The Spiritual Brain

By PZ Myers

I tried. I really, honestly, sincerely tried. I've been struggling with this book, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, for the past week and a half, and I've finally decided it's not worth the effort. It's just about completely unreadable.

This is not a positive review by any stretch of the imagination, I'm afraid — it's a very poorly written book, which reaches unsupportable conclusions by ridiculous contortions of logic. It is also not about evolution, although it does have a connection: one of the authors, Denyse O'Leary, is one of the faint and flickering luminaries of the Intelligent Design movement, and the premise that the mind has a natural cause is one of the targets of anti-materialist creationism.

Continue reading "The Spiritual Brain" (on Pharyngula)