Evolution is a blind tinkerer, lacking the foresight of human engineers. Rarely, if ever, does it discard established designs and start over fresh, even when that would be more efficient. Instead, it builds on and around past adaptations, using the old as a foundation for the new. This is true throughout the biosphere, and it's especially true of one of the most complex structures ever evolved, the human brain. The physical architecture of the mind shows, through and through, the evolutionary hacks and kludges that went into creating it.

In his book The Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan points out that the human brain has a threefold division. The most complex and most recently evolved structure is the neocortex, responsible for rational judgment, self-control, long-term planning, and all those other characteristics we think of as most uniquely human. Below it, somewhat older, is the limbic system: shared by all mammals, producing feelings of parental love and pair-bonding. And oldest and most primitive, shared by all vertebrates, is the brainstem, which controls the instinctive drives and behaviors known as the four "F"'s - fight, flight, feeding, and reproduction.

And if you're feeling allegorical, you might notice a correspondence with the world's religions. No organized religion in existence today posits a god of the neocortex. A few of the best offer a god of the mammalian brain, but even they rarely aspire to anything higher. But most - the belligerent, aggrieved, crudely literal fundamentalist faiths that command the allegiance of hundreds of millions - have gods of the reptile brain. These deities well up from the brainstem, the evolutionary remnant that sees the world as a dark palette of anger, fear, hunger and lust. Like the promptings of the brainstem, they're concerned, more than anything else, with the lowest and most primitive animal drives: what we eat, how and with whom we have sex, whether we observe rituals and taboos relating to purity and contamination. Also like the promptings of the brainstem, the religions they preside over tend to include generous amounts of aggression, submission, and xenophobia, and inflexible rules on when these are to be displayed and toward whom.

Of course, I'm not saying that religion originates solely in the brainstem. Were that the case, we'd see distinctly religious behavior throughout the animal kingdom, which we obviously don't. Religion requires other mental capabilities that are largely unique to humans and other intelligent mammals - social dominance hierarchies, pattern-seeking behavior, and an awareness of personal mortality. Still, it's striking how close is the correspondence between the concerns of fundamentalist religion and the instinctive drives mediated by the most evolutionarily primitive part of our brains.

But from the rational perspective - the highest, most uniquely human perspective - it's clear how ridiculous and morally outrageous this is. The fundamentalists believe in a supreme, universe-transcending creator whose single-minded, all-consuming focus is what people do with their genitals - a clownish, laughable notion deserving only ridicule. But even worse is the notion, held by millions of believers, that this being threatens humans: "Obey me or I'll hurt you!" This idea is a moral depravity that could only be born from wicked minds.

Any god worthy of the name wouldn't coerce its creatures' obedience through fear or pain, but would set up the world so that they would all freely choose through reason to do the right thing. That would be how a supreme intelligence would create; that would be a god of the neocortex. Instead, the religions of this world are stocked with clumsy, brawling, belligerent gods of the reptile brain - gods who are constantly bewildered and enraged when their plans go astray and who can think of no better tools than violence and destruction.

Religion is supposed to bring out the best in us, we're told by its defenders; it's supposed to encourage the decency and compassion that human beings are capable of. And perhaps, sometimes, it does do this. But more often, it gives vent to the violent, destructive side of our nature, gives us license to express our xenophobia and violence and rage under the illusion that these qualities are endorsed by God.

"A qualitative and quantitative study of the incidence, features, and aetiology of near death experiences in cardiac arrest survivors." Resuscitation 48 (2001): 149-156.

In my most recent post on Case for a Creator, I mentioned that Lee Strobel referenced a February 2001 paper which allegedly provided proof that people had conscious experiences during the time that their brains were not functioning. I have a copy of that paper now, thanks to several helpful readers, so in this post I'm going to dissect it.

The principal researcher, Sam Parnia, carried out a study in which he interviewed all survivors of cardiac arrest at his hospital over one year, asking them if they had any memories and, if so, to describe what they experienced. There were 63 such people over the course of the study. Here's the first important point: the vast majority of those who were revived from cardiac arrest had no memories or experiences of any kind:

During the 1 year period 63 patients survived and were interviewed. Of those, 56 (88.8%) had no memory recall of their period of unconsciousness; the remaining seven survivors (11.1%) had some memory.

Only seven people had any memories at all, and only four of those had enough of the "classic" NDE elements (feelings of bliss and peace, seeing a bright light, the sensation of traveling through a tunnel or entering some other world) for Parnia to classify them as such. The other three had only vague hallucinations (one reported a sense of peace but no other elements, one reported seeing deceased relatives but with no other accompanying experiences, and one just saw "some unknown people jumping off a mountain"). This is difficult to explain under theistic assumptions. If everyone has a soul, shouldn't everyone who suffers cardiac arrest have an NDE?

There's also this part, which must have made Strobel decidedly uncomfortable if he read the actual paper:

All the NDE group were Christians. However, none of them described themselves as practising members and nor did they see a figure during their NDE specifically related to Christianity. One of the four also described himself as a Pagan. [According to a table later in the paper, three described themselves as non-practicing Anglican, while one identified as non-practicing Catholic and pagan. —Ebonmuse]

How is it that non-practicing Christians - one who described himself as a pagan, no less - had the same blissful hallucinations that are the most common kind of NDE? If Strobel's born-again beliefs are true, shouldn't these people have had only the frightening, "hellish" NDEs that are sometimes reported?

Again, please note that every conclusion in this study is inferred on the basis of just four people's experiences. This is hardly enough to draw any kind of firm conclusion, and Parnia and his co-authors say so themselves:

In this study possible physiological causative factors could not be investigated adequately in view of the relatively small number in the study (NDE) group. Nevertheless it was interesting that patients in the study group had higher oxygen levels than those in the control group. This may simply be a skewed result due to the low patient numbers. Alternatively it may indicate that patients who had NDEs had better oxygenation during the resuscitation, allowing better cortical function.... However, it would be unwise, with such small numbers, to draw any significant conclusion from this finding.

Strobel, meanwhile, inflates this noncommittal, tentative statement into a clangingly unequivocal conclusion:

"About ten percent reported having well-structured, lucid thought processes, with memory formation and reasoning, during the time that their brains were not functioning. The effects of oxygen starvation or drugs - objections commonly offered by skeptics - were ruled out as factors." [The Case for a Creator, p.251]

Not only is this a ridiculous exaggeration of what the study claims, it's also factually inaccurate. Parnia says only that "all patients followed a standard resuscitation protocol", which includes the administering of emergency drugs. He says nothing about whether these could or couldn't contribute to an NDE. As for oxygen starvation, of course patients with cardiac arrest experience oxygen starvation! That's what happens when your heart stops. What Parnia says, and what Strobel misunderstands, is that patients who had NDEs had higher blood oxygenation levels while they were being resuscitated, compared to those who had no such experiences. And even though the small numbers don't allow for robust conclusions, this is a very suggestive detail. It raises the possibility that NDEs are the result of neural activity starting up again in the brain as it's being revived.

Despite their small sample size, Parnia and his co-authors do argue that NDEs happen while the brain is unconscious, not at the onset of unconsciousness or during the process of revival. Here's how they defend that conclusion:

An alternative explanation would be that the observed experiences arise during the loss of, or on regaining, consciousness. However, it is unlikely that the NDE arises either when the cortical modules are failing, that is, during the process of becoming unconscious, or when the cortical modules are coming back on line, that is, when consciousness is returning... The EEG data during fainting shows a gradual slowing of the cerebral rhythms with the appearance of delta activity before finally, in a minority of cases, the EEG becomes flat. In the case of cardiac arrest, the process is accelerated, with the EEG showing changes within a few seconds. The transition from consciousness to unconsciousness is thus rapid, appearing immediate to the subjects.

So, their argument is that people suffering cardiac arrest become unconscious too quickly for the entire NDE to take place during that time. But that's a weak argument: We know of drugs that can skew the sense of time, and Parnia himself points out that one of the elements of a classic NDE is a sense that "time [has] speeded up". Why is it not possible that a few seconds of activity in a dying brain can produce experiences which subjectively seem much longer when the person is later revived?

Even if the unconscious brain is flooded by neurotransmitters this should not produce clear, lucid remembered experiences, as those cerebral modules which generate conscious experience and underpin memory are impaired by cerebral anoxia... Experiences which occur during the recovery of consciousness are confusional, which these were not.

Now hold on, there - Parnia is treating this claim as a matter of fact, when clearly it's a matter of opinion. The classic NDE isn't dreamlike or confusional? The feeling that a person has left their body, is entering a mystical realm, and encounters religious figures and deceased relatives? I think an atheist would reply that that's as hallucinatory and dreamlike an experience as you could hope to get.

Furthermore, Parnia's very small sample size may have caused him to overlook the fact that many NDEs which otherwise conform to the standard definition have unambiguously hallucinatory elements. Keith Augustine's essay on the Secular Web, which surveys reports of NDEs, has many examples: people who saw living friends and relatives in the afterlife, people who met talking animals or fictional characters, and in one amusing case, a winged centaur Jesus. Even Parnia's study had one case that he dismissed as merely confusional in nature, a man who saw "some unknown people jumping off a mountain" - but the only reason he dismissed it is that it didn't fit the classic NDE description, even though the man went through a cardiac arrest and revival the same as his other subjects.

And how do we know that his NDE subjects didn't omit dreamlike elements when telling him their stories? Parnia and his co-authors say they didn't prompt their subjects with leading questions, but the possibility can't be overlooked that people who are familiar with NDEs from pop culture prune the discordant elements from their story to make their experience more of a coherent narrative, making it sound more like the way they thought it "should" be.

In sum, Parnia's study, despite Strobel's overblown and grandiose assertions, doesn't prove anything about the timing of NDEs or demonstrate that they occur while the brain is nonfunctional. The only conclusive way to prove that they result from the soul leaving the body would be for people in such a state to gain information they couldn't have accessed through ordinary methods - but as I said earlier, aside from unverifiable hearsay and anecdotes, this never happens. Every careful, controlled experiment set up to prove this has turned up empty.

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 10

I was going to wrap up my review of chapter 10 with my previous post, but looking back over my notes, I see that Moreland and Strobel made a few more claims I wanted to address. Mostly, these consist of assertions that there's evidence for the ability of the soul to leave the body and have thoughts and experiences in a disembodied state. Moreland doesn't dwell on these at length, possibly because these sorts of claims are usually more identified with New Age belief systems than with Christianity. But Strobel did promise us science, and this is one of the few times that this chapter comes close to offering that, so I thought it was only fair to give these claims full consideration.

In their journal article, physician Sam Parnia and Peter Fenwick... describe their study of sixty-three heart attack victims who were declared clinically dead but were later revived and interviewed. About ten percent reported having well-structured, lucid thought processes, with memory formation and reasoning, during the time that their brains were not functioning. [p.251]

The citation is to this Reuters article, which refers to a February 2001 article in the journal Resuscitation. I don't have access to this journal, but if anyone who does wants to get in touch with me, it'd be much appreciated. [EDIT: I have it now - thanks to everyone who contacted me!]

Still, going by the material as presented, I see a fairly obvious fallacy here: Conscious experiences don't have timestamps. Even if people revived from cardiac arrest reported having memories, how on earth could anyone know that those memories were formed while the brain was not functioning? How could you rule out the possibility that they were formed, for example, in the last few seconds of erratic neural activity before the brain's oxygen supply was cut off, or when the brain resumed functioning once the patients were revived? Strobel makes no effort to explain this, and I greatly doubt that Parnia and Fenwick do either.

He speculated that the brain might serve as a mechanism to manifest the mind, much in the same way a television set manifests pictures and sounds from waves in the air. If an injury to the brain causes a person to lose some aspects of his mind or personality, this doesn't necessarily prove that the brain was the source of the mind. "All it shows is that the apparatus is damaged," he said. [p.251]

This analogy would make sense if damage to the brain could do nothing more than selectively eliminate aspects of consciousness, much the same way as damage to a TV might eliminate its ability to show color or to pick up certain channels. But that's not what happens in human beings. There are countless cases where brain damage doesn't remove but rather changes a person's personality, giving them new personality traits, desires, beliefs, or habits that they never possessed before. To use Moreland's analogy, no matter what kind of damage I do to my TV, it's never going to show me a parallel universe where the New York Mets are a football team, or play an alternate version of Star Wars in which Darth Vader is the hero and Luke Skywalker is the villain. Something like that could only happen if the programming was being produced inside the TV and could be altered by specific kinds of damage. (Moreland's apologetic also doesn't explain cases where only part of a person's consciousness has access to some information, such as we see in split-brain patients.)

"This happens in near-death experiences. People are clinically dead, but sometimes they have a vantage point from above, where they look down at the operating table that their body is on. Sometimes they gain information they couldn't have known if this were just an illusion happening in their brain. One woman died and she saw a tennis shoe that was on the roof of the hospital. How could she have known this?" [p.257]

No source is given for this, but it's clearly the infamous story of Kimberly Clark Sharp, which I discussed in a previous post on OBEs. This story is pure hearsay, and no well-designed scientific experiment has ever shown that people can take in information while in a disembodied state. (Some researchers have tried putting LED screens in operating rooms where they could only be seen by someone floating near the ceiling, but to no avail.)

But even if these stories are all fictitious, Moreland has one more laughably desperate argument to make: the fact that we can even conceive of such things proves that they're true!

"And clearly these stories make sense, even if we're not sure they're true. We've got to be more than our bodies or else these stories would be ludicrous to us." [p.257]

Whenever I see an argument like this, that our ability to imagine X proves that X exists, I apply "the Santa test": Is there a real Santa Claus? Well, there are stories from many different cultures about saintly figures who give gifts to children during the winter holidays. And clearly, these stories make sense to us, even if we're not sure they're true. Does this mean there must be elven workshops and flying reindeer, just because we can form a clear conception of those things and don't instinctively find them impossible or absurd? Or does it just mean that humans have the capability to imagine states of affairs that don't exist in reality?

And lastly, Moreland favors us with another of his classic philosopher's apologetics:

"I had a student a few years ago whose sister had a terrible accident on her honeymoon. She was knocked unconscious and lost all of her memories and a good bit of her personality....
    Now, we all knew this was the same person all along. This was Jamie's sister. She was not a different person, though she was behaving differently...
    Now, if I were just my consciousness, when my consciousness was different, I'd be a different person. But we know that I can be the same person even though my consciousness changes, so I can't be the same thing as my consciousness. I've got to be the 'self,' or soul, that contains my consciousness." [p.260]

Moreland doesn't attempt to explain how this hypothesis is compatible with the TV-antenna analogy discussed earlier, even though this case raises some interesting questions. If damage to the brain can cause you to lose your memories, doesn't that imply that memory is stored in the brain and not in the soul? If so, how is it possible that people having an out-of-body experience can remember it when they're revived later? (For that matter, how can a disembodied soul have experiences of any kind, if it doesn't have sensory organs?)

To address the substance of his argument, let's consider a parallel case: Am I the same person now that I was when I was four years old? Most people would probably say yes, since there's an unbroken thread of physical and psychological continuity from me-then to me-now. But you could make an equally sensible and plausible argument that the answer is no. After all, if all my likes, beliefs and preferences are different now from what they were then - if even the atoms in my body have been replaced by the steady turnover of biological processes - then in what sense are we the same?

There's no fact that could resolve this question one way or the other. The answer is just a matter of definition and convention. And the same is true for Moreland's example: Whether Jamie's sister before the accident and Jamie's sister after the accident are the same person depends entirely on your definitions of "same" and "person". Moreland has fallen into the philosopher's trap of thinking that definitions create objective reality - that because we choose to call Jamie's-sister-before-accident and Jamie's-sister-after-accident the same person, this implies there must be some concrete, persisting thing for that definition to attach to. In fact, all it shows is how we choose to categorize objects in the world through our use of language. This is really a rather obvious and simple fallacy. Did Moreland the clever philosopher not notice it, or did he and Strobel just choose to overlook it?

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 10

Science is hard work. Normally, to make any significant contribution to human knowledge, a scientist really has to get their hands dirty - experiments in the lab, research in the field, long days and longer nights, and the meticulous testing of hypotheses. But J.P. Moreland must be an especially brilliant scientist, because he doesn't even need any of those trappings. In this chapter, Strobel interviews him not in a lab or an office, but at his own home:

When I pulled up to J.P. Moreland's house on a cool and foggy morning, he was outside with a cup of coffee in his hand, having just walked home from a chat with some neighbors. His graying hair was close-cropped, his mustache neatly trimmed, and he was looking natty in a red tie, blue shirt, and dark slacks.
    "Good to see you again," he said as we shook hands. "Come on in."
    We walked into his living room, where he settled into a floral-patterned chair and I eased onto an adjacent couch. [p.252]

I quote this passage not just to point out how cringingly bad Strobel's writing is, but to call attention to the setting of this interview. For in this chapter, Moreland claims to prove the existence of the soul - certainly a Nobel-worthy result! - without once doing an experiment, running any sort of test, or even leaving his floral-patterned armchair.

"...if physicalism is true, then consciousness doesn't really exist, because there would be no such thing as conscious states that must be described from a first-person point of view... if everything were matter, then you could capture the entire universe on a graph - you could locate each star, the moon, every mountain, Lee Strobel's brain, Lee Strobel's kidneys, and so forth. That's because if everything is physical, it could be described entirely from a third-person point of view. And yet we know that we have first-person, subjective points of view - so physicalism can't be true." [p.255]

Look, I realize there probably aren't many philosophical materialists on staff at the Talbot School of Theology, where Moreland teaches. I appreciate that this makes it slightly more difficult to do research for this interview. But really, would it have killed him to at least try to find out what we actually think?

I don't know where Moreland got the odd fantasy that materialists are committed to denying anything that can't be found on a map. Materialists believe in many things that have no physical location. I can name a few: justice, music, erosion, mathematics. What we really assert is not that there are no such things as abstract concepts, but that there are no abstract concepts that are not ultimately reducible to patterns of matter and energy. We deny that these concepts exist in their own right, independently of whatever arrangements of matter and energy happen to instantiate them at particular times and places. Just so with consciousness: it exists, but only as the product of brains. (This is the same thing I said in my Statement of Principles.)

"Nothing in my brain is about anything. You can't open up my head and say, 'You see this electrical pattern in the left hemisphere of J.P. Moreland's brain? That's about the Bears.' Your brain states aren't about anything, but some of my mental states are. So they're different." [p.259]

This argument, which Moreland apparently makes in all seriousness, betrays such an elementary confusion of terms that I scarcely even know where to begin. The whole point of science is that it's about reductionism: explaining the properties of a complex phenomenon in terms of simpler components, which come together to create that property but don't possess it themselves. A cloud of gas has the property of temperature, but the individual atoms that make up that cloud do not. That doesn't mean that the gas and the atoms aren't the same.

Or, for an example that hits even closer to home: a book. A book is about something, it contains thoughts, ideas; but the ink and paper that make up a book aren't about anything. (This is true even if no human being ever reads the book, so it can't be said that the meaning of the book exists only in the reader's mind.) Does that mean that books have souls, to contain the ideas that inhabit them?

This simple concept is one that Moreland apparently doesn't grasp. It should be obvious that, if we materialists are correct, the electrical pattern in your brain is the thought. The two are one and the same, just described at different levels of organization. Moreland is trying to turn a basic confusion of definitions into a sweeping conclusion about the nature of ultimate reality. A philosopher as renowned as Strobel describes him to be has no excuse for not understanding why this is fallacious.

"[If scientists believe that mind emerges from material processes] they are no longer treating matter as atheists and naturalists treat matter - namely, as brute stuff that can be completely described by the laws of chemistry and physics. Now they're attributing spooky, soulish, or mental potentials to matter... They're saying that prior to this level of complexity, matter contained the potential for mind to emerge... That is no longer naturalism," he said. "It's panpsychism.... the view that matter is not just inert physical stuff, but that it also contains proto-mental states in it. Suddenly, they've abandoned a strict scientific view of matter and adopted a view that's closer to theism than atheism." [p.264-5]

Again, Moreland has some bizarre notions about what materialists believe (and if I were feeling unkind, I'd say that he's the only one here for whom "proto-mental states" are in evidence).

Atheists believe that the mind emerges from the functioning of the brain. This isn't panpsychism - it simply means that matter arranged in certain ways has causal powers that matter arranged in other ways doesn't have. You can build a car out of metal, but that doesn't mean that metal had an ethereal notion of "transportation" inherent in it from the beginning. It just means that a set of atoms arranged car-wise produces an object which has certain causal powers that other arrangements of atoms don't have. Similarly, the mind arises from an arrangement of matter arranged so as to possess a sufficient degree of information-processing power.

"If a finite mind can emerge when matter reaches a certain level of complexity, why couldn't a far greater mind - God - emerge when millions of brain states reach a greater level of consciousness? You see, they want to stop the process where they want it to stop - at themselves - but you can't logically draw that line. How can they know that a very large God hasn't emerged from matter...?" [p.265]

Okay, and what's the evidence that this has happened?

As with the other sections of this chapter, Moreland mistakes armchair speculation for argument backed by evidence. The mere hypothetical possibility of a god emerging from matter is held to be "a problem for atheists". (Lest you think this represents a daring flirtation with unorthodoxy, Strobel immediately emphasizes that this "wouldn't be the God of Christianity", once again making it clear who his intended audience is.)

In fact, at no point in this chapter does Moreland get out of that armchair. Despite the fact that this is supposed to be a book about science, he acts as if philosophical arguments and thought experiments are all the proof he needs. Given that this is Strobel's last interview, you'd think he'd want to go out with a bang - but whimpers are all he has to offer.

UPDATE: As Siamang points out in the comments, Strobel declared in an earlier chapter that:

"I wasn't interested in unsupported conjecture or armchair musings by pipe-puffing theorists. I wanted the hard facts of mathematics, the cold data of cosmology, and only the most reasonable inferences that could be drawn from them." [p.95]

Yet this entire chapter consists solely of "unsupported conjecture" and "armchair musings". Did Strobel think no one would notice, or is it just that his "interests" have changed now that he's reduced to scraping the bottom of the barrel to find Christian fundamentalists with scientific credentials?

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 10

In this section, J.P. Moreland (with the help of softball questions obligingly lobbed by Lee Strobel) continues to pour scorn on the idea that the brain could produce consciousness. As in the last installment, his rhetorical strategy is to attack only the weakest and most simplistic hypothesis of how this could occur - to set up a straw man that he can easily push over - and when he's done this, he declares victory and concludes that he's proven human beings must have souls, factory-installed by Jesus at the time of conception.

Strobel has asked what the implications would be if we had no souls. Moreland responds thusly:

"...there would be no free will. That's because matter is completely governed by the laws of nature. Take any physical object... For instance, a cloud," he said. "It's just a material object, and its movement is completely governed by the laws of air pressure, wind movement, and the like. So if I'm a material object, all of the things I do are fixed by my environment, my genetics, and so forth.
    That would mean I'm not really free to make choices. Whatever's going to happen is already rigged by my makeup and environment. So how could you hold me responsible for my behavior if I wasn't free to choose how I would act?" [p.256]

In this passage, Moreland sets up a dilemma: Either my choices are determined by me, or they're determined by the sum total of my causal history and the natural laws operating on me at that moment. It sounds like a convincing argument; but his mistake is in thinking that these are competing positions.

Moreland's narrow and restrictive view of free will requires thinking of himself as a point source of action, a supernatural locus spontaneously originating decisions with no prior cause. In this view, any reason for our actions can only override free will, because reasons are necessarily enmeshed in the causal history of the world. But human beings clearly do have reasons for our actions - in many cases, those reasons are clearly visible. We have a nature, not chosen by us, which primes us to act in certain ways. In Moreland's view, this is a frightening and disturbing idea, for all that it's obviously true.

But what if we draw the boundaries of the self somewhat more broadly? What if I consider myself to be a complex nexus of character traits, dispositions, emotions and reasoning capacity, an animal shaped by evolution and also a human shaped by culture? In that case, the causes that determine my decisions aren't things pressing on me from outside, but part of me, part of the nature that I have. The laws of nature, as well, are not external impositions upon me but simply facts about the way the organic machine that is my brain works.

Moreland's dilemma, therefore, is a false one. We're not something separate from the unfolding of the universe's physical laws. That notion implies that they could "prefer" one outcome while I prefer another, and I could struggle against them in a battle that I would inevitably lose. But that's clearly absurd. I choose what I will, and the laws of nature are part of the explanation for why I had that will in the first place - and this is true no matter what I choose. (See my post series "On Free Will" for more on this view.)

What Moreland seeks is a kind of radical freedom where a person's choices aren't determined by their genetics, their environment, anything in their personal history, or even by the structure of their brain. So what does determine them? The only possible answer, in his view, is that nothing determines them, which is the same as saying that they're random. But how is this an improvement? If our free acts have no causal history to explain them, but arise ex nihilo without rhyme or reason, we haven't established moral responsibility but eliminated it. How can you hold someone responsible for their behavior if their decisions are as random and reasonless as spins of a roulette wheel? Moral responsibility in that scenario would be as futile as blaming the wheel for landing on double 0 when you were betting on black. It's the materialist view, which roots our decisions firmly in the causal weave of the world, that provides the most solid basis for true moral responsibility. When a person errs, we can find the cause of their wrong decision, and then change the way they make decisions - through persuasion, through punishment, or through any other method - so that they will not be caused to make similar bad choices in the future.

"So if the materialists are right, kiss free will good-bye. In their view, we're just very complicated computers that behave according to the laws of nature and the programming we receive. But, Lee, obviously they're wrong - we do have free will. We all know that deep down inside." [p.256]

For a book that claims to be based on science, this is a very peculiar mode of argument. Compare: "My colleagues in the academy, my eleven-dimensional supersymmetric string theory explaining dark matter and unifying gravity with the other physical forces is true. I don't have any evidence, but you all know it deep down inside."

"You already know I'm right" may be an effective argument for Strobel's intended readership: the Christian cheering section who already agrees with him and needs only the thinnest excuse to start nodding vigorously. But to convince people who don't already agree with everything you believe, you need hard evidence - you need science. Strobel and Moreland don't even attempt to provide that here. Obviously, a hard determinist would say that this "feeling" of personal freedom is an illusion, that we're determined in advance to feel that way just as all our other feelings and desires are determined. Moreland has nothing to counter that explanation, which is why he retreats into bald assertion.

To close out the chapter, Moreland offers what he thinks is evidence for the soul. He tells an unlikely story of how the Pentagon, during the Vietnam War, was supposedly basing its military strategy on B.F. Skinner's behaviorism. Because of this, he says, they believed that victory was certain if we dropped enough bombs, because eventually the negative stimuli of the bombing had to condition the North Vietnamese army into surrender:

"It didn't work... [b]ecause there was more to the Vietnamese than their physical brains responding to stimuli. They have souls, desires, feelings and beliefs, and they could make free choices to suffer and to stand firm for their convictions despite our attempt to condition them by our bombing." [p.256]

With this passage, Moreland has not only dodged the obvious counterarguments, he's sprinting far past them into the distance, leaving a curl of dust as he vanishes over the horizon. He argues as if Skinnerian behaviorism is the only possible theory of non-supernatural decision-making, and if it's shown to be false, then we have no alternative but to conclude we have souls, God exists, and Jesus died for our sins.

?! Has it ever crossed his mind that there's more than one possible hypothesis to explain how a physical brain makes decisions? Does he really think there's no materialistic way to account for the obvious fact, denied by no one, that some people hold fast to a chosen cause despite suffering for it? You might as well say that I should be able to make a computer do whatever I tell it by sending electric shocks through its CPU, and if that doesn't work, it proves that my computer is run by magical elves that are immune to electricity.

Since I apparently need to, permit to recount the obvious truths about human nature which Moreland fantasizes that materialists deny. Human beings are not flatworms responding blindly to stimuli, but reasoning creatures with a highly developed neocortex capable of abstract goals and long-term planning. We do possess the same basic drives - hunger, lust, aversion to pain - as all other animals, but we, unlike most species, can hold those drives in check by using our ability to anticipate the future, delaying immediate gratification in the name of achieving a larger goal. Nothing about this is incompatible with the brain being a physical machine.

Humans also aren't the only creatures capable of this. Consider the famous experiment where one monkey voluntarily starved itself, in one case for days on end, rather than pull a chain that would dispense food but would also give an electric shock to a monkey in an adjacent cage. Skinner's behaviorism fares poorly at explaining this. Does this mean that monkeys must also have souls?

Actually, he does think that - and the way I know this is the strangest part of this book yet. A bit later in the chapter, Moreland veers off into an utterly bizarre tangent about whether animals have souls. He says they do (which we know because "[i]n several places the Bible uses the word 'soul' or 'spirit' when discussing animals" [p.262]). But according to him, the difference between us is that humans are capable of "free moral action", while animal souls are "determined" (those monkeys sounded a lot like they were performing free moral actions to me); and also, "the animal soul ceases to exist at death" [p.263].

For a book that claims to be based on science, this sudden detour into angels-dancing-on-pinheads theological fantasy is as jarringly misplaced as it would be to find a passage on voodoo rituals inserted into the middle of a calculus text. It confirms, again, that what we have here is not an actual recounting of what science has discovered, but an exercise in Christian theology dressed up in just enough scientific language to fool people who don't know the difference.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 10

The essence of science isn't test tubes or lab coats, but a special kind of scrupulous intellectual honesty. It's the willingness to try to prove yourself wrong, to subject your own ideas to the most rigorous, make-or-break tests you can conceive of. Equally as important, it's the willingness to consider every plausible alternative and weigh them all fairly - and if a competing hypothesis explains the data better than your own, to acknowledge that and respond accordingly.

This is a standard that this book doesn't meet, and chapter 10 shows why. A recurring theme of this chapter is that Strobel and Moreland consider only the simplest possible hypotheses of how the brain causes consciousness - and when they identify a weakness, they conclude that not just that hypothesis, but all the more complex alternatives as well, are false.

In this section, Strobel has asked, "What positive evidence is there that consciousness and the self are not merely a physical product of the brain?" Here's how Moreland responds:

"For example, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield electrically stimulated the brains of epilepsy patients and found he could cause them to move their arms or legs, turn their heads or eyes, talk, or swallow. Invariably the patient would respond by saying, 'I didn't do that. You did.'....
No matter how much Penfield probed the cerebral cortex, he said, 'There is no place... where electrical stimulation will cause a patient to believe or to decide.' That's because those functions originate in the conscious self, not the brain." [p.258]

This argument only works if you assume an extremely simplistic model of consciousness: that beliefs and decisions originate from one single spot in the brain, and by poking that spot, you can activate the processes that produce them. But this is unlikely in any plausible materialistic view of consciousness. It's much more likely that these higher-order functions involve the coordinated activity of many brain regions, since after all, forming a belief or making a decision necessarily requires integrating many different sources of input. In fact, Moreland's view that simple electrical stimulation should produce beliefs and decisions would make more sense under a Christian view of the brain - like that of Descartes, who believed there was a single anatomical region (the pineal gland) where the brain interfaced with the soul and received its marching orders.

But you'll notice that Moreland, unintentionally I'm sure, has committed himself to a completely testable claim: if we have a soul, our beliefs and decisions originate there and not in the brain. Therefore, it's a necessary consequence of his view that no physical alteration of the brain, whether caused by accident, disease or anything else, should cause a person to believe or decide in a particular way.

Well, if that's his challenge, I'm happy to take him up on it. It may be that Penfield's crude electrical stimulation didn't cause his patients to form beliefs or make decisions, but there are many types of brain disorders that do exactly this. I'll list a few, all of which are described in greater detail in my essay "A Ghost in the Machine":

Capgras' syndrome: Sometimes occurs in people suffering from schizophrenia, dementia, or head injury. The patient suddenly begins to insist that a friend or loved one has been replaced by an impostor who looks and acts exactly like the missing individual. This meets Moreland's criterion of brain injury causing a person to believe.

Frontotemporal dementia: A disease similar to Alzheimer's that causes degeneration in the frontal lobes of the brain. Individuals suffering from the early stages of FTD have been known to show dramatic changes in their personal likes and dislikes, political preferences, and even their religion. This meets Moreland's criterion of brain injury causing a person to decide.

Environmental dependency syndrome: Often caused by tumors pressing on the frontal lobes or other types of frontal lobe dysfunction. Patients with this disorder act as if their behavior is governed by external cues rather than internal decisions. They also show dramatically reduced impulse control, often choosing to act in ways they previously never would have done. One famous case is Phineas Gage, a railroad foreman who survived a freak accident that destroyed part of the frontal loes of his brain, but in the aftermath, baffled his friends and family by transforming from a diligent, well-respected worker to a lazy, shiftless drifter.

Akinesia: Unlike paralysis, the inability to move, akinesia is the unwillingness to move. Akinesia sufferers lose the motivation to do anything except respond to the most immediate needs. Again, this condition is often caused by tumors or brain damage. One case I detail in my essay is of a Baptist preacher who quit his church because he no longer felt like going to work. When a surgeon removed a tumor pressing on his frontal lobes, he soon regained his motivation and returned to work.

All these disorders, and others like them, are totally inexplicable on Moreland's view. If the soul is the source of belief and decision and is not dependent on the brain, as he insists, then we should never find cases like this. On the dualist view, we might expect to find cases where the soul's "lines of communication" to the body were cut by brain damage, but that should only produce effects like paralysis or coma, not actual alterations to a person's desires and personality. But the dualist view clashes with reality. In cases like the ones I've described, people can still do exactly what they want; the problem is that what they want has changed.

Strobel and Moreland never address evidence like this, so it's hard to tell how they would respond to it. The thoroughly mechanistic nature of consciousness, and the fact that it can be changed by changing the brain, as surely as a computer can be reprogrammed, is evidence that Christian apologists in general haven't acknowledged or come to terms with. But to anyone who's familiar with the discoveries of modern neuroscience, the idea that beliefs and decisions originate somewhere other than the brain, in some separate and supernatural "conscious self", is as laughable as the idea that mental illness is caused by demonic possession.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

Most religious people believe in the soul, an ethereal locus of consciousness that separates from the body upon physical death and travels elsewhere to receive its reward. To people who hold this belief, it's a natural next step to guess that the soul or spirit could sometimes leave a person's body while they're still alive and travel to distant places on its own initiative. Such is the belief in out-of-body experiences, the subject of today's Popular Delusions post.

Belief in OBEs is probably as old as humanity. The Bible alludes to a man who was "caught up to the third heaven", "whether in the body... or whether out of the body, I cannot tell" (2 Corinthians 12:2-3), and the apocryphal Ascension of Isaiah claims to describe that famous prophet caught up out of his body and taken to heaven to witness prefigurements of Christianity. However, OBEs today are mostly the province of New Age believers, who usually refer to them as "astral projection".

Although many purported OBEs involve voyages to dreamlike, conveniently unverifiable "spiritual realms" (where meetings with Jesus, guardian angels, and other religious figures are guaranteed crowd-pleasers), the existence of the phenomenon is an eminently testable claim. All that would be needed is for a person having an OBE to travel to some distant location, view it, and then give accurate details of their experience that could not have been obtained through normal sensory channels. Alas, all such attempts have come up short.

One of the most famous was the planetary voyage of the psychic Ingo Swann, who was enlisted by ESP researchers Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff to take an astral voyage to Jupiter. As reported by Swann, Jupiter was an eerie and compellingly beautiful place, with a surface of shifting sand dunes, enormous mountain ranges, and lakes or oceans in which icebergs floated. These marvelous discoveries were only slightly tarnished by the fact that none of them turned out to be true; Jupiter is a gas giant with no solid surface. Not to be deterred, Swann later claimed that he must have accidentally overshot Jupiter and traveled into another solar system entirely, and was describing a different planet which he saw there.

Other tests of OBEs, though more modest, proved equally flawed. The best-known were carried out by Charles Tart, such as this one on a subject who claimed she had experiences in which she left her sleeping body and floated up to the ceiling or through the walls of the room. Tart claims that his subject correctly perceived a remote target consisting of a five-digit random number during an OBE, but his methodology was less than rigorous:

The sleep laboratory consisted of two rooms... A large window was between the rooms for viewing, but in this experiment it was covered with a Venetian blind in order that the subject's room could be reasonably dark for sleeping. An intercom system allowed hearing anything the subject said. I monitored the recording equipment throughout the night while the subject slept and kept notes of anything she said or did. Occasionally I dozed during the night, beside the equipment, so possible instances of sleep talking might have been missed.

...The subject slept on a comfortable bed just below the observation window.... Immediately above the observation window (about five and a half feet above the level of the subject's head) was a small shelf (about ten inches by five inches)... This five-digit random number constituted the parapsychological target for the evening. I then slipped it into an opaque folder, entered the subject's room, and slipped the piece of paper onto the shelf without at any time exposing it to the subject.

So, to review: the number the subject was supposed to be psychically viewing was on a shelf five feet above her head throughout the night. She was neither recorded nor observed; the window into her room was covered by a blind, and Tart, who was sitting in the next room, helpfully notes that he dozed off several times during the night. Readers are invited to imagine a non-supernatural means by which the result could have been achieved.

This sloppy methodology, subjective judging, and flat-out inaccuracy pervades parapsychological research in general and on OBEs specifically. It shouldn't be a surprise that all the most striking claims of people gaining true information through OBEs are completely anecdotal, even hearsay - as in the famous case of the woman named Maria who allegedly saw a tennis shoe on a window ledge outside the hospital where she was having one. We have only the word of one person, a social worker named Kimberly Clark Sharp, that this OBE happened at all or that the shoe was there as described. Anecdotal accounts like this are impossible to test or verify. And so far, no rigorous, well-designed experiment has proven that people can acquire information this way at rates significantly greater than chance, much less that they can use it to do something genuinely useful, such as sending or receiving messages.

As with many other popular delusions, belief in OBEs is probably sustained in part by natural psychological phenomena which true believers have misunderstood (such as the role of sleep paralysis in alien abduction and haunting claims). The truth is, many people do have out-of-body experiences - that is to say, they have the experience of being outside their body. But that is not the same thing as saying that something actually leaves the body. Instead, these experiences appear to be nothing more than elaborate hallucinations caused by the brain misfiring.

I wrote on Ebon Musings about the brain's superior parietal lobe, also called the "orientation association area". Among its other functions, this part of the brain orients a person in three-dimensional space and calculates how to move through the world. In deep meditative states and other circumstances, the superior parietal lobe ceases its activity, causing a person to feel as if the physical boundaries of their self have been dissolved - they can no longer tell where their body ends and the world begins. It's easy to see how such an event could be implicated in an OBE. Another brain area, the angular gyrus, is involved in OBEs more directly. In at least one experiment, when electrically stimulated, it repeatedly caused them to occur in the patient.

No matter how impressive they may feel, out-of-body experiences are just tricks of the brain, and do not contain any sensory information not accessible to a person through normal means. A well-designed, repeatable experiment could prove otherwise, but an endless string of unverifiable anecdotes does not.

Other posts in this series:

• Popular Delusions

By Sarah Braasch

When I was about seven years old I almost died. It wasn't the only time I almost died, but it was one of my most colorful near death experiences. I had acquired some sort of flu bug or food poisoning or I don't know what, but my mother, in her either infinite ignorance or indifference, failed to procure anything in the way of medical attention for her ailing child. In all fairness, at first, I attempted to minimize my illness in order to be able to participate in a planned trip to a local amusement park.

I know it sounds silly to say that I almost died from a flu bug in the US during the later part of the 20th century, and, yet, my story is true. I hadn't eaten anything solid for about two weeks, and I couldn't remember the last time I'd been able to hold down water. It seemed like I was either vomiting or dry heaving non-stop. I was parched and too weak to lift my head off of my pillow. I hadn't realized it at the time, but my mother later told me that I looked like a little concentration camp survivor, I had lost so much weight.

I remember that there was an old black and white movie on the tiny television on the dresser at the foot of the bed. I remember that the movie took place in a faux harem in a faux Middle Eastern palace in a faux Arabia. I think Gregory Peck may have been involved.

I wasn't scared. I just remember how I wanted nothing more than for the overwhelming waves of pain and nausea rolling through my body to stop. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I couldn't drink. I couldn't move. All I could think about was the pain. I didn't have the strength to dry heave anymore, but I kept dry heaving while lying on my back. I didn't even have the strength to turn onto my side or even turn my head. My body was convulsing involuntarily. Then, the convulsions started to fade. My body no longer possessed the ability to exercise its involuntary impulses. The ripples in my stomach waned. Everything slowed down. My heartbeat. My breathing. I felt nothing so much as relief. I just didn't want to feel anything anymore. I lost the will to live.

It was so strange how everything came into such clear focus at that moment. I remember the bizarre brown and gold patterned wallpaper. I remember these tiny clip on cabbage patch dolls I had purchased at the local five and dime. I remember the huge yellow plastic bowl I had been throwing up in, when I still had something inside of me to vomit. I remember the bedroom furniture and the way the bedspread draped over my legs and feet. I remember the light in the room.

I was completely still. My little legs began to rise. Actually, my entire body began to rise, but flat as a board, as if someone was lifting me by the feet, but my head was secured to my pillow. I watched this with great curiosity. I realized that my legs remained swathed in my nightgown, even as my legs were lifted higher and higher, until my feet were directly overhead. Then I watched as my body swung back down, in the same manner, towards the bed. As I watched my legs and feet return to the bed, I discovered that my body was also still on the bed, covered in the bedspread, completely still. This occurred multiple times. My head never left my pillow. I didn't feel fear, only intrigue, and, even, amusement.

At that time, death was not particularly terrifying. I had no fear of hell, not because I thought I was without sin, but because I didn't think hell existed. I was a little Jehovah's Witness girl, and Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe in hell. But, I was confused. It seemed to me as if a version of me, a spirit, a soul had left or was trying to leave my physical body. But, I had been taught that I was a living human soul, but that I didn't have a soul, which survived the death of my physical self.

My feet were directly overhead again. It felt final. It felt like I was being asked to make a choice, like I was on the edge of a precipice, about to jump. It felt like my feet were being tugged on, but something inside of me was resisting. My head remained securely on my pillow, as if it were attached. Not exactly terror, because I wasn't afraid, but determination, and, maybe, panic washed over me, almost instantaneously. Then, I chose. I wasn't ready. But, I wasn't sure how to get back inside myself. I didn't know what to do. I wasn't sure I had the strength to do anything.

With everything and anything I had left inside of myself to give, I screamed for my mother. It came out as a barely audible, raspy plea. I tried again. Louder. Again. Then, she was beside me, looking down at me.

"What is it?" she asked, seemingly unable to see that which I could see.

"Mommy, why are my feet up there?" I asked.

"What are you talking about?"

"My feet are up there, in the sky."

"No they aren't. They're right here." My mother sat on the bed, placing her hands on my lifeless limbs under the bed covers. It was the strangest sensation. It was like I fell back into myself. My mother looked terrified. She called the doctor.

I guess it would be pretty easy to chalk up the entire experience to an illness induced hallucination, but I've never forgotten it, and I've never stopped feeling as if there was something more to it than just dehydration or religious fervor induced psychosis. It was hardly my only mystical experience as a child, or even as an adult.

I've had tons of mystical and spiritual (i.e. allegedly nonmaterial, supernatural) experiences. I was able to conjure up transcendental experiences at will as a child, which could probably best be described as astral projection, although I wouldn't have understood that term at the time, of course. But, somehow, I knew that I had separated from my ostensible physical self. All I had to do was contemplate the unfathomable idea that nothing would have ever existed if Jehovah God hadn't chosen to create everything, including existence itself. I would float around in outer space, amongst the planets and stars. It was the strangest feeling. It made me feel high, even after I'd returned to my body. I became addicted to it, and it became more and more difficult for me as I got older. I would spend hours alone in my room trying to recreate the sensation. As I grew older, it also got scarier. I had been raised to believe that anything even remotely attributable to spiritism and the occult was the product of demonic influence. I became obsessed with the notion that I was inviting demons into my life.

I've seen what would commonly be referred to as ghosts, demons, and angels, not to mention the future. I practically have a mystical experience once a day. None of these experiences, past or present, compel me to believe in God, certainly not the God as typically conceived by any of the major mainstream religions. There are lots of things in the world, which I neither understand nor can explain, starting with my personal existence. This doesn't presume a divine source. This doesn't even presume a supernatural or metaphysical cause.

The very act of employing the term supernatural is rather arrogant when we understand so little of our natural world. How do we know that these mystical experiences aren't the result of interacting with alternate dimensions or alternate universes or alternate versions of ourselves? As our perception of reality approaches our wildest science fiction fantasies, we realize just how disappointing, prosaic, and mundane the world's religions' gods are, seemingly endlessly fascinated and preoccupied by the quotidian sexual exploits of my next door neighbor.

With the ever exponentially telescoping expansion of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, I believe that we are moving closer and closer to answering those most difficult ontological and teleological existential questions. We will know the nature of God, and we will discover that God is nature. General relativity, special relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, M theory, supersymmetry, the multiverse. We just keep getting closer and closer.

I am not troubled at the thought of losing life's zest and purpose once the mystery is gone. First of all, that point is far, far away, still, despite our amazing progress. Second, just imagine the possibilities. The infinite universes to explore, the infinite selves with whom to acquaint oneself. Ultimately, we will harness our ability to shape our myriad existences and universes. Time and materiality will be of little consequence. We will become gods with the ability to determine our own destinies, our own realities. And I, for one, unlike Jehovah, Yahweh, Jesus, and Allah, will not be much bothered with the sexual goings-on of my neighbors.

The reliability of eyewitness accounts is one of the bedrock beliefs of our society. In ancient cultures - and in some modern cultures that still follow ancient laws - some crimes could only be proven by eyewitness testimonies. One of the most infamous examples was Pakistan's Hudood Ordinances, which mandated that allegations of rape could only be proven by four eyewitness accounts; otherwise, the woman was to be punished for making false accusations. Even in our supposedly more enlightened society, eyewitness testimonies still carry great weight in criminal trials - this despite ample evidence that they are often mistaken, resulting in many wrongful imprisonments.

The willingness of juries, and people in general, to believe eyewitness testimony stems from a faulty view of the nature of memory. Human memory is not like a tape recorder or a video camera, creating a record of events and then playing them back exactly as they were first observed. Rather, human memory is basically reconstructive: in most cases, we remember only the basic outlines of an event, and if we're called upon to retell what happened, the mind fills in the gaps with whatever details are at hand. This means that details that are fed to a person may subconsciously be incorporated into their memories and presented by that person as an accurate account of history.

One of the classic examples of this is an experiment done by the memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus. In it, Loftus interviewed the relatives of her research subjects to get three true stories of childhood events that had happened to each of them. To those three stories, she added a fourth one, which she confirmed with relatives had not actually happened: a story about the subject being lost in a mall at the age of five, crying and being comforted by an elderly woman, and finally being reunited with their parents. The subjects were each presented with these stories and asked to write down as much additional detail as they could remember about each of them. About 25% of Loftus' subjects "remembered" the fictitious account and described it as a true story that had happened to them in childhood (source). Similar studies along this line have found that, in follow-up interviews conducted later, more and more subjects remembered the false stories over time, with some even embellishing them with details of their own that weren't part of the original presentation.

Another study by Loftus found that subjects' memories of events can be altered by questions that presuppose a particular set of facts. In this experiment, 150 students saw a short film of an accident involving a white sports car and then answered questions about it. One set of students was asked, "How fast was the white sports car going when it passed the barn?" (There was no barn in the film.) The other set was simply asked, "How fast was the white sports car going?" One week later, both sets of students were brought in for a follow-up interview, and both were asked, "Did you see a barn in the film?" Students who had previously been asked about the non-existent barn were far more likely (17% vs. 2%) to incorrectly believe that it had been present the first time.

Even memories of highly emotionally charged events - so-called "flashbulb" memories - are just as likely to suffer this distortion. Just like any other memory, subjects tend to forget true details or add embellishments over time. But what's worrying is that, despite this error creep, people tend to put more confidence in their flashbulb memories and are more likely to believe they're accurate, even when the record shows otherwise.

And finally, the most sensational example of how memory can fail us: In 1975, the Australian psychologist Donald Thomson was arrested and charged with rape, and was informed by police that the victim had positively identified him as her attacker. This was a great surprise to Thomson, because he had a seemingly invulnerable alibi: he was on live TV at the time, being interviewed in the presence of a studio audience, cameramen, and an assistant police commissioner. As it turned out, the woman who was raped had been watching that very program just before the attack. She had mixed up Thomson's face on the TV screen with the face of her attacker. Ironically, Thomson had been on TV to discuss the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. (source; see also)

The human tendency to confabulate details and misattribute sources means that memory, especially in the long term, cannot be counted on as a reliable source of information. This doesn't mean that eyewitness accounts should be excluded from trials and other decision-making altogether, but they should be considered with greater attention to their fallibility. When we question witnesses about the details of an event, we must avoid leading questions that could implant details into their minds. When victims of crime are asked to pick their assailants out of a lineup, those lineups should be double-blind. And testimonies should be given greater weight when two or more witnesses independently agree on the same details or when they are supported by other evidence.

Other posts in this series:

• How to Think Critically

In 2006 and 2007, I wrote several entries in a series called A World in Shadow, bolstering the atheist's argument from evil by describing particularly shocking or egregious instances of natural and moral evils. However, I haven't written any new entries for this series in some time.

To be honest, I stopped writing these posts because I found them too upsetting. There are more than enough - far too many - examples of tragedy and catastrophe in this world to make the case against a benevolent overseer; we need not dwell on them. But today, I have to make just one further exception. I don't like writing about these things, but this is one case where the tragedy is so shattering, the suffering so horrendous, and the action needed to stop it so trivial, that it perfectly sums up and encapsulates the argument from evil.

I'll begin where Gene Weingarten begins, from his March 8 article in the Washington Post:

The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant had behaved after the police first brought him in, she wept.

This ordinary man, Miles Harrison, was a loving father who made an irrevocable mistake: on his way in to work one day last summer, distracted and beset by daily trivialities, he forgot to drop off his infant son at daycare. He entered his office, leaving the child still strapped into his car seat in the parking lot. And over nine hours, on a sweltering July day, the temperatures inside the car rose until the boy slowly boiled to death.

It seems incredible, unbelievable that any parent could forget their own child. But this case is not the first, and it will not be the last. It happens, on average, around 20 times a year in the United States alone, to parents of every occupation and social class:

Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.

Part of the reason why this happens is the recommendation of safety experts that young children in child seats be in the rear of the car, facing backwards, to protect them from injury in crashes. A child who can't easily be seen by the driver is easier to forget about. But the larger reason, as Weingarten's article explains, simply has to do with the fallibility of human memory and attention. Though we value the lives of our children, that does not mean the memory is treated any differently by the neural circuitry of the brain. In people who are stressed, sleep-deprived, distracted, the higher executive functions can be shunted aside by the lower, more primitive system of the basal ganglia, an evolutionary autopilot that carries out frequently rehearsed tasks with mechanical single-mindedness. (This is why you can sometimes drive a familiar route and end up at your destination with no memory of the journey.) Usually this is a harmless mental shortcut, but when it goes awry, this is the tragedy that results.

I have no desire to place blame on the parents who do this. For the most part, they're not bad people; they're loving parents who made an awful mistake, and who've already punished themselves far beyond anything a judge or jury could ever impose. But consider, now, how little a benevolent god - if there was one - would have to do to stop this from happening. It would take no dramatic interventions, no obvious miracles - just a small, possibly even subconscious nudge to the parent before it was too late. It would interfere with no one's free will to do this. These parents, after all, are not murderers, did not desire to kill their children.

But these tragedies continue to occur, and that can only mean one of three things. Either there is no cosmic authority watching the affairs of humankind, and we are on our own and must take the initiative ourselves if we are to prevent tragedies like this. Or there is a god who lacks either the knowledge of what is going on or the ability to do anything about it. Or, most horrifyingly, there is a god who knows perfectly well when this happens, could save these children if he so desired, but does nothing - only stands by and watches while innocent infants slowly broil to death behind glass.

For reasons I cannot fathom, millions of people adopt the third of those three choices and call it comforting. What comfort they find in believing that their lives are overseen by such a heartless monster, I couldn't say. But there is reason to believe that at least some people to whom this has happened have drawn the obvious moral:

The Terrys are Southern Baptists. Before Mika's death, Mikey Terry says, church used to be every Sunday, all day Sunday, morning Bible study through evening meal. He and his wife, Michele, don't go much anymore. It's too confusing, he says.

"I feel guilty about everyone in church talking about how blessed we all are. I don't feel blessed anymore. I feel I have been wronged by God. And that I have wronged God. And I don't know how to deal with that."

Four years have passed, but he still won't go near the Catholic church he'd been working at that day. As his daughter died outside, he was inside, building a wall on which would hang an enormous crucifix.

Other posts in this series:

• A World in Shadow