BRAIN AND BELIEF

by John McGraw

(Aegis Press, 2005, paperback $14.95)

The title of John McGraw's recent book, Brain and Belief: An Exploration of the Human Soul, is misleading. It would have been more accurate to call it Brain and Unbelief: A Deconstruction of the Human Soul, because McGraw is simply not a believer in any religious sense of the term. And his primary interest in the soul is in freeing humanity from the idea that it exists. In fact, the thesis of his quite impressive but also quite polemic survey of the history, philosophy, and science of the human soul is that there is no difference between the soul and the brain. Brain and belief, in other words, are inextricably linked.

For McGraw, our growing understanding of the human brain is the Trojan horse that is slowly but doggedly undermining the foundation of almost all religious and spiritual thought. It is deconstructing the age-old idea that we are both material and spiritual beings, that we have not only a body but also a soul. In fact, McGraw writes with an open distaste for religion and is one of those who simply cannot understand how modern people could believe in the existence of a spiritual dimension of life. To his credit, he does not try to hide his own agenda. In fact, he states clearly at the outset of the book that his goal is to deliver us from premodern illusions of an immortal soul; to encourage us to finally, as he puts it, “give up the ghost.”

In the introduction, McGraw remembers a defining moment in his young life. As a six-year-old child, he visited his great-grandfather in the hospital, and he remembers looking into the empty and confused eyes of his relative perched at the edge of death. “Something human looked at me but something human was missing,” he writes, and it was in the shock of that missing essence that McGraw realized that the idea of the soul was an illusion. He understood that “Santa Claus is not real,” that “despair is genuine,” and that “all comes to naught,” meaning that there is no life to be expected beyond death. “Life after death is a phrase so hopelessly inept in logic that it defies the word oxymoron,” he writes a few pages later. But like any good scientist, he wants to prove his point. And he sets out to do just that, through looking more closely at the “historical and ontological” notion of the soul and at the science of the human brain. The idea is to examine what we are learning about the latter and unlearning about the former. In this respect, he is a master teacher, and the first third of the book is a fascinating tour through the history of the idea of the soul in the religions of the world. He traces this literal “ghost story” to early animistic beliefs, with their conviction that “a spiritual substance persists behind all material things.” This paved the way for shamanism and the notion of a spirit world where life and self-awareness extend beyond the boundaries of the physical body. He traces how shamanism in turn influenced Greek philosophy, then Christianity, and also Hinduism and other Eastern religions. And he identifies the first true, unambiguous dualist (someone who believes that the soul is independent from the physical body) as being Zoroaster (or Zarathushtra).

There is, no doubt, much truth to McGraw's historical overview, though he is clearly looking at history through the filters of his own predetermined conclusions about the soul. Indeed, it's no accident that he emphasizes the influence of shamanism, with its use of psychoactive drugs in religious ceremonies. It serves his larger thesis: that the idea of the soul, and by extension religion, came in large part from the manipulation of brain states through psychoactive substances, coupled with the fear of death. “The poignancy of the relationship between drugs and religion,” he writes, “lies at the foundation of our notions of a disembodied self.” There is nothing wrong with interpreting historical data to support a thesis, but McGraw has a bad habit of stating his antireligious interpretations as if only the mentally challenged would not draw the same conclusion.

The second third of Brain and Belief more or less follows the same pattern as the first, this part exploring the nature of the human brain and giving an equally compelling overview of many of the new discoveries regarding the gray matter between your ears. Want to know why caffeine gives you a buzz? How Alzheimer's affects the brain? McGraw has it all covered and gives a detailed account of the ins and outs of brain science and the challenge that it is presenting to our conventional ideas of self. (For an in-depth exploration of the spiritual implications of recent discoveries in neuroscience please see Craig Hamilton's article, “Is God All in Your Head?” in the June–August 2005 issue of WIE.)

Finally, in the last third of the book, titled “Giving up the Ghost,” McGraw makes a more direct case for moving human thought beyond the “beautiful lie”—the idea of an immortal soul. This section is also an educational journey, but a more philosophical one, as he explores humanity's relationship to death over the millennia. It includes an extended reflection on The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest known works of literature—part of ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Hittite culture—whose subject is the quest (ultimately a fruitless and ill-fated one) for immortality. And McGraw ends with his own preferred philosophical systems, a final injunction to “give up the ghost” and a quote from Nietzsche, the most oft-quoted figure in the book. In fact, it is no accident that Nietzsche plays such a strong role in McGraw's own feelings about life. He is clearly drawn to the Existentialists and their inclination to face the raw truth of life without illusions, to face that there may be no salvation, no religion, no God, and no comforting reason for our brief existence in the immense and empty void of the universe.

In addition to his existentialist leanings, there is only one religion McGraw can stomach—Buddhism. Now, I don't know if the fact that a surprising number of scientific materialists, not to mention existentialists, find in Buddhism a nondogmatic psychological system that fits in easily with an anti- religious, antispirit, antisoul, materialistic worldview says something about the great religion itself or simply about the human tendency to see our own reflection in the currents of history. But it is a curious phenomenon that would be worthy of a more detailed analysis. Whatever the case, McGraw finds in the essence of Buddhism (as well as Epicureanism and Stoicism) a workable philosophy for the modern age. Well, almost. Even he balks at the Buddha's Fourth Noble Truth, the one that offers a way out of suffering, which he calls the Buddha's only lie.

Brain and Belief is an enjoyable and educational book in many respects, but it is hardly an open-minded exploration of the human soul. McGraw is a fundamentalist, though his fundamentals tell us about the supremacy of matter and the illusions of spirit, not the other way around. He seems like the kind of person who would be fascinating to talk to—thoughtful, intelligent, and curious about life, a true scientific mind—but whose broader conclusions about the nature of reality should be deeply questioned. In fact, his supreme confidence in those conclusions amounts to a sort of unquestioning faith in materialism that, ironically, echoes the rigid dogmas of much religious theology. Certainly, in an age of science, our traditional conception of the soul must be fundamentally reexamined. But when McGraw triumphantly announces the soul's demise, he is drawing a conclusion based not on science but on belief. It was this kind of “scientism” that the great religious scholar Huston Smith was referring to when he wrote, “The triumphs of modern science went to man's head in something of the way rum does, causing him to grow loose in his logic. He came to think that what science discovers somehow casts doubt on things it does not discover; that the success it realizes in its own domain throws into question the reality of domains its devices cannot touch.”

While a scientific fundamentalist is far preferable to a religious fundamentalist, there are simply too many positives contained in both the scientific and the religious worldviews to be satisfied with the dogmatic conclusions of either.

Carter Phipps

TEMPLARS IN AMERICA

by Tim Wallace-Murphy and Marilyn Hopkins

(Weiser Books, 2004, paperback $17.95)

In Templars in America, British scholars Tim Wallace-Murphy and Marilyn Hopkins offer a fascinating account of how, when, and where the Knights Templar came to America—and why. The Order of the Knights Templar (for those few remaining souls who have not read The Da Vinci Code) was founded by the Church in 1118 as a monastic military order to protect Christian pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land. Over several hundred years, they became perhaps the most powerful society of medieval Europe. Authors Wallace-Murphy and Hopkins conclude that Scottish knights who were Templar-connected settled in America nearly one hundred years before Columbus. In 1396, they argue, Prince Henry Sinclair of Scotland and Orkney (whose home was Roslin) led an expedition that reached Nova Scotia and the East Coast of America.

How do the authors come to this conclusion? First, Rosslyn Chapel, in Roslin, Scotland, was built by a branch of these knights in the mid-1400s and was completed more than a decade before the end of that century. It contains carvings of maize (Indian corn), aloe, and other plants native to the New World. The authors then point to little-known facts: evidence of Scottish settlement in Nova Scotia in the fourteenth century, an engraving of a Scottish knight carved into a rock ledge in Massachusetts, and a fourteenth-century tower in Newport, Rhode Island, built in a medieval Scottish style.

But this isn't what makes Templars in America so intriguing. The authors speculate that the knights played a significant role in the founding of the United States. Through their engaging narrative, they take us into esoteric Christianity, Freemasonry, and the apparently secret history of America's founding. Over time, the authors tell us, the Templars transformed into the Freemasons. Noting that George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere, John Hancock, and other founders were Masons, they speculate that America is partly a Templar project. The Templar goal was to establish a new society in the New World, uncorrupted by the Church but based on principles of esoteric Christianity that the knights upheld. Moreover, these principles constitute “a spiritual pathway to enlightenment” encoded in the carvings of Rosslyn Chapel.

Templars in America presents an interpretation of history that is impressive in its scope and significance. While much of it is speculative, the argument is well grounded and intellectually satisfying. The authors' conclusion, if true, suggests that there was a sacred dimension to the creation of the very structures of American government and society. This spiritual dimension has been omitted from our understanding of history and bears deeper investigation and illumination.

John White