Minds Over Matter

by Dinesh D'Souza

In his book A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness, V.S. Ramachandran says it "never ceases to amaze me" that "all the richness of our mental life--all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions--is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in our brains. There is nothing else." Here is the voice of materialism, the doctrine that holds that matter is all that there is, and mind is simply an epiphenomenon of matter. It is the intellectual foundation of the new atheism espoused by Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett and others.
Dawkins, Pinker and Dennett offer nothing to prove the doctrine, and neither does Ramachandran. The best Ramachandran can do is cite exotic ailments: the fellow who could recognize shapes but not faces; the fellow who thought his mother was an imposter in disguise, the patient who responded to pain with laughter, and so on. Turns out that these peculiarities emerge as a result of damage to particular parts of the brain.

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I won't torture you with the entire article. But the jist of it is that the new athiests are silly because they SHOULD know there is something more but they are too dull to see it. He makes a pathetic argument that mind over matter is probably possible, but never tells us what the mind is and how this possibly could be done. Not much of a scientist are you? The truth is that Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris and Pinker make the most sense of anyone because of their passion for truth and almost disarming honesty and directness. Those of a spiritual bent with a chip on their shoulder should do more listening than playing the "I'm so offended" card every time new ways of looking at spirituality are brought to light in a scientific manner.

Thanks for letting me vent. Whew.