The Placebo Effect & Mind-Body Dualism

Having read neuroscientist Mario Beauregard's The Spiritual Brain, I am intrigued by "The Magic Cure" in today's Boston Globe, on the power of placebos. Beauregaard presents the placebo effect as one piece of a cumulative argument for mind-body dualism.

The article states: "In the last decade-plus, however, the accumulating data have sparked a renewed interest in the placebo as a treatment in its own right. Numerous studies have shown that it can trigger verifiable changes in the body." 

The essay has a funny and interesting quote from a U-Michigan scholar: "“Medicine is intensely meaningful,” says Daniel Moerman, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Michigan at Dearborn who coined the phrase “meaning response.” “It’s this highly stylized, highly ritualized thing.” He urges us to “forget about the stupid placebo and start looking at the system of meaning involved.”"

The bulk of the article is about the ethical issue of giving people fake pills, even if they "work" to heal. My interest is the Beauregaard thesis of: change the mind, and you change the brain. Here is the claim that the "mind" exists independently of the physical brain; viz., "mind" cannot be fully reducible to the physical brain, having causal efficacy re. the physical brain.

Do Everything In Love

When Jesus stands in front of Pilate and says "My kingdom is not from this world" an entire universe of meaning is unveiled.

"Kingdom" means: the rule or reign of a king. The "dome" of kingly rule. The dominion of such rule. Pilate, as prefect of the Roman outpost-province of Judea, has dominion over this tiny province. Jesus' dominion, on the other hand, is vast. Jurgen Moltmann says that Jesus' kingdom “embraces the whole of creation, heaven and earth, the invisible side of the world and the visible side too; so it is both in the next world, in heaven, and in this one, on earth.” (Moltmann, Jesus Christ for Today's World, 20) Jesus' outrageous claim is to be king over all. "Pilate concludes that Jesus is a deluded quack whom he can banter with but not take seriously.” (Ben Witherington, in Andreas Kostenberger, John, 528, fn. 40)

Jesus’ kingdom is not “of” this world, in the sense of coming from it… originating from it. N.T. Wright says: “When I lecture about this, people will pop up and say, "Surely Jesus said my kingdom is not of this world." And the answer is no, what Jesus said in John 18 is, "My kingdom is not from this world." That's ek tou kosmoutoutou. It's quite clear in the text that Jesus' kingdom doesn't start with this world. It isn't a worldly kingdom, but it is for this world. It's from somewhere else, but it's for this world.”


The kingdom of God does not have its roots sunk into this world. The kingdom of God did not grow out of this world. This kingdom gets no nourishment from this world. It is not sustained by this world and what happens in this world. The kingdom of God comes from God. If it didn’t come from God it couldn’t heal the sick world. To say that Jesus' kingdom comes from another place is to say it comes from the being of the Triune God. It issues forth from love, since the being of God is love.

This contrasts sharply with worldly kingdoms. If Jesus' kingdom were of this world then his followers would have picked up the sword and waged war against Rome. Such violence is not the way of the kingdom of God. The way of the cross is the way of love. "The telltale sign that one is a member of Jesus’ kingdom is that they do not fight like everyone in the world does." (Greg Boyd, The Myth of a Christian Nation)

Listen to this other-worldly-kingdom stuff, written by the extraterrestrial apostle Paul:

"Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen... Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you." (Ephesians 4:29, 31-32) Is that different from the ways of this world, or what? It's so other-worldly it's even different from all the intra-church rivalry, slander, and hatred going on around us. 

In my studies this past week I cam across one of the shortest verses in the Bible - 1 Corinthians 16:14, which says, simply and clearly: “Do everything in love.” Everything we do — including all our thoughts and speech - is to be done in love. Take those four words and tattoo them on your frontal lobe. They will be more than enough to live your life by. And as you do, you'll look like some alien wacko from another planet who's come to subvert this world's kingdoms. You might even get crucified for it.

I'm talking about the other-worldly kingdom of Jesus. It is, essentially, a kingdom where love rules and love lasts and the greatest thing is love and the greatest command is love because the very essence of God is love. A mark of the people of God's kingdom is that they do not fight against other people, but rather fight for them. Paul expresses it this way in Ephesians 6:12: "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places." Greg Boyd says: "If it has ”flesh and blood,” it’s not someone we’re to be fighting against. Indeed, if it has “flesh and blood,” it’s someone we’re to be fighting for. They may intend us and our nation harm. We may hate their lifestyle, politics and religion. But if they are human, we are commanded to love them, serve them, do good to them, pray for them, and fight for them (Lk 6:27-35). And a primary way we fight for them is by resisting the principalities and powers that seek to oppress both them and us — including fueling the universal fallen human tendency to identify other people as the enemy! Our counter-cultural Jesus-looking lifestyle, including our willingness to love and serve enemies, is our warfare on behalf of enemies."

Now you must admit that this kind of talk is not from any earthly kingdom, but is truly not from this world. But while it is not from this world it is truly for this world. Moltmann again: "Through the cross of Christ the kingdom of God is ineradicably planted on this earth. With the resurrection of the crucified Christ the rebirth of the whole tormented creation begins.”
 
So let the tormented rejoice! Heart-pray these words: "God, let your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven." Since the "dome" of the King extends over you, receive God's rule over your heart. Let God's love rule and reign in you. It's "from another world," from the very being of God, staked like a wooden cross of love in the fertile soil of your soul. Rest in this truth. As it becomes your very being, the Pauline injunction to "do everything in love" will be your experience.
 
In regard to the other-worldly nature of the Real Jesus I love these words of messianic Jewish scholar Michael Brown:
 
“Jesus was, and still is, the embodiment of the anti-Establishment mentality – when the Establishment is anti-God… The gospel is subversive. It is the ultimate revolutionary message. It is the supreme countercultural philosophy. It says this world is not our eternal home and this world’s system does not rule or govern us. We are governed by a higher authority, ruled by another power, at home in a different world. This is the message we spread. This is the mind-set we hold on to.” (Revolution! The Call to Holy War, 84)

Nietzsche: Acknowledging the Death of God Blows Up Many Things

Nietzsche is fascinating. Were I an atheist I would be following after him.

In today's nytimes book review section Francis Fukuyama reviews Julian Young's Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. Fukuyama writes: "Whether we acknowledge it or not, we continue to live within the intellectual shadow cast by Nietzsche. Postmodernism, deconstructionism, cultural relativism, the “free spirit” scorning bourgeois morality, even New Age festivals like Burning Man can all ultimately be traced to him... [Nie­tzsche] would not have cele­brated alternative lifestyles, non-­Western cultures or the right of every fourth grader to be his or her own value-creator. Acknowledgment of the death of God is a bomb that blows up many things, not just oppressive traditionalism, but also values like compassion and the equality of human dignity on which support for a tolerant liberal political order is based. This then is the Nie­tzschean dead end from which Western philosophy has still not emerged."

Correct. For Nietzsche the idea that God is "dead" left humanity adrift on a sea with an "infinite horizon." The firm foundation of "land" that Judeo-Christian theism gave us is gone. Nihilism remains.

Ernie Harwell & the Power of Humility

I'm reading Mitch Albom's beautiful memorial tribute to Detroit Tiger broadcaster Ernie Harwell. It's making me feel sad, and inspired. It's about the nature of true greatness.

Albom writes that among Harwell's achievements included personal dissatisfaction with his life in the 1960s that brought him to a Billy Graham crusade where he became a devout follower of Jesus. Throughout his life Ernie's ego decreased, while Christ in him increased. Albom writes: "I can tell you that whenever a new sportswriter or broadcaster came to town, Ernie would greet him as if we were lucky to have him. He never played the kingpin. Never acted like a boss checking out the new kid. Not with journalists. Not with players. He made humility his calling card, he shook hands and drawled, "Welcome to the Tigahs" or "Good to have ya here," and it usually would be someone else who would nudge the new guy and say, "Do you know who that is? That's Ernie Harwell. THE Ernie Harwell.""

I love and admire and honor the fact that Ernie loved his wife Lulu. "For 68 years, they were together, acting like kids on their first date. The last time I saw them both, a few months back, in his modest residence at a senior center in Novi, he said, "Lulu, how about some of that butter pecan ice cream?" And she brought us some and we ate it together. I don't know why I remember that line. "How about some of that butter pecan ice cream?" It was just so innocent, so happy, a man in his 90s, asking for a treat. I don't even eat ice cream. I ate it that night."

People loved Ernie Harwell because Ernie Harwell loved and honored people above his own self. You've got to be a free person inside to be able to do that. Albom says: "An outsider may wonder why so many fans today are singing Ernie's praises, but it was largely because he never sang his own. In a sport full of big egos, Ernie's was invisible." The freedom of personal invisibility. It's rare.

The Shady Beginnings of Yoga in America

"Today yoga flourishes even in the *Great Oom's home state of Iowa, and the yoga industrial complex has broadened to include magazines, books, clothing and celebrity followers. Eager students can study Christian yoga (or "Yahweh Yoga," as it is sometimes called) and Jewish Yoga, where students replace "om" with "shalom." What was once exotic is now simply part of America's multicultural mix."

*One of yoga's earliest promoters, Pierre Bernard—known as the "Great Oom."

Read about the shady beginnings of yoga in America, in the Wall Street Journal here.

Redeemer Ministry School - Life After Death, and the Fine-Tuning Argument for God's Existence

(Lake Erie, Monroe)

At Redeemer Ministry School we value the experiential reality of the presence of God and the academic study of all that we believe. We engage in deep Kingdom of God studies, and encounter the God of the Kingdom. And all of this is Spirit-led.

To emphasize the experiential at the expense of the academic is to risk becoming heretical; to emphasize the academic at the expense of the experiential is to risk becoming sterile and irrelevant.

One of our more academic classes is my Apologetics class. Tomorrow we will look at two things: 1) chapter 8 in Dinesh D-Souza's Life After Death: "The Immaterial Self: How Consciousness Can Survive Death"; and 2) The "Fine-Tuning Argument for the Existence of God," by Robin Collins.

(Want a 9-month immersion in RMS's experiential and academic environment? Check out our website for more information.)

Philosophical Materialism Is Waning

(The Mackinac Bridge)

Yayyy! - I just received my copy of The Waning of Materialism, ed. by U of Texas philosopher Robert Koons and Yale philosopher George Bealer (KB). It's a collection of essays by 23 philosophers who find materialism wanting.

In the Introduction KB explain that, while materialism will not be eclipsed, it is decreasing, at least among philosophers. Admittedly, "there is good reason to think that materialism is a perennial fixture of philosophy." (ix) But there is "an ever-growing number of major philosophers who reject materialism, or at least have strong sympathies with anti-materialist views." (Ib.) Like who? Like...

Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Alonzo Church, Kurt Godel, Nelson Goodman, Paul Grice, Stuart Hampshire, Roderick Chisholm, Benson Mates, Peter Strawson, Hilary Putnam, John Searle, Jerrold Katz, Alvin Plantinga, Charles Parsons, Jaegwon Kim, George Myro, Thomas Nagel, Robert Adams, Hugh Mellor, Saul Kripke, Eli Hirsch, Ernest Sosa, Stephen Schiffer, Bas van Fraasen, John McDowell, Peter Unger, Derek Parfit, Crispin Wright, Laurence Bonjour, Michael Jubien, Nancy Cartwright, Bob Hale, Kit Fine, Tyler Burge, Terence Horgan, Colin McGinn, Robert Brandom, Nathan Salmon, Joseph Levine, Timothy Williamson, Mark Johnston, Paul Boghossian, Stephen Yablo, Joseph Almog, Keith DeRose, Tim Crane, John Hawthorne, Richard Heck, & David Chalmers. (Ib.)

KB say that all the living philosophers listed above (underlined/linked) "have given explicit permission to include them on the list." (Ib., fn. 1)

KB define "materialism" in relation to philosophy of mind studies. "Specifically, materialism is a certain view, or family of views, on the Mind-Body Problem, which concerns the ontological status of, and fundamental metaphysical relationship between, the mental and the physical... Throughout most of the history of philosophy, materialism took the form of what today we call the Identity Theory, according to which mental properties are identical to internal bodily properties, whether they be the properties associated with Democritean atoms, Hobbesian motions in the body or, in our period, electrochemical interactions at the neurological level." (Ib., x)

(KB realize the addition of Russell may seem odd. They write: "Russell espoused, at different times, phenomenalism and robust neutral monism, each of which is antithetical to Reductive Materialism and also to the thesis that physical properties are metaphysically prior to - and hence are a supervenience base for - mental properties." {ix-x, fn. 1})

The Great Yoga Debate

Aseem Shukla and Deepak Chopra are debating on yoga at washingtonpost.com. Shukla thinks yoga practice has become too every-person-ish, thus leaving its Hindu spiritual roots. Chopra argues back that Hinduism's "patent on yoga has run out."

Shukla responds by saying that Chopra-ism is precisely the kind of thing he is protesting. Shukla writes: "A prolific writer and gifted communicator, Chopra is perhaps the most prominent exponent of the art of "How to Deconstruct, Repackage and Sell Hindu Philosophy Without Calling it Hindu!"" I agree. While of course I'm not a Hindu, I can sympathize with Shukla's concerns since the same Chopra put his big new-agey syncretistic spin on Jesus too.

Bertrand Russell's "A Free Man's Worship"

If you were an atheist, what should you worship? What should you give your life to? Bertrand Russell's answer was: worship "Goodness." Russell capitalizes 'Goodness,' and in a later writing admitted that "Free Man's Worship" may have been a bit too idealistic. Nevertheless, I do think Russell captures the logic of atheism.

By the "logic of atheism" I mean: what life is like if atheism is true. In one of the most famous atheistic paragraphs ever written Russell says:

"Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins -- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."

Here are the Russell bullet-points.

• Russell says, without God, "Science" is the only tool we have to understand the world.
• Science gives us three bleak certainties:
• 1) Your life has no purpose - it's but an accidental put-together of atoms.
• 2) There's no existence after death.
• 3) All the achievements of humanity are destined to be destroyed by the inexorable onslaught of nature's power.
• Realize the certainty of these three things. They form a "foundation of unyielding despair." Build your life on them.

Anticipating Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker, Russell writes next: "A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life."

So, while Nature is the big, bad, blind, pointless consuming Beast, it has mysteriously produced us, and we in our minds are free. How weird! For Russell this makes us "superior" to the "resistless forces" of Nature. In our minds we are free. We can make choices. And we can choose to worship, not Nature, but Goodness.

 The big choice for us is this: "Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our God exist and be evil, or shall he be recognized as the creation of our own conscience? The answer to this question is very momentous, and affects profoundly our whole morality. The worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us, is the result of failure to maintain our own ideals against a hostile universe: it is itself a prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice of our best to Moloch." Russell thus rejects the Nietzschean choice of the worship of Power.

Were I an atheist, I would follow both Nietzsche and Russell this far, being forced to acknowledge points 1-3 above, with the Nietzschean addition of the loss of a moral foundation (the moral ontology of atheism does not provide a foundation for objective moral values). For this reason I would be forced to choose the "worship" of Power, not Goodness. I'd also seriously entertain the idea that, on atheism, we don't have free will (by "free will" meaning: choices not fully reducible to antecedent causal conditions). Then I'd really struggle with that last sentence, since it implies that there is an 'I' to "choose" to "entertain" any ideas. I'd have to look into the abyss of nihilism, admitting that there's little hope of overcoming it.

This Crazy Month of May (and beyond...)

(Me, in Bangkok)

Linda and I have entered one of the busiest 3-month periods we've had in a long time. Here is the run-down.

- last Monday evening our son and daughter-in-law Dan and Allie returned to Michigan from their two years working in Japan. It's so good having them with us!
- I did the wedding of Heidi Benner and Matt Skeens this past weekend. A beautiful wedding and, for me, an honor to be a part of.
- My Philosophy of Religion final exams are this week. I give the students oral exams on the questions I lecture about. I really enjoy doing this, and find it the best way for me to evaluate students' knowledge about these deep philosophical issues.
- Our son Josh graduates with his Bachelor's degree from Siena Heights University this coming Sunday. We are so proud of Josh - he's done extremely well!
- On May 15 Linda and I will be part of the wedding of Paul Murphy and Sugeily Pinero-Soto. It's going to be a great wedding day for them!
- May 22 - Linda's student piano/vocal recital. I'm one of Linda's helpers.
- May 24-27 - I travel to Wisconsin to be one of the speakers at "Fanning the Flame," a conference for pastors and Christian leaders.
- May 26-30 - Chris Overstreet, Robby Dawkins, Chad Dedmon, and Anne Evans come to Redeemer for the Bethel School of Supernatual Evangelism. People will be coming from all over the states to attend this - plus, we even have a group coming from Korea and another one from Germany.
- June 2-5 - our worship leader, Holly Benner, records her live worship cd in our church's sanctuary. There will be at last two full nights of worship, as Holly does all her own songs (+, I think, one I have written, which she will record).
- June 20 - Jeff and Annie Dieselberg from NightLight Bangkok will be with us, both morning and evening.
- June 27-July 2 - Linda and I + Holly and our worship team, and Josh and Beth Bentley, will minister with Randy Clark in Green Lake, Wisconsin.
- In the last week in July I will teach at Payne Theological Seminary. PTS has asked me to help develop the spiritual formation component of their seminary. This is a great privilege for me. I'll be working with two great scholars - Leah Fitchue and Bill Augmon.
- August... Linda's birthday, our 37th anniversary, rest, peace, joy...