Creationism - Better Right Than Happy

Why I Am Not a Materialist

There is a rumor going around the internet that I am a “materialist”. This seems to have started with David Klinghoffer, a senior fellow with the creationist organization the Discovery Institute. On their website “Evolution News” (which generally contains very little actual news about evolution), he writes in reference to my ongoing debate with Michael Egnor, “(T)he question before the (sic) Faizal Ali and Michael Egnor is whether the mind, with its power of abstract thought, can be fully accounted for just with reference to a physical organ, the brain. Ali thinks so — as a materialist, he would have to do so….” And in a more recent article he continues to imply that my disagreement with Egnor is motivated by a prior commitment to “materialism” (though I will say that his analysis of the reasoning behind my choice of banner art is bang on.)

A Neurosurgeon Argues That Mind Functions Are Immaterial. Badly. (Pt. 3)

This is my final post discussing creationist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor’s attempts to demonstrate that certain mental functions cannot be accounted for solely by the brain and, instead, indicate the involvement of some unspecified “immaterial” processes or entities. The first two posts in the series can be found here and here.

As before, I am including the video in which he makes his arguments, but it should not be necessary to watch the entire video in order to understand this post.

A Chemist Who Thinks He Understands Biology Better Than Biologists Do.

James Tour is a synthetic organic chemist at Rice University. His work primarily involves building nanotechnology from organic chemicals. He is by all accounts very good at the work he does, and is widely published. Unfortunately, he has also gained a reputation on the internet for being a prominent denier of the theory of evolution and has recently become affiliated (though not necessarily in an official capacity) with the creationist Discovery Institute (DI). You can read more about some of his thoughts and opinions on evolution in this article from Larry Moran’s Sandwalk blog.