REASONING BEYOND REASON
Science, Religion and Human Consciousness
ISBN: 978-0953-5089-8-3
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For online purchase try Amazon.co.uk
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Why would a scientist hold unscientific religious beliefs and deploy
arguments in defence of those beliefs which fall short of the scientific
standards he would undoubtedly observe in his professional (scientific) life?
That is the question addressed by this book.
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Issues discussed:
Francis Collins (The language of God)
Owen Gingerich (God's Universe)
Paul Davies (The Goldilock Enigma)
Alister McGrath (The Dawkins Delusion)
Keith Ward (Why there almost certainly is a God)
Richard Dawkins (The God delusion)
God and Reason
Faith and reason
Theistic evolution
God and evolution
Evolution and the origin of faith
The evolutionary origin of altruism
Delayed reciprocal altruism
Why Ockham's Razor is an essential part of our lives
Why quantum mechanics does not provide a "magic" solution
Why probability is a false foundation for any faith
A physical explanation of human consciousness
The nature of Reality, Existence and Truth
Faith as a form of addiction
Why some scientists use unscientific arguments to defend their faith
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In REASONING BEYOND REASON Noble examines the arguments
presented by each of these believing scientists. He tackles them point by
point, issue by issue.
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What does it mean to say that a thing "EXISTS"?
What exactly is the difference between something which
"DOES NOT EXIST"
and something which
"DOES EXIST"
(but for which no evidence of its existence can ever be obtained)?
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In the SECOND PART of his book, Noble offers a powerful counter-narrative to
mysticism. In doing so he covers several important concepts and does so
without being obscurely technical.
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Probability is a measure of prior expectation of a given event.
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Consciousness. A significant part of Noble’s book is devoted to this topic.
He argues that there is no need for us to attribute exotic non-physical
properties to human consciousness (as Davies does). Consciousness is a
mode of action. It is not an entity in itself. It is the enactment of a
procedure by the physical components of the brain. Noble does not ask us
simply to accept that as a fact. He offers a functional description of a
hypothetical brain-model which would exhibit the most important
characteristics of what we call “consciousness”. The mechanism leans
heavily on the notion of causation described by David Hume. Noble also
shows that if the design could be realised in physical reality, the resultant
machine would honestly believe itself to be conscious. Moreover, because
of the way the system, for computational reasons, would need to represent
itself, to itself, it would also find it difficult not to believe that its own
consciousness was a non-physical thing separated from the physical
mechanism.
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An antidote to pretentious mysticism
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Hugh Noble is a scientist with a wide range of experience in several
scientific disciplines. As a young man, he studied the mass-balance of
glaciers in Antarctica. He reported at that time on what can now be seen
to have been the early signs of global warming. As a bio-physicist, he
studied the movement of sugars and ions through the epithelial layers of
the intestine under the influence of various hormones - work for which he
gained a PhD. As a post-doctoral research fellow in Artificial Intelligence
he developed computer systems which offered a hypothetical model of the
way the human brain processes a natural language. These ideas were later
developed into the theoretical model of human intelligence and human
consciousness which are described, in outline, in this book.
Also by this author
Natural Language Processing (Blackwell, ISBN 0-632-01738-4)
Operational Consciousness (Tartan Hen Pub. ISBN 0-9535089-4-3)
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