An interview with ex-preacher Jerry DeWitt

June 19, 2013 • 9:46 am

Jian Ghomeshi at the CBC has a new 16-minute interview with Jerry DeWitt, the Pentacostal preacher turned atheist who lost his wife, friends, and family when he gave up God. He was the first person to “come out” in the “Clergy Project,” a support group for nonbelieving preachers, and is an intelligent and articulate man.

You can hear the interview here (press the “listen” button); it’s definitely worth investing the quarter-hour. Despite what he’s gone through, DeWitt is amiable and soft-spoken, and you’ll learn a lot, including why he stays in the Louisiana town where he once preached but is now reviled.

DeWitt has a new book out, Hope After Faith: An Ex-Pastor’s Journey from Belief to Atheism.  I suspect it will be well worth reading, just like two other excellent books about giving up preaching for atheism: Dan Barker’s Godless and John Loftus’s Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity. There is no substitute for hearing what it’s like for someone deeply steeped in faith—indeed, someone whose job was to preach the faith—to lose it completely.

h/t: Matt

David Brooks: The brain is not the mind

June 19, 2013 • 5:25 am

David Brooks always seems to write above his pay grade when he weighs in about science. His pop evolutionary-psychology book The Social Animal, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, was pretty dreadful, and, I think, inimical to the public understanding of evolution in its pretense that we have a thorough understanding of the evolutionary roots of our behavior. 

But even that isn’t as bad as his op-ed piece in Monday’s New York Times, “Beyond the brain.”  Brooks’s thesis is that “the mind is not the brain”, which is simply a Deepity in the Dennettian sense. For while that mantra implies something deep (i.e., the mind is separate from the brain), what Brooks says is only that the brain and its workings are hard to study. Yet his article flirts heavily with dualism, leaving the reader with a sense that the mind is in some ways independent of the brain, and There Must be More.

I’ll have to quote in extenso to convey the full fatuity of Brooks’s views. He begins by asserting his xkcd-like superiority over both neuroscientists and philosophers:

[Neuroscience] is obviously incredibly important and exciting. From personal experience, I can tell you that you get captivated by it and sometimes go off to extremes, as if understanding the brain is the solution to understanding all thought and behavior.

This is happening at two levels. At the lowbrow level, there are the conference circuit neuro-mappers. These are people who take pretty brain-scan images and claim they can use them to predict what product somebody will buy, what party they will vote for, whether they are lying or not or whether a criminal should be held responsible for his crime.

At the highbrow end, there are scholars and theorists that some have called the “nothing buttists.” Human beings are nothing but neurons, they assert. Once we understand the brain well enough, we will be able to understand behavior. We will see the chain of physical causations that determine actions. We will see that many behaviors like addiction are nothing more than brain diseases. We will see that people don’t really possess free will; their actions are caused by material processes emerging directly out of nature. Neuroscience will replace psychology and other fields as the way to understand action.

These two forms of extremism are refuted by the same reality. The brain is not the mind. It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind.

By equating free will with the absence of determinism and materialism, Brooks implicitly labels himself a dualist. And yet the program of the “nothing buttists” sounds pretty good to me: in fact, it’s the only program that is likely to make progress in understanding how and why we think.

In the last paragraph Brooks makes his big mistake: he equates the difficulty of studying the brain with the conclusion that “the brain is not the mind.” This confusion plagues the rest of his piece.

Here’s why, according to Brooks, the brain isn’t the mind. There are five reasons, none of them having the slightest bearing on his thesis. His quotes are in bold in the bulleted points below:

  • “The first basic problem is that regions of the brain handle a wide variety of different tasks.”  Brooks notes that the amygdala can light up during fMRI scans during a variety of activities and thoughts, including sexual arousal, fear, novelty, and happiness.  To this I say, “so what”?  Brain imaging is crude, and yes, brain tasks are farmed out to a variety of regions of the organ. One “region” (which of course comprises millions of neurons) can do several things. But that is one thing we’ve learned from the materialist and reductionist program that Brooks so decries. Again, this is no proof that the brain is not the mind, but only a sign that the workings of the brain are complex.
  • Then there is the problem that one activity is usually distributed over many different places in the brain. In his book, “Brain Imaging,” the Yale biophysicist Robert Shulman notes that we have this useful concept, “working memory,” but the activity described by this concept is widely distributed across at least 30 regions of the brain. Furthermore, there appears to be no dispersed pattern of activation that we can look at and say, “That person is experiencing hatred.” Again, this is no evidence for Brooks’s thesis.  Perhaps we shouldn’t be looking at crude brain scans to understand hatred, but where else can hatred come from but the brain?
  • Then there is the problem that one action can arise out of many different brain states and the same event can trigger many different brain reactions. As the eminent psychologist Jerome Kagan has argued, you may order the same salad, but your brain activity will look different, depending on whether you are drunk or sober, alert or tired. This is just dumb, for who ever thought that brain activity, visualized broadly, will be the same in all mental and physiological states, even when you make an identical decision? Does this really suggest that the brain isn’t the mind?
  • Then, as Kagan also notes, there is the problem of meaning. A glass of water may be more meaningful to you when you are dying of thirst than when you are not. Your lover means more than your friend. It’s as hard to study neurons and understand the flavors of meaning as it is to study Shakespeare’s spelling and understand the passions aroused by Macbeth.  I think Brooks is using the wrong examples here, since the evolved desire for water when you’re thirsty is probably one of the easier mental states to study. Ditto for love.  But even the notion that The Sun Also Rises is more meaningful to me than, say, The Purpose Driven Life is a notion that in principle could be studied neurologically, for that judgment is a reflection of my genes and my experiences, both of which must be reflected in the way my brain is wired. For “meaning” is simply “emotional resonance,” and that, too, resides in the brain.
  • Finally, there is the problem of agency, the problem that bedevils all methods that mimic physics to predict human behavior. People are smokers one day but quit the next. People can change their brains in unique and unpredictable ways by shifting the patterns of their attention. Here Brooks is mistaking “predictability of behavior” with “source of behavior.” It’s unlikely that, at least in this century, we’ll understand enough about the brain to make good predictions about people’s behavior. For one thing, that behavior depends on the environment, and so you can’t predict one’s behavior from studying a single brain. You also have to predict the behavior of people with which that brain interacts, as well as other things like the weather, the availability of certain foods, and so on. Such predictability is an infinite regress, but says nothing about where the mind comes from.  Likewise, the fact that one’s behavior can change says nothing about where those changes come from.  You might be able to make a smoker relapse by putting a pack of Camels in front of him, but does that show that the mind isn’t the brain? Our feeling of agency, which we don’t yet understand, may well be an evolutionary adaptation—one also coded in the brain.

At the end, Brooks shows his true colors: he objects to the brain/mind program because it is materialistic and reductionist.  In fact, he raises the scientistic fallacy, but to no end.  He claims that “material determinism” isn’t the way to understand the brain, but, tellingly, suggests no alternative. Should we look for souls, or the hand of god tweaking our neurons?

What Satel and Lilienfeld call “neurocentrism” is an effort to take the indeterminacy of life and reduce it to measurable, scientific categories.

Right now we are compelled to rely on different disciplines to try to understand behavior on multiple levels, with inherent tensions between them. Some people want to reduce that ambiguity by making one discipline all-explaining. They want to eliminate the confusing ambiguity of human freedom by reducing everything to material determinism.

But that is the form of intellectual utopianism that always leads to error. An important task these days is to harvest the exciting gains made by science and data while understanding the limits of science and data. The next time somebody tells you what a brain scan says, be a little skeptical. The brain is not the mind.

Ah, there it is: “the limits of science and data”! Now where have we heard that from? Could it be. . . . . the theologians?

You know why Brooks would be a bad scientist? It’s because he wants this dualism to be true: he wants there to be something more to the mind than the neuronal secretions of the brain. And yet his objections to the materialist program are not objections at all. Nor does he suggest an alternative.  His decrying materialism suggests some kind of festering spirituality, which is odd coming from someone who wrote a book claiming that much of our modern behavior is coded in our genes. For Brooks’s brand of evolutionary psychology is nothing but materialist and reductionist.

In fact, the brain is the mind in the sense that the mind is a product of the brain, and without a brain there is no mind. The brain is in fact the meat computer that, taking in physiological and environmental inputs, produces the mind as its output. That may sound reductionistic and materialistic, but it happens to be true. Unless, that is, there’s a spiritual homunculus sitting in our heads.

Once again Brooks has done science no favors. This piece is simply the usual critique of scientism with the usual flaws. All it does is enable those who want to believe in woo.

Two by Don Henley

June 19, 2013 • 4:24 am

For reasons unknown, but which were probably determined by the configuration of the universe this week, I wanted to post some music by Don Henley et  frères. The first is one of my favorite songs by the Eagles, a group I didn’t really appreciate when they were around. “I Can’t Tell you Why, written by Henley, Glenn Frey, and Timothy Schmit, all members of the group, was recorded in 1979.

The second song, “Boys of Summer“, was released by Henley on a solo album in 1984. He’s not in great voice during this live performance, which is the only one I could find on YouTube. Lyrics are by Henley; music by Mike Campbell. It’s hard to believe this song is nearly thirty years old. It’s one of several in which Henley mourns his lost youth, which he’s been doing since he was in his thirties.

Wikipedia explains the song’s origin:

Henley’s song has a haunting rhythm and timbre, cemented by Campbell’s 1-7-5 repetitive riff over a vi-IV-V-IV chord pattern. Superficially, the song appears to be about the passing of youth and entering middle age, with the theme of ‘summer love’ apparent in the choruses, and of reminiscence of a past relationship. [JAC: Superficially? I can’t detect any deeper meaning, but that’s okay.]

In a 1987 interview with Rolling Stone, Henley explained that the song is more about aging and questioning the past—a recurring theme in Henley’s lyrics (cf. “The End of the Innocence”, and “Taking You Home”.)

In an interview with NME in 1985, Henley explained the ‘Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac’ lyrics as an example of his generation selling out:

“I was driving down the San Diego freeway and got passed by a $21,000 Cadillac Seville, the status symbol of the Right-wing upper-middle-class American bourgeoisie – all the guys with the blue blazers with the crests and the grey pants – and there was this Grateful Dead ‘Deadhead’ bumper sticker on it!”

In an interview with Knoxville.com, Neil Giraldo, Pat Benatar’s guitarist and husband, says that Henley came in the studio while he was in the process of recording the song “Love Is a Battlefield” using an up tempo beat, and asked Giraldo if he could steal the sound for use in his song, “The Boys of Summer”, to which Giraldo gave his permission.

The recorded version of the song, without the strained voice, is here.

Your worst nightmare

June 18, 2013 • 5:39 pm

I couldn’t resist posting this video, which several readers have sent me. It’s an albino Burmese python, and apparently this isn’t staged. The clip will soon become viral.

According to Business Insider, the python’s name was Julius and, sadly, he died of an infection last year.  The owners are quoted as saying this:

Bored of being in a dark room, she flips on the light, opens the door and bails.

This particular episode takes place at 1am.

This is why we keep doors locked with her around. We don’t need her harassing the neighbors.

A fox asks for help?

June 18, 2013 • 10:30 am

A while ago I posted an animal-asking-for-help video, which, I recall, involved a net-tangled dolphin approaching divers for “assistance”. (The divers cut it free.)  Here we have a small fox with its head stuck in a jar, and HuffPo presents this, without question, as the animal approaching humans to ask for help.

Wild foxes aren’t known to hang around humans too often, but that changed for one little fox that turned to two men for help after getting stuck in a jar.

Two men walking along a dirt road in Russia came upon a red fox with its head stuck in a glass jar. The fox walked toward them, and one of the men bent down to help. He grabbed the jar, pulled the scruff of the animal’s neck and freed it.

As the kit scampered away, the man joked, “Where’s my thank you?” according to a Huffington Post translation.

Well, I’m not so sure. It’s entirely possible that the animal was simply disoriented, which effaced its fear of humans. It’s hard for me to believe that a wild animal that has either an evolved or learned fear of humans would suddenly find itself in a pickle and, overcoming those fears, ask for help—or even know what “asking for help” means.

Anyway, HuffPo mentions a few other stuck-animal rescues:

On Saturday, Pennsylvania police rescued a young bear whose head was stuck in a plastic jar for at least 11 days, according to the Associated Press. Likewise, officers in Florida’s Big Pine Key saved a deer that got its head stuck in a bag of Doritos chips.

Here’s the fox video; judge for yourself:

h/t: Barry

“No Hindu monkey god”: One of Hedin’s students exposes his Christian proselytizing, and I’m called a bully

June 18, 2013 • 8:19 am

A student who took Eric Hedin’s Honors course at Ball State University—”The Limits of Science”—has started a thread on reddit saying that you can ask the student anything.  I have independent evidence that what the student describes about Hedin, bizarre as it sounds, is almost certainly true. And it makes it even more imperative to do something about that ridiculous course (my recommendation is to dump it).

Here are a few of the student’s comments on the thread (the pseudonym is Kettyr). There are some inquiries, and the debate turns at times to philosophy and ethics, but the interesting part is what, according to Kettyr, Hedin said to his class (Kettyr’s comments are indented):

***

Dr. Hedin taught a science class designed to challenge the “limits” of science. He is now under fire by the FFRF for his course. Here is a good summary. And THIS article has the reading list.

I took the course in the Spring of 2011 and clashed with Hedin, both in assignments, out-of-class communication, and in-class discussion. Ask me anything.

***

Hedin is a scientist. He has a Ph.D. in physics. He believes that the big bang happened, but he also believes that there is a “limit” to science. To me, this makes him an apologist, desperately clinging to a belief system that is becoming exponentially more irrelevant as humans adopt reason. He believes in the Cambrian Explosion, another that we just don’t understand yet. I asked him one day, “Why is it that the limit of science is god, and not just ignorance?” and he had a lot of reasons why it must be God and there are things we will never know, though I think that his argument is self-defeating.

***

His biggest example was “what came before the Big Bang?” He believes the Big Bang happened, but he also believes it is a divinely triggered event. That is, in his words, a limit to scientific knowledge. When, in reality, it’s substituting lack of knowledge with a fabricated reality.

***

Another commenter, “Islamdunkbrunch,” asks this:

Do you think he went over the line promoting Christianity? What was the tone like in the class? As an atheist, were you challenged on your beliefs?

***

Kettyr replies (my emphasis), showing the immense pedagogical stupidity of Hedin:

  1. I do think he occasionally went over the line. As soon as I realized how firm his beliefs were, I knew what I was getting into. The biggest thing I remember was when I asked him why it is HIS god (the Christian god) that must be the “answer” to what science cannot explain. He said “it’s not like it’s some sort of Hindu monkey god.” That was very over the line.
  2. The class was half-and-half between small-group discussion (most of the questions were reasonable–like “What was before the Big Bang?”–though some were very leading) and his lectures. His lectures were very one-sided, extremely so, and he would have us do readings or watch clips from anti-evolution programs or movies, like Ben Stein’s documentary.
  3. I was the only atheist in a class of about 25 students, and found that my challenges (which were many) came from the class as a whole. He was not very confrontational and did allow for an open forum of ideas, but the other students agreed with him and often ganged up on me with some pretty harsh words. His biggest challenges came in the form of critiques on writings for the class, which were a more unopposed soap box than the class discussions.

and adds this:

The biggest was when I asked him why the Christian god is the answer to whatever science cannot explain. He said that it was not just his beliefs, it was a simple fact that it must be the Christian god. He then said, and this is a direct quote, “It’s not like it was some Hindu monkey god.” I blew up, and in hindsight I wish I had been more level-headed. I said that was not just hypocritical but a damnation of an entire population whose beliefs are just as valid as his. We argued for about five or ten minutes, and it was one of those situations where the other students got uncomfortable and quiet. He was not mean or hurtful, but I think he wished he hadn’t said it, and I wish I had been calmer. I ended saying something along the lines of “It takes a lot of ignorance to put your own beliefs on a pedestal above reason and evidence.” He got very calm then (he is an EXTREMELY calm, soft-spoken person; the monkey god comment was very out-of-character for him) and said that it was obvious our debate wasn’t going to change anyone’s minds and that we should revisit the topic in the future. We did revisit it over e-mail correspondence, but it felt forced and awkward.

****

About the reading list:

. . . The reading list is essentially a who’s-who of Christian apologists and scientists. For instance, he spent a long time discussing the Cambrian Explosion, a time in which life on earth evolved “too quickly” to be realistic, and had to have had some sort of divine intervention. This is a perfect example of “Science can’t explain it? It must be God”

. . . The only notable atheist he brought up was Dawkins, and that was only in one lecture, and he tore him to shreds.

The questions were all over the place. Sometimes, they were very open, like “Is there a universal theory of everything?” or “What is a theory?” or “What if our physical laws were ever-so-slightly different?”. However, these questions often followed a lecture (sermon?) about his views and, more often than not, students would just regurgitate what he said.

I remember one student essentially quoting Hedin, five minutes after the lecture (sermon) while discussing our “perfect” physical laws, and I asked the student, “Wouldn’t you agree that we can only be in awe of the universe’s physical laws because they are the only set of laws that we know?” which sort of stumped my small discussion group.

***

Another commenter asks if “Kettyr” complained to the administration.  The answer is “yes”:

Absolutely. Extensively. It was, by a long shot, the longest professor evaluation I ever wrote. I spoke in detail, using multiple specific dates and direct quotes. The administration (or at least, his supervisor or dean) knew what was going on at least two years before this story broke out, as I took the class in Spring 2011.

Remember that Ball State has claimed that there were no negative evaluations, and so far has refused to make any student evaluations available to the Muncie Star-Times reporter on the case, Seth Slabaugh, even though those evaluations are anonymous.

***

As to what should be done with the course, here’s Kettyr’s opinion, which also confirms that Hedin made his students watch the odious movie “Expelled”:

Which is the essence of my opinion on the matter: move the class the religious studies department, get it away from physics department. I should not have gotten physics credit for a course where we watched Ben Stein’s “Expelled”

***

No monkey gods, no Dawkins, God as the cause of the Cambrian Explosion? This is absolutely outrageous. What is equally outrageous is that Ball State University knew about these issues at least as early as 2006, when complaints about Hedin’s proselytizing for Christ were posted on ratemyprofessors.com, and had a long and critical evaluation in hand two years ago. Yet they did nothing, even when I added my voice to the list.

It took a letter from the Freedom from Religion Foundation to get Ball State to even investigate the content of Hedin’s course.  If this student is accurate, and I have no reason to doubt what he/she says, that course should be deep-sixed. It’s not even suitable for a “religion” course because there are no other views offered to counter Hedin’s religious interpretation of science.

In the meantime, a reader has written to The Daily, the Ball State University student newspaper:

Dear Editor:

Unfortunately, I greatly fear that Dr. Eric Hedin will not be treated fairly by Ball State University and panel of four professors charged with investigating his teaching of the honors symposium titled “The Boundaries of Science.”

University of Chicago evolutionary biologist and avowed atheist Dr. Jerry Coyne and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, whose complaints spurred the investigation, are ideological bullies with plenty of influence and financial clout. They have threatened legal action if their objections to Dr. Hedin’s teaching are not validated.

Across our land, we’ve seen variations of this “movie” before and it does not bode well for Dr. Hedin. Let’s be realistic and honest. Faced with the threat of an long-running and expensive lawsuit, the quiet but primary aim of the panel and the university will be “how do we make this go away?” It will not be “let’s do what is right and principled.”

The right and principled answer is simple. Dr. Coyne and the FFRF are wrong and are bringing a frivolous charge against Dr. Hedin. Dr. Hedin should be exonerated from all charges of wrongdoing.

The claim against Dr. Hedin is that he is in violation of the First Amendment for teaching religion.

They should be rebuffed because nowhere is Dr. Hedin charged with talking about the Bible or Jesus. That would be discussion of religion.  Through his class, he has simply raised the possibility of intelligent design of life and our cosmos. That is not teaching religion.

This matter is not complicated — but resolving it fairly would require a tremendous amount of courage on the part of the university.

Dr. Hedin has done nothing wrong and deserves support. Fair-mined people need rise up and apply the pressure needed for the university to muster the courage to stand up to Dr. Coyne and the FFRF and tell them to “get lost.”

Eric A. Ether
BSU Class of 1972
University Place    WA     98467

Mr. Ether is deeply ignorant, not only about what went on in this class (really—Hedin showed “Expelled”!), but about how academic teaching should proceed. Ether is also dead wrong about Hedin’s not talking about the Bible or Jesus. He did, and his “textbooks” are full of Christianity.

Hedin has done something wrong and his course should be put in the circular file.  It is Ball State’s abysmal failure to enforce decent standards of instruction that has forced us “ideological bullies” to get involved.  And what “financial clout” do I have to resolve this issue?