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Setting the Scene: Addressing the Main Arguments Against Survival Hypothesis
Abstract
This chapter will present and refute the most frequently claimed empirical and philosophical objections that impede giving the survival hypothesis a fair trial: (1) neuroscience “proves” that the brain generates mind; (2) Principle of Parsimony—we should explain mind solely on a material basis; (3) there is no mechanism for how the mind would influence the brain; (4) science has proved physicalism and survival implies supernaturalism; and (5) survival implies Cartesian dualism that is rejected by learned people. These objections are usually based on misguided metaphysical and philosophical assumptions and often related to previous ideological commitment to physicalism. There is no sound argument or empirical evidence to force us to an a priori rejection of survival as an explanatory hypothesis for the anomalous and spiritual experiences we discuss at this book. In light of that, survival hypothesis should be taken in consideration by a rigorous but open-minded and fair examination. Rejecting to consider this possibility would be dogmatic and, thus, anti-scientific.KeywordsSurvival after deathLife after deathPrejudiceDogmatismSkepticismSurvivalNeuroscienceOccam’s razorMechanismPhysicalismDualismSuperstition
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Humans seem to have an adaptive predisposition for inventing, telling and consuming stories¹. Prehistoric cave art provides the most direct insight that we have into the earliest storytelling2–5, in the form of narrative compositions or ‘scenes’2,5 that feature clear figurative depictions of sets of figures in spatial proximity to each other, and from which one can infer actions taking place among the figures⁵. The Upper Palaeolithic cave art of Europe hosts the oldest previously known images of humans and animals interacting in recognizable scenes2,5, and of therianthropes6,7—abstract beings that combine qualities of both people and animals, and which arguably communicated narrative fiction of some kind (folklore, religious myths, spiritual beliefs and so on). In this record of creative expression (spanning from about 40 thousand years ago (ka) until the beginning of the Holocene epoch at around 10 ka), scenes in cave art are generally rare and chronologically late (dating to about 21–14 ka)⁷, and clear representations of therianthropes are uncommon⁶—the oldest such image is a carved figurine from Germany of a human with a feline head (dated to about 40–39 ka)⁸. Here we describe an elaborate rock art panel from the limestone cave of Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 (Sulawesi, Indonesia) that portrays several figures that appear to represent therianthropes hunting wild pigs and dwarf bovids; this painting has been dated to at least 43.9 ka on the basis of uranium-series analysis of overlying speleothems. This hunting scene is—to our knowledge—currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world.
Interest in religion and spirituality continues to grow among public health practitioners, researchers, and scholars. While there have been several recent landmark publications and efforts to understand the intersections of religion, spirituality, and public health, work remains to be done. In this commentary, we outline three challenges that impede more substantive engagement with religion and spirituality from the public health perspective; namely, the controversial aspects of religion, the perception of religion as a private matter, and limited academic space for coursework around religion and spirituality within public health training. We then describe a series of recommendations that might foster better scholarship and praxis at the crossroads of public health, religion, and spirituality: forming interdisciplinary teams, engaging a wider body of literature, building relationships with faith-inspired colleagues and communities, and considering the goals and ends of communities we serve. We remain hopeful that through ongoing dialogue and academic humility, work exploring the features of religion, spirituality, and public health will yield richer understanding of our shared humanity and the features that give rise to life.
A review of research on near-death experiences, reincarnation and other phenomena to see whether they provide evidence for life after death. Title page and contents page only.
Objective: To examine the relationship between psychiatrists’ religious/spiritual beliefs and their attitudes regarding religion and spirituality in clinical practice. Methods: A cross-sectional survey of religion/spirituality (R/S) in clinical practice was conducted with 121 psychiatrists from the largest academic hospital complex in Brazil. Results: When asked about their R/S beliefs, participants were more likely to consider themselves as spiritual rather than religious. A total of 64.2% considered their religious beliefs to influence their clinical practice and 50% reported that they frequently enquired about their patients’ R/S. The most common barriers to approaching patients’ religiosity were: lack of time (27.4%), fear of exceeding the role of the doctor (25%), and lack of training (19.1%). Those who were less religious or spiritual were also less likely to find difficulties in addressing a patient’s R/S. Conclusion: Differences in psychiatrists’ religious and spiritual beliefs are associated with different attitudes concerning their approach to R/S. The results suggest that medical practice may lead to a religious conflict among devout psychiatrists, making them question their faith. Training might be of importance for handling R/S in clinical practice and for raising awareness about potential evaluative biases in the assessment of patients’ religiosity.
Keywords: Religion; ethics; education, psychiatric; psychotherapy
Belief in afterlife is frequent, but little is known about how it relates to religiousness/spirituality (R/S) and socio-demographic variables. To investigate how the beliefs in afterlife and that “there is something beyond matter” are associated with socio-demographic, health, and R/S dimensions in a sample of medical inpatients and their companions. In multivariate analysis, afterlife belief correlated positively to educational level, religious affiliation, belief in something beyond matter, and private religious practices. Believe in something beyond matter correlated positively to afterlife belief and being spiritual. Educational level, rates of spirituality, religious affiliation, and private religious practices seem to influence the belief of afterlife and in a non-materialist cosmology.
Some religious or spiritual (R/S) clients seek psychotherapy that integrates R/S values, while others may be reticent to disclose R/S‐related aspects of struggles in a presumably secular setting. We meta‐analyzed 97 outcome studies (N = 7,181) examining the efficacy of tailoring treatment to patients’ R/S beliefs and values. We compared the effectiveness of R/S‐tailored psychotherapy with no‐treatment controls, alternate secular treatments, and additive secular treatments. R/S‐adapted psychotherapy resulted in greater improvement in clients’ psychological (g = 0.74, p < 0.000) and spiritual (g = 0.74, p < 0.000) functioning compared with no treatment and non R/S psychotherapies (psychological: g = 0.33, p < 0.001; spiritual: g = 0.43, p < 0.001). In more rigorous additive studies, R/S‐accommodated psychotherapies were equally effective to standard approaches in reducing psychological distress (g = 0.13, p = 0.258), but resulted in greater spiritual well‐being (g = 0.34, p < 0.000). We feature several clinical examples and conclude with evidence‐based therapeutic practices.
Objective:
The mind-brain problem (MBP) has marked implications for psychiatry, but has been poorly discussed in the psychiatric literature. This paper evaluates the presentation of the MBP in the three leading general psychiatry journals during the last 20 years.
Methods:
Systematic review of articles on the MBP published in the three general psychiatry journals with the highest impact factor from 1995 to 2015. The content of these articles was analyzed and discussed in the light of contemporary debates on the MBP.
Results:
Twenty-three papers, usually written by prestigious authors, explicitly discussed the MBP and received many citations (mean = 130). The two main categories were critiques of dualism and defenses of physicalism (mind as a brain product). These papers revealed several misrepresentations of theoretical positions and lacked relevant contemporary literature. Without further discussion or evidence, they presented the MBP as solved, dualism as an old-fashioned or superstitious idea, and physicalism as the only rational and empirically confirmed option.
Conclusion:
The MBP has not been properly presented and discussed in the three leading psychiatric journals in the last 20 years. The few articles on the topic have been highly cited, but reveal misrepresentations and lack of careful philosophical discussion, as well as a strong bias against dualism and toward a materialist/physicalist approach to psychiatry.
Religiousness and spirituality are recognised as important factors to consider in both health services research and clinical practice. A large and growing number of studies have examined the relationship between, for example, religiousness and spirituality and physical and mental health, and many of these point to a positive relationship between them. Increased psychological well-being, lower prevalence of depression, substance misuse and suicidal ideation, as well as better physical health, are reported in those who are religious when compared with control groups (Koenig et al , 2001).
Since the new developments of neurotechnologies for studying the brain functioning in the second half of twentieth century, a new wave of enthusiasm for materialistic explanations of mental phenomena has invaded philosophy and -psychology departments worldwide. The culmination of all this was the so-called "decade of the brain" in the 1990s. However, a closer examination of the arguments presented by some of these new materialists reveals recurrent patterns of analogies and metaphors, besides an old rhetorical strategy of appealing to a distant future, in which all the problems will be solved. This study intends to show that these new forms of materialism repeat discursive strategies of older versions of materialism, especially the French materialism of the eighteenth century and the German materialism of the nineteenth century. Finally, an interpretation for materialism's eternal return will be offered. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012. All rights reserved.
Background
Although there is evidence of a relationship between religion/spirituality and mental health, it remains unclear how Brazilian psychiatrists deal with the religion/spirituality of their patients.
Aims
To explore whether Brazilian psychiatrists enquire about religion/spirituality in their practice and whether their own beliefs influence their work.
Method
Four hundred and eighty-four Brazilian psychiatrists completed a cross-sectional survey on religion/spirituality and clinical practice.
Results
Most psychiatrists had a religious affiliation (67.4%) but more than half of the 484 participants (55.5%) did not usually enquire about patients’ religion/spirituality. The most common reasons for not assessing patients’ religion/spirituality were ‘being afraid of exceeding the role of a doctor’ (30.2%) and ‘lack of training’ (22.3%).
Conclusions
Very religious/spiritual psychiatrists were the most likely to ask about their patients’ religion/spirituality. Training in how to deal with a patient’s religiosity might help psychiatrists to develop better patient rapport and may contribute to the patient’s quicker recovery.
Declaration of interest
None
Copyright and usage
© The Royal College of Psychiatrists 2016. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Non-Commercial, No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license.
Background
Psychiatrists’ views on the mind-brain relationship (MBR) have marked clinical and research implications, but there is a lack of studies on this topic.
Objectives
To evaluate psychiatrists’ opinions on the MBR, and whether they are amenable to change or not.
Methods
We conducted a survey of psychiatrists’ views on the MBR just before and after a debate on the MBR at the Brazilian Congress of Psychiatry in 2014.
Results
Initially, from more than 600 participants, 53% endorsed the view that “the mind (your “I”) is a product of brain activity”, while 47% disagreed. Moreover, 72% contested the view that “the universe is composed only of matter”. After the debate, 30% changed from a materialist to a non-materialist view of mind, while 17% changed in the opposite way.
Discussion
Psychiatrists are interested in debates on the MBR, do not hold a monolithic view on the subject and their positions are open to reflection and change, suggesting the need for more in-depth studies and rigorous but open-minded debates on the subject.
Despite the extensive literature assessing associations between religiosity/spirituality and health, few studies have investigated the clinical applicability of this evidence. The purpose of this paper was to assess the impact of religious/spiritual interventions (RSI) through randomized clinical trials (RCTs). Method A systematic review was performed in the following databases: PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, PsycINFO, Cochrane Collaboration, Embase and SciELO. Through the use of a Boolean expression, articles were included if they: (i) investigated mental health outcomes; (ii) had a design consistent with RCTs. We excluded protocols involving intercessory prayer or distance healing. The study was conducted in two phases by reading: (1) title and abstracts; (2) full papers and assessing their methodological quality. Then, a meta-analysis was carried out.
Through this method, 4751 papers were obtained, of which 23 remained included. The meta-analysis showed significant effects of RSI on anxiety general symptoms (p < 0.001) and in subgroups: meditation (p < 0.001); psychotherapy (p = 0.02); 1 month of follow-up (p < 0.001); and comparison groups with interventions (p < 0.001). Two significant differences were found in depressive symptoms: between 1 and 6 months and comparison groups with interventions (p = 0.05). In general, studies have shown that RSI decreased stress, alcoholism and depression.
RCTs on RSI showed additional benefits including reduction of clinical symptoms (mainly anxiety). The diversity of protocols and outcomes associated with a lack of standardization of interventions point to the need for further studies evaluating the use of religiosity/spirituality as a complementary treatment in health care.
The aim of this systematic literature review was to ascertain the patient perspective regarding the role of the doctor in the discussion of spirituality.
We conducted a systematic search in ten databases from inception to January 2015. Eligible papers reported on original research including patient reports of discussion of spirituality in a medical consultation. Papers were separated into qualitative and quantitative for the purposes of analysis and quality appraisal with QualSyst. Papers were merged for the final synthesis.
54 studies comprising 12,327 patients were included. In the majority of studies over half the sample thought it was appropriate for the doctor to enquire about spiritual needs in at least some circumstances (range 2.1-100%, median 70.5%), but patient preferences were not straightforward.
While a majority of patients express interest in discussion of religion and spirituality in medical consultations, there is a mismatch in perception between patients and doctors regarding what constitutes this discussion and therefore whether it has taken place.
This review demonstrated that many patients have a strong interest in discussing spirituality in the medical consultation. Doctors should endeavor to identify which patients would welcome such conversations.
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.
Incorporating faith (religious or spiritual) perspectives into psychological treatments has attracted significant interest in recent years. However, previous suggestion that good psychiatric care should include spiritual components has provoked controversy. To try to address ongoing uncertainty in this field we present a systematic review and meta-analysis to assess the efficacy of faith-based adaptations of bona fide psychological therapies for depression or anxiety.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials were performed.
The literature search yielded 2274 citations of which 16 studies were eligible for inclusion. All studies used cognitive or cognitive behavioural models as the basis for their faith-adapted treatment (F-CBT). We identified statistically significant benefits of using F-CBT. However, quality assessment using the Cochrane risk of bias tool revealed methodological limitations that reduce the apparent strength of these findings.
Whilst the effect sizes identified here were statistically significant, there were relatively a few relevant RCTs available, and those included were typically small and susceptible to significant biases. Biases associated with researcher or therapist allegiance were identified as a particular concern.
Despite some suggestion that faith-adapted CBT may out-perform both standard CBT and control conditions (waiting list or "treatment as usual"), the effect sizes identified in this meta-analysis must be considered in the light of the substantial methodological limitations that affect the primary research data. Before firm recommendations about the value of faith-adapted treatments can be made, further large-scale, rigorously performed trials are required.
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
As is well‐known, the mechanistic ontology associated with the work of Descartes and Newton also challenged the irreducibility of final causes. This challenge undercut objective justifications of goodness and beauty. As one result, aesthetics has since been viewed largely or wholly as a subjective matter. In this article, however, I argue that the anti‐teleological turn has now been undermined because of new discoveries in sciences. I argue therefore that the claim can no longer be made that science compels us to reject classical and objective accounts of goodness and beauty in aesthetics. Such developments are important to a wide range of fields, including aesthetics and metaphysics, as well as science and religion.
La determinación del significado filosófico de la «religión» es una tarea compleja, que debe considerar lo histórico, lo descriptivo y lo crítico, tratando de abarcar los distintos elementos implicados en un concepto tan saturado de matices. El examen de algunas manifestaciones prehistóricas, como las pinturas rupestres, cuyo sentido determinado posiblemente se nos escape para siempre, puede servir paradójicamente como vía de acceso a algunos elementos constitutivos de lo religioso, precisamente situados más allá de su concreción cultural.
Importance:
Associations between putative risk factors and psychiatric and substance use disorders are widespread in the literature. Basing prevention efforts on such findings is hazardous. Applying causal inference methods, while challenging, is central to developing realistic and potentially actionable etiologic models for psychopathology.
Observations:
Causal methods can be divided into randomized clinical trials (RCTs), natural experiments, and statistical models. The first 2 approaches can potentially control for both known and unknown confounders, while statistical methods control only for known and measured confounders. The criterion standard, RCTs, can have important limitations, especially regarding generalizability. Furthermore, for ethical reasons, many critical questions in psychiatric epidemiology cannot be addressed by RCTs. We review, with examples, methods that try to meet as-if randomization assumptions, use instrumental variables, or use pre-post designs, regression discontinuity designs, or co-relative designs. Each method has strengths and limitations, especially the plausibility of as-if randomization and generalizability. Of the large family of statistical methods for causal inference, we examine propensity scoring and marginal models, which are best applied to samples with strong predictors of risk factor exposure.
Conclusions and relevance:
Causal inference is important because it informs etiologic models and prevention efforts. The view that causation can be definitively resolved only with RCTs and that no other method can provide potentially useful inferences is simplistic. Rather, each method has varying strengths and limitations. We need to avoid the extremes of overzealous causal claims and the cynical view that potential causal information is unattainable when RCTs are infeasible. Triangulation, which applies different methods for elucidating causal inferences to address to the same question, may increase confidence in the resulting causal claims.
This volume reviews the exploding religion/spirituality (R/S) and health literature from a population health perspective. It emphasizes the distinctive Public Health concern for promoting health and preventing disease in societies, nations, and communities, as well as individuals. Part I offers a rigorous review of mainstream biomedical and social scientific theory and evidence on R/S-health relations. Addressing key gaps in previous literature, it reviews evidence from a population health viewpoint, surveying pertinent findings and theories from the perspective of Public Health subfields that range from Environmental Health Sciences to Public Health Nutrition to Health Policy & Management and Public Health Education. In Part II, practitioners describe in detail how attending to R/S factors enhances the work of clinicians and community health practitioners. R/S provides an additional set of concepts and tools to address opportunities and challenges ranging from behavior and institutional change to education, policy, and advocacy. Part III empowers educators, analyzing pedagogical needs and offering diverse short chapters by faculty who teach R/S-health connections in many nationally top-ranked Schools of Public Health. International and global perspectives are highlighted in a concluding chapter and many places throughout the volume.
This book addresses a pressing need for Public Health research, practice and teaching: A substantial evidence base now links religious and spiritual (R/S) factors to health. In the past 20 years, over 100 systematic reviews and 30 meta-analyses on R/S-health were published in refereed journals. But despite this explosion of interest, R/S factors remain neglected in Public Health teaching and research. Public Health lags behind related fields such as medicine, psychology, and nursing, where R/S factors receive more attention. This book can help Public Health catch up. It offers abundant key resources to empower public health professionals, instructors, and students to address R/S, serving at once as a course text, a field manual and a research handbook.
The problem of the relation between our bodies and our minds, and espe cially of the link between brain structures and processes on the one hand and mental dispositions and events on the other is an exceedingly difficult one. Without pretending to be able to foresee future developments, both authors of this book think it improbable that the problem will ever be solved, in the sense that we shall really understand this relation. We think that no more can be expected than to make a little progress here or there. We have written this book in the hope that we have been able to do so. We are conscious of the fact that what we have done is very conjectur al and very modest. We are aware of our fallibility; yet we believe in the intrinsic value of every human effort to deepen our understanding of our selves and of the world we live in. We believe in humanism: in human rationality, in human science, and in other human achievements, however fallible they are. We are unimpressed by the recurrent intellectual fashions that belittle science and the other great human achievements. An additional motive for writing this book is that we both feel that the debunking of man has gone far enough - even too far. It is said that we had to learn from Copernicus and Darwin that man's place in the universe is not so exalted or so exclusive as man once thought. That may well be.
This dissertation examines the co-emergence of psychical research and modern professionalized psychology in the late nineteenth century. Questioning conservative historical accounts assuming an inherent incompatibility of these disciplines, this thesis argues that from the early 1880s to ca. 1910, it was often difficult if not impossible to draw a clear distinction between psychology and psychical research. Chapter 1 forms the integrative framework of the thesis through a historiographical review of changing attitudes to ‘occult’ properties of the mind in natural philosophy from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 provides a study and comparison of concerns and epistemological presuppositions of the instigators and leading representatives of psychical research in England, France, Germany and the USA. Chapter 3 outlines competing methodological maxims in early experimental psychology, explores the work of the Society for Psychical Research in England and psychological societies conducting psychical research in Germany, and discusses the active involvement of the ‘father’ of modern American psychology, William James, in psychical research. Formulations of transcendental-individualistic models of unconscious or subliminal cognition by Carl du Prel in Germany and Frederic W. H. Myers in England, which informed the mature psychological thought of James in America and Théodore Flournoy in Switzerland, are discussed as landmarks in the history of concepts of the unconscious. Chapter 4 presents case studies of early professional psychologists repudiating psychical research from the territories of fledgling psychology, identifies recurring rhetorical patterns in these controversies, and connects them to wider cultural and historiographical developments studied in Chapter 1.
I contribute to a prehistory of rhetoric by exploring early rhetorical practices in the Paleolithic era. Using new materialist methodologies (Karen Barad, Andy Clark), I theorize how humans are constitutively entangled with material environments and objects. I also emphasize a materialist historiographic method that seeks bottom-up, emergent explanations for cultural innovations. I propose two rhetorical forms in the Paleolithic: first, rhetoric as an emergent development stemming from increased sociomaterial complexity, performed via plaques, beads, pigments, and spatial arrangement; and second, rhetoric as integrated into mysterious cave rituals, which are given lasting inscription in the famous cave images. Contemporary theories argue that some of the cave imagery stems from visions achieved through altered states, but we might well understand such states as something environed?a capacity of human beings elevated to a techne and performed via the material affordances of cave properties. These cave rituals show that rhetoric recruited from other cultural developments, including magic and religion, a point that can help differently illuminate Greek rhetoric as well. My overall goal is to help forge a materialist-oriented prehistory that demonstrates rhetoric to be fundamentally entwined with the emergence of modern humans.
Importance
Previous studies have linked suicide risk with religious participation, but the majority have used ecologic, cross-sectional, or case-control data.
Objective
To examine the longitudinal association between religious service attendance and suicide and the joint associations of suicide with service attendance and religious affiliation.
Design, Setting, and Participants
We evaluated associations between religious service attendance and suicide from 1996 through June 2010 in a large, long-term prospective cohort, the Nurses’ Health Study, in an analysis that included 89 708 women. Religious service attendance was self-reported in 1992 and 1996. Data analysis was conducted from 1996 through 2010.
Main Outcomes and Measures
Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to examine the association between religious service attendance and suicide, adjusting for demographic covariates, lifestyle factors, medical history, depressive symptoms, and social integration measures. We performed sensitivity analyses to examine the influence of unmeasured confounding.
Results
Among 89 708 women aged 30 to 55 years who participated in the Nurses’ Health Study, attendance at religious services once per week or more was associated with an approximately 5-fold lower rate of suicide compared with never attending religious services (hazard ratio, 0.16; 95% CI, 0.06-0.46). Service attendance once or more per week vs less frequent attendance was associated with a hazard ratio of 0.05 (95% CI, 0.006-0.48) for Catholics but only 0.34 (95% CI, 0.10-1.10) for Protestants (P = .05 for heterogeneity). Results were robust in sensitivity analysis and to exclusions of persons who were previously depressed or had a history of cancer or cardiovascular disease. There was evidence that social integration, depressive symptoms, and alcohol consumption partially mediated the association among those occasionally attending services, but not for those attending frequently.
Conclusions and Relevance
In this cohort of US women, frequent religious service attendance was associated with a significantly lower rate of suicide.
Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) was an English anthropologist who is widely considered the founder of anthropology as a scientific discipline. He was the first Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford from 1896 to 1909, and developed a broad definition of culture which is still used by scholars. First published in 1871, this classic work explains Tylor's idea of cultural evolution in relation to anthropology, a social theory which states that human cultures invariably change over time to become more complex. Unlike his contemporaries, Tylor did not link biological evolution to cultural evolution, asserting that all human minds are the same irrespective of a society's state of evolution. His book was extremely influential in popularising the study of anthropology and establishing cultural evolution as the main theoretical framework followed by anthropologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Volume 2 contains Tylor's interpretation of animism in society.
Frederic William Henry Myers (1843-1901) was a classical scholar who in mid-career turned to the investigation of psychic phenomena. After studying, and later teaching, Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge he resigned his lectureship in 1869, became an inspector of schools, and campaigned for women's higher education. With the encouragement of former colleagues he began a scientific investigation of spiritualism and related phenomena, and in 1882 he helped to found the Society for Psychical Research. This two-volume work, first published posthumously in 1903, contains the fullest statement of Myers' influential theory of the 'subliminal self', which he developed by combining his research into psychic phenomena with his in-depth reading about the latest advances in psychology and related fields. His deeply intellectual approach is evident throughout the book, which analyses a huge amount of interesting data. Volume 2 discusses apparitions, trances and bodily possession.
The myth of religious violence is the pervasive secularist idea that there is something called "religion," endemic to all human cultures and eras, that has a tendency to promote violence because it is essentially prone to absolutism, divisiveness, and irrationality. Religion must therefore be separated from "secular" phenomena like politics for the sake of peace. This book argues that the myth of religious violence is a piece of Western folklore that underwrites Western violence. The book shows that religion is not a universal and transhistorical phenomenon. Religious-secular and religion-politics distinctions are modern Western inventions. The book shows that what counts as religious or secular in any context corresponds to how power is arranged. The myth of religious violence helps to construct a religious Other, prone to fanaticism, to contrast with the rational, peace-making, secular subject. In domestic politics, the myth underwrites the triumph of the state over the church in the early modern period and the nation-state's subsequent monopoly on its citizens' willingness to sacrifice and kill. In foreign policy, the myth of religious violence reinforces the superiority of Western social orders to nonsecular-especially Muslim-social orders. Their violence is seen as fanatical; our violence is seen as rational and peace making. In academic, government, and journalistic sources, the book shows how the myth of religious violence is used to justify U.S. diplomatic and military actions, including the Iraq War. Peace depends on recognition that so-called secular ideologies and institutions can be just as prone to absolutism, divisiveness, and irrationality.
This book is a long-awaited major statement by a pre-eminent analytic philosopher, on one of our biggest debates-the compatibility of science and religion. The last twenty years has seen a cottage industry of books on this divide, but with little consensus emerging. This book's author, as a top philosopher but also a proponent of the rationality of religious belief, has a unique contribution to make. The theme of this short book is that the conflict between science and theistic religion is actually superficial, and that at a deeper level they are in concord. The book examines where this conflict is supposed to exist-evolution, evolutionary psychology, analysis of scripture, scientific study of religion-as well as claims by Dan Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Philip Kitcher that evolution and theistic belief cannot co-exist. The book makes a case that their arguments are not only inconclusive but that the supposed conflicts themselves are superficial, due to the methodological naturalism used by science. On the other hand, science can actually offer support to theistic doctrines, and the text uses the notion of biological and cosmological "fine-tuning" in support of this idea. The book argues that we might think about arguments in science and religion in a new way-as different forms of discourse that try to persuade people to look at questions from a perspective such that they can see that something is true. In this way, there is a deep and massive consonance between theism and the scientific enterprise.
In four caves located in south-western Germany, figurines carved from mammoth ivory were discovered in find horizons dating to the Aurignacian. In one of the cave sites, the Stadel Cave in Hohlenstein, excavators in 1939 uncovered a therianthrope figurine, with the head and front legs of a cave lion but with the lower body and legs of a human being. It was thus named the Lion Man. During recent excavations in the Stadel Cave between 2008 and 2013, a stratigraphic sequence was discovered that extended from the Middle Palaeolithic to the Aurignacian. It became clear that the location of the Lion Man during the excavations of 1939 corresponded to layer Au of the recent 2008-2013 excavations. This lowest Aurignacian layer yielded a radiocarbon date of 39-41 ka calBP. The Lion Man therefore belongs to the oldest known figurative artworks in the world. During the recent excavations, part of the back dirt from the 1939 excavation was also uncovered. Here, surprisingly 575 fragments of mammoth ivory were found that were partially worked and thus probably belonged to the Lion Man figurine. In 2012 and 2013 the Lion Man was therefore newly restored. During this work, critical areas of the figurine were at times fully reconstructed. It became apparent that the Lion Man did not represent a female, as sometimes earlier presumed, but in fact a male.
This book reassesses the seminal work of Wilhelm Wundt by discussing the history and philosophy of psychology. It traces the pioneering theorist’s intellectual development and the evolution of psychology throughout his career. The author draws on little-known sources to situate psychological concepts in Wundt’s philosophical thought and address common myths and misconceptions relating to Wundt’s ideas. The ideas presented in this book show why Wundt’s work remains relevant in this era of ongoing mind/brain debate and interest continues in the links between psychology and philosophy.
Featured topics include:
*Theoretical and philosophical foundations of Wundt’s early work in scientific psychology.
*Wundt’s conception of scientific philosophy in relation to his theory of knowledge.
*The epistemological dimensions of Wundt’s final project in scientific psychology.
Wundt and the Philosophical Foundations of Psychology is a valuable resource for researchers, professors, and graduate students in cognitive and related psychology and philosophy disciplines.
This book argues that the widely accepted world view of materialist naturalism is untenable. The mind-body problem cannot be confined to the relation between animal minds and animal bodies. If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. No such explanation is available, and the physical sciences, including molecular biology, cannot be expected to provide one. The book explores these problems through a general treatment of the obstacles to reductionism, with more specific application to the phenomena of consciousness, cognition, and value. The conclusion is that physics cannot be the theory of everything.
Fifty years after Bradford Hill published his extremely influential criteria to offer some guides for separating causation from association, we have accumulated millions of papers and extensive data on observational research that depends on epidemiologic methods and principles. This allows us to re-examine the accumulated empirical evidence for the nine criteria, and to re-approach epidemiology through the lens of exposure-wide approaches. The lecture discusses the evolution of these exposure-wide approaches and tries to use the evidence from meta-epidemiologic assessments to reassess each of the nine criteria and whether they work well as guides for causation. I argue that of the nine criteria, experiment remains important and consistency (replication) is also very essential. Temporality also makes sense, but it is often difficult to document. Of the other six criteria, strength mostly does not work and may even have to be inversed: small and even tiny effects are more plausible than large effects; when large effects are seen, they are mostly transient and almost always represent biases and errors. There is little evidence for specificity in causation in nature. Biological gradient is often unclear how it should it modeled and thus difficult to prove. Coherence remains usually unclear how to operationalize. Finally, plausibility as well as analogy do not work well in most fields of investigation, and their invocation has been mostly detrimental, although exceptions may exist. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This book argues for substance dualism (of soul and body) and libertarian free will. It begins with full discussions of the underlying philosophical issues (such as the criteria of identity of events and substances, and the nature of metaphysical possibility) and the underlying epistemological issues (such as when scientists are justified in believing subjects' reports about their conscious events). Armed with results of this kind, it then argues that pure mental events (including conscious events) are distinct from physical events and that these interact with each other. Recent neuroscience (such as Libet's experiments) has no tendency whatever to show that they do not interact, and no scientific work in the future could show that. It is then argued that, to be precise, it is not mental events which cause our brain events, but we ourselves. The argument is made that since it is metaphysically possible that each of us could acquire a new brain, or continue to exist without a brain, we are essentially pure mental substances (souls). Our brain events and conscious events are so different from each other that it would not be possible to establish a scientific theory which would make it possible to predict what each of us would do in situations of making moral decisions. Hence, since it seems to us that we make our decisions independently of the causes acting on us (agent causation), we ought so to believe. It follows that we are morally responsible for our moral decisions.
Mediumship, an experience widespread throughout human history, can be defined as an experience in which an individual (the so-called medium) purports to be in communication with, or under the control of, the personality of a deceased. Since the nineteenth century, there is a substantial, but neglected tradition of scientific research about mediumship and its implications for the nature of mind. This chapter will review studies investigating the origins, the sources of mediumistic communications. Since one crucial aspect of mediumistic experience is the claim for the persistence of mind activity and the communication of personalities after bodily death, I discuss what would be the evidence for personal identity and its persistence beyond the brain. After that, empirical evidence provided by studies on mediumship is presented and analyzed, including a brief biography of two very productive mediums: Mrs. Leonora Piper and Chico Xavier. Finally, I discuss the implications of these data for our understanding of mind and its relationship with the body. Applying contemporary research methods to mediumistic experiences may provide a badly needed broadening and diversification of the empirical basis needed to advance our understanding of the mind–body problem.
This book, the first of its kind, reviews and discusses the full range of research on religion and a variety of mental and physical health outcomes. Based on this research, the authors build theoretical models illustrating the various behavioural, psychological, and physiological pathways by which religion might affect health. They also review research that has explored the impact of religious affiliation, belief, and practice one use of health services and compliance with medical treatment. Finally, they discuss the implications of these findings, examine a number of possible clinical applications, and make recommendations for future research in this area
According to Google Scholar, the 1st edition of the Handbook, published in 2001, is the most cited of any book or research article on religion and health in the past forty years (Google 2011). This new edition is completely re-written, and in fact, really serves as a second volume to the 1st edition. The 2nd edition focuses on the latest research published since the year 2000 and therefore complements the 1st edition that examined research prior to that time. Both volumes together provide a full survey of research published from 1872 through 2010 -- describing and synthesizing results from over 3,000 studies. The Second Edition covers the latest original quantitative scientific research, and therefore will be of greatest use to religion/spirituality-health researchers and educators. Together with the First Edition, this Second Edition will save a tremendous amount of time in locating studies done worldwide, as well as provide not only updated research citations but also explain the scientific rationale on which such relationships might exist. This volume will also be of interest to health professionals and religious professionals wanting to better understand these connections, and even laypersons who desire to learn more about how R/S influences health.
This book is unique in that it provides data resulting from a four year study of religious experiencing in China today which could radically transform the understanding of the role of religion in contemporary China. The suppression of religion by communist authorities in the latter part of the 20th century is well known but, far less well-known, is the underlying resurgence of religious life within the most populous nation on earth. The research is focused on the Han Chinese who form over 90 percent of the population of mainland China and is undertaken on ten sites across the country resulting in data from 3,000 detailed questionnaires. The importance of this project is that it is ground-breaking research in an almost wholly new context. No previous research on this scale has taken place before and indeed until recently no such research would have been permitted in a state which since the Communist Revolution of 1949 has been deeply suspicious of any manifestation of religious feeling, and in which a wholly atheistic educational system has prevailed.