revised/“nuanced” with facts, experiments, measurements, and data, so can his finding “god” be skeptically but cordially discussed.
There are too many errors and inconsistencies in the Bible to use it to “verify” truths about Jesus and God.
This omnipotent God shows no real sign that he wants to be worshipped. NOBODY can really claim they know what God wants — if it were obvious we’d have one religion.
Ah, but the God of Abraham et al. has a documented history of showing arbitrary favour to some folks and similar wrath to some others. So he’s clearly not omni-equitable. Maybe he tells different folks different nonsense for the lols.
My understanding is that Paul never claimed to meet Jesus nor did he write anything about his life contemporaneous with the supposed events. In fact, Paul’s writings are often used to support the mythicist position.
I’m always amazed by comments such as “I thought I didn’t need God. I was wrong.” Well, true, you might need god, but that doesn’t mean there is/are god/gods. Big difference. I always respond with something like “I feel a desperate need for Penelope Cruz, but that doesn’t mean I have her.” (Not a perfect comparison, of course, because she does indeed exist. But you get the point.)
In short, my desires/needs do NOT determine what is.
Many people do have an actual desperate need to win the lottery, particularly the compulsive lottery players….
I’ve made it through 30 minutes so far of the Shermer-Murray podcast. A pleasant enough conversation so far, if not terribly meaty.
Murray dismisses the theodicy argument saying that it never convinced him. As I heard Dennis Prager say once, he cannot imagine how evil could NOT exist in our human world, and so doesn’t see this as a problem for believing in a god. He also suggests that humans cannot possibly grasp the mind of a god (so far he has avoided capital-God), just as his dog cannot fathom what he (Murray) is thinking.
I once experienced non-terminal lucidity with my father, who was slowly losing ground to dementia at the time. Typically very quiet in his wheelchair, nodding off a lot, one day Dad reverted back to his old self and even more so. For well over an hour he enthusiastically recounted various stories, many of them about his tour of duty in the Coast Guard in the Pacific right after WWI ended. I remember, though, that he intertwined these accounts with those of later visits to the South Pacific with my mom, so that this wasn’t a totally accurate account of his time in that part of the world.
This was such a gift to have Dad back momentarily, but never once did it occur to me that this was evidence for his consciousness residing anywhere other than in his fading brain. After this burst of mental activity, things returned to the new normal for him, and he passed away within a year or two.
WWII, of course.
The problem with the word “God” is that it can mean just about anything and therefore nothing. The anthropomorphic God that man makes in his own image is, of course, an absurdity. But what about abstract, philosophical conceptions?
A theologian might tell me that God is the “ground of all being”. A Hindu of a philosophical rather than a superstitious bent might speak of the Brahman, the Ultimate Being that indwells in all that exists. Spinoza might tell me that God is a Transcendent Being that permeates the universe and manifests Itself in the harmonies of nature and of natures laws.
Well, those words are sort of pretty, but what do they mean? I don’t know and you don’t know. I don’t insist those abstract ideas are entirely wrong; I say there is no clear proposition to be evaluated. Wolfgang Pauli use to put down badly formulated scientific ideas with the insult “That’s not even wrong!”. I.e. the idea is to badly formulated to constitute a clear idea that admits a possibility of evaluation as to truth or falsity. That is what I say to such ideas.
There is indeed something instead of nothing. The world exists, and I exist, and I don’t understand why. That is okay. There are plenty of fascinating lesser mysteries I can productively think about and actually achieve some understanding.
Devotees of the “God is the ground of being” may wish to consult this:
https://www.northernsun.com/Coffee-Is-God-Magnet-%289940%29.html?srsltid=AfmBOopJE18KzjTgg8e6ZTIQcumMMClFQ26UQ-AT-ozZls1BVS5pnwKL
So I have not heard of terminal lucidity, but an online search gives me this damn AI summary about possible causes. Although it is not understood, the possible causes seem reasonable.
1. Brain function changes: It may be related to changes in brain chemicals, such as a temporary increase in activity or a breakdown in the blood-brain barrier.
2. Neurological processes: Scientists hypothesize that the brain may have the ability to access remaining neural networks or cognitive pathways that were previously inaccessible.
3. Oxygen levels: Fluctuations in oxygen to the brain are another potential contributing factor.
From Wikipedia, which adds that there are parallels to ongoing dementia, where patients with dementia temporarily get back some cognition. This is called paradoxical lucidity:
… as new research emerges and more insight is gained on previously poorly understood mechanisms involving the brain, it may be discovered that what was initially assumed to be permanent (dementia) is actually reversible.
Paradoxical lucidity is considered a challenge to the irreversibility paradigm of chronic degenerative dementias.[22] The similarities between paradoxical and terminal lucidity may suggest a shared common mechanism. Having a thorough understanding of both types of phenomenon can facilitate researchers in advancing the scope of their study.
It then goes on to draw parallels to near-death experiences and lucid dreaming. The later is especially interesting to me since I’ve had some really amazing dreams that were g.d. like reality, such that I was very confused when I woke up!
The article brings up signs of increased neural activity in patients who are dying in hospice. But that in the end we don’t understand these phenomena. Nothing is suggested about there being a realm of spiritual woo.
So Murray of course is not finding anything deep and real. He has become self-deluded to a degree that is disappointing, and especially so since a simple review of online sources offers these entirely naturalistic explanations, along with clear statements that these things, like many other aspects of the mind, are not understood. An academic should always assert that extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence, but here he simply fails to do so. Like an amateur preacher on the street corner. So he gets to write about his fantasies and get it published because of his reputation as a public intellectual. It is a shame.
Murray claims, “Discovering this new feature would be akin to finding a way that blood can circulate when the heart stops pumping.” That would be true if there was no brain activity during these “lucid” periods.
From what I gather, that’s not even close to what “terminal lucidity” is. It’s an unexplained recovery, but there’s no reason to believe that the brain isn’t functioning during this period (as Murray’s analogy would require).
Two thoughts on consciousness:
and
I am not at all sure consciousness is not an epiphenomenon
You might be receptive to Dennett’s Consciousness Explained; in my limited experience many/most people aren’t.
How funny. I was just now discussing all the horrible things that drive me crazy about ai (for example, have you noticed how difficult it has become to run a successful search with ai on board due to how concretely it tends to define words?). I then read this comment of yours, highlighted the 3 words Dennett’s Consciousness Explained and got a fascinating summary with citations and everything that, at the very bottom reads “AI generated answer- please verify critical facts”. Interestingly, all the citations led to Wikipedia which I also am not fond of. Everything I read could have been complete bullshit.
Add: My point is, I enjoyed what I read. What does that say about me? About all of this?
I get the feeling there is a parallel in there somewhere between AI and the Bible, both of which should have “please verify critical facts” at the bottom of all their answers.
I too am not a big fan of LLM AI™. FWIW, I find GPT-5 to be a significant improvement over GPT-4; both are available free within Duck.ai .
Re what not immediately rejecting Illusionism says about you — you’re clearly one of the Elect; you’ll be shown the secret handshake at the next meeting 🙂.
She immediately pictures the album cover of “Pleased to Meet Me” (Replacements, anyone?). What with all the rock and roll references in this thread.
Pinker says, “But we know that people are extraordinarily credulous about the cognitive abilities of entities they interact with, readily overinterpreting simple responses as signs of nonexistent cogitation.”
Yes. As a prominent example, recall the sad Terri Schiavo case. In her final days, friends and family members who were desperate to resume her nutritional support claimed, probably earnestly, to have seen her tracking their movements in the room with her eyes, and exclaiming, “I want to live!”
But brain scans, confirmed by a detailed post-mortem examination of Schiavo’s brain, proved conclusively that she had no cerebral cortex. She could not have seen because she had no visual cortex. She could not have spoken because she had no remaining brain parts that could control language perception or production. These people were seeing what they wanted to see, not what was actually there.
Some years ago people used to wonder what the sun was and why it appeared every morning in the east and set every evening in the west. All around the world people had simple, logical, theological explanations for the observation. Every one of them was wrong. They believed some supernatural being was responsible, whether riding on a chariot or simply by HIS will (and it’s always a “his”), the sun rose and set every day and we didn’t know why. Well, it’s god, Jake!
Terminal lucidity is the sun to us today.
We keep chasing this god feller into tinier and tinier hidey-holes, I tell you what. We found out god wasn’t driving the stars and the heavens, we evolved from earlier creatures and so did they, and the god thing actually has nothing to do with things like lightning, the weather and sudden death from heart attack. We’ve chased the god responsible for all those things into smaller and smaller places to hide. The best outcome now would be for god to be chased into the tiniest space there is and then dissappear in poof of irrelevancy.
Want to add a piece of trivia :
I’m probably the only one who thought of this :
Silent Lucidity
Queensryche (1990) :
https://youtu.be/jhat-xUQ6dw?si=36zKc53NZt1dVxPj
🤘🎸🎶
The background refers to a 1974 book Creative Dreaming by Patricia Garfield “which explained how to tap into one’s subconscious to experience a lucid dream.” (Wikipedia).
No, you’re not (the only one who thought of the Queensryche song).
Terminal lucidity?
Murry is himself suffering from regessive lucidity. He didn’t need to write a book about it. That god is indeed in a hole all that’s needed is the lid to stay firmly cemented, and the evidence against mythical beings should do the job.
It’s a play on the old Phil Ochs refrain. Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, I’m a Conservative.
I check out Shermer every once in a while. I like his sincere and good faith style and it’s been a while since I listened to an atheist/theist conversation (although technically agnostic for Shermer). I was hoping for something more, and found it a bit disappointing for many of the reasons you listed in your essay. It was a kinda a surprising low effort recycling of stuff I have heard before TBH.
Anyways, silver lining, got to read some fine writings by you and Pinker.
I recommend his conversation with Ben Shapiro.
It’s somewhere … either Shermer’s or Shapiro’s … channels, or what have you.
I thought terminal lucidity was knowing which Paris terminal to go to catch one’s train.
Or which way to hook up the jumper cables.
+1!
Ecclesiastes 3v19 “Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath c ; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. 20 All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. 21Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?”
Never a truer word spoken in the Bible, well except that if there was a spirit why would it rise up in the sky rather than disappear into another dimension ?
It is funny how anyone can take the New Testament book of Revelation seriously when it totally misses out any significant details of human history that have happened in the last 2000 years. It should have had something like, “In the end times there will be an industrial revolution fueled by fossil fuels. Humans will flourish for a while on this wave of energy from fossil fuels and many will say to themselves, ‘most of the sayings of the Godly priesthood have turned out to be junk, we have discovered by microscopes and telescopes etc how to improve our quality of life and longevity, what use have we for this God talk’ but in the last days there will be grid lock on the roads and then the great horror will arise : no petrol at the fuel station. And people will worship their wind turbines believing that those will save them but then the wind will fail and people will cry out and pray to the weather Gods to send wind but alas they will find those too are false gods. Then the Son of Man will be revealed and remind them that nuclear power was the answer but it is now too late to build enough as all the fossil fuel has been used up. And then Armageddon and the End.
( disclaimer, above passage not to be taken seriously or literally )
Spirit in the Sky
Norman Greenbaum
1969
https://youtu.be/W2msh0jut2Y?si=vO-pXxofcYieUH5i
I love it!
Looks like a very bad trip, particularly the long lip-snakes. YMMV.
I knew this would happen
The song I meant.
I didn’t watch the video but picked it b/c it has 45M views!
Hi Bryan, Nice tune, comforting to think we all go to a happy ever after wonderland. I was remembering that over 2000 years ago some folks equated breath and spirit. Even John 20v22 has, “And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Also see Wikipedia article about Pneuma. We don’t even understand what was meant by the words the ancients wrote.
Pneuma (Ancient Greek: πνεῦμα, romanized: pneûma) is an ancient Greek word for “breath”, and in a religious context for “spirit”.[1][2] It has various technical meanings for medical writers and philosophers of classical antiquity, particularly in regard to physiology, and is also used in Greek translations of ruach רוח in the Hebrew Bible, and in the Greek New Testament.
In classical philosophy, it is distinguishable from psyche (Ancient Greek: ψυχή, romanized: psūkhḗ), which originally meant “breath of life”, but is regularly translated as “spirit” or most often “soul”.[3]
Also on topic of what the ancients meant by “Spirit”; Genesis 2v7,” Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
Interesting that the mammals and birds didn’t need breathed into to get them started. I’m trying to remember in evolution how breathing started, amphibians ? Creatures that were able to have an exchange of air through their skin ? I will go and revise. How come we forget what we want to remember and remember what we would rather forget ?
Is religion (God) a spandrel? Did human ancestors adapt by evolving an imaginative brain? Did that brain –> causes for sun rising, moon, all sorts of phenomena cause unknown? Did culture then find use for religion, unifying, pacifying, controlling?
Consciousness may be the spandrel. What’s it for?
Brains are obviously extremely complex. For such complex structures they are extremely robust, surviving many extreme events and continuing for the most part to keep our bodies running and a reasonably coherent sense of sense of self, more many many years.
That the mechanisms that contribute to this coherence can occasionally reassert themselves for a moment here and there in an otherwise apparently lost mind is no great surprise at all.
As Steve put so nicely.
That Charles Murray hangs his hat on such a easily doubted bit of non evidence is similar to many religious types and their rationales. Francis Collins and a frozen waterfall for example.
In the interview with Michael Shermer, Murray suggests that God was very clever to choose Palestine for his intervention 2000 years ago: The geographical location inside the Roman Empire facilitated the rapid growth of Christianity. Really? If God wanted his missionaries to spread the gospel rapidly, why most people in the world today still know nothing, or almost nothing, about the gospel?
And I wanted to teleport into the interview at that point, and ask Murray if he agreed that it was extremely clever of God to appear to Mo when he did, so as to ensure a rapid conquest of the one, true faith…Islam. I would want to hear Murray explain why we should disregard all of the faithful Muslims in favor of his Quaker Oats God…
This may have been covered in the Podcast, but isn’t Murray famous (or notorious) for his argument that “racial” differences in IQ scores are significantly influenced by genes?
How is that consistent with an argument that cognition is in fact carried out by an immaterial soul?
White souls are smarter…