Daylight Atheism » Mind and Brain

Near-Death Experiences Without Being Near Death

Ebonmuse — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 10:45:10 +0000

I've written before about near-death experiences and what they can prove about the existence of the soul. Now another study has come to my attention, one that has an even more potent conclusion. (HT: Boing Boing)

It's long been known that the ... [visit site to read more]

Treating Demon Possession with Antipsychotics

Ebonmuse — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 10:56:25 +0000

As I've written in the past, modern Christianity has never outgrown the demoniac fixation of its founders, who believed that evil spirits were constantly on the prowl and assaulting them. People like Gary Collins - an evangelical, a clinical psychologist, and the head of a 15,000-member association of Christian counselors - still believes, based not on evidence but on his "theological beliefs", that demons exist ... [visit site to read more]

How to Think Critically: Anchoring

Ebonmuse — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 11:47:09 +0000

I'm pleased to announce the first-ever holiday edition of How to Think Critically. If you're planning to do your Christmas shopping soon, this post might just save you some money!

The mental phenomenon called "anchoring and adjustment" was first described in the 1970s by the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. When we're trying to estimate an unknown quantity, such as judging whether a price tag is reasonable or guessing what percentage of the population belongs to a certain age ... [visit site to read more]

Another Response to the Theist's Guide

Ebonmuse — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 21:12:54 +0000

I've received another response to my essay "The Theist's Guide to Converting Atheists". This response, which can be viewed here, comes by way of an author calling himself Roq.

I am, at heart, a simple person, so it'll only take one thing for me to become an atheist.

When science can create a mass hallucination in a group of fifty or more people where the ... [visit site to read more]

The God of the Reptile Brain

Ebonmuse — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:52:40 +0000

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 ... [visit site to read more]

Do Near-Death Experiences Prove the Soul Exists?

Ebonmuse — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 10:43:58 +0000

"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 ... [visit site to read more]

The Case for a Creator: TV Sets and Tennis Shoes

Ebonmuse — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 10:45:55 +0000

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 ... [visit site to read more]

The Case for a Creator: Science by Armchair

Ebonmuse — Sat, 29 May 2010 00:55:30 +0000

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 ... [visit site to read more]

The Case for a Creator: Why We Lost the Vietnam War

Ebonmuse — Fri, 07 May 2010 23:15:25 +0000

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 ... [visit site to read more]

The Case for a Creator: Belief and Decision

Ebonmuse — Sat, 01 May 2010 03:55:47 +0000

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 ... [visit site to read more]

Popular Delusions: Out-of-Body Experiences

Ebonmuse — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:50:39 +0000

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 ... [visit site to read more]

Mystery Does Not Equal God

Ebonmuse — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:47:39 +0000

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 ... [visit site to read more]