Doubts and Competing Interests

I am at something of a crossroads. I've spent most of my life arguing against Christianity online and off and wanting to write engaging books and articles sharing my counterapologetical efforts with the world. I used to think I could or, at least, might be able to do this by simply collecting all my best arguments and then presenting them as systematically and clearly as I could while finding some way to do it with a novel enough combination of comprehensiveness, clarity, eloquence, and idiosyncratic intimacy and charm that some nebulous albeit sizable segment of the public would go for it.

I say "nebulous" because I can't imagine that most fervent Christians would want to read anything I've written that argues against their beliefs, and I'm not sure that enough non-believers aren't already so saturated with counterapologetical arguments from existing sources or are interested enough in the subject to pursue it that there would be an appreciable market for my efforts no matter how good they might be.

But then there's also the question of how good my efforts could ever be for any audience. I am the veritable personification of the maxim that the more one learns, the more he realizes how ignorant he is. For not only have my fairly recent encounters with erudite and brilliant counterapologists such as William Lane Craig, J.P Moreland, and Peter Kreeft convinced me that I have so much more to learn and understand on a deeper level about Christian theology and apologetics than I've learned or understood so far or probably have enough time left in my life to learn and deeply understand, but I admit that I don't think I'm smart enough to learn it no matter how much time I might have left and no matter how hard I might try.

And then there's the even bigger and seemingly more insurmountable challenge of mastering counterarguments sufficiently powerful to rebut the most sophisticated apologetics. And let's face it. I don't want to bother arguing against the lowest common denominator of Christian beliefs and defenses of those beliefs, such as the biblical literalism of Noah's Ark or Jonah and the Whale. I want to be able to offer powerful arguments against the best apologetics of the leading figures I've already mentioned and more, and their apologetics go way beyond defending Noah's Ark. And these are just the evangelical theologians and apologists. What about the more liberal ones? How could I ever come to grips with and refute their apologetics? And really, when I come right down to it, why would I want to? If I think it's all nonsense to begin with, why spend time and energy trying like mad to refute it?

Not only this, but I'm interested in so many other things. I'm fascinated with the free will vs determinism issue. I'm increasingly interested in political philosophy and in developing a coherent view of the ideal society and type of government. I continue to be interested in spirituality, especially as viewed by Ken Wilber's integral model. I have an abiding fascination with the intersection of modernized stoicism and psychotherapy. I'm experiencing a revival of my interest in psychology and a growing one in neuroscience and cognitive science. I still want to learn more about the physical sciences, especially physics and cosmology. The list of my interests are proliferating like the weeds in my front and back lawns. And I feel myself pulled toward all of them, while, at the same time, I feel crushingly inadequate to even remotely satisfy any of them.

Part of me wants to drop counterapologetics and move on to my other interests which, despite the challenges they too pose, might be more accessible and fulfilling to me than further pursuit of evangelical Christian counterapologetics could ever be. Yet, I've acquired, at no small expense, so many books and other materials on Christianity, apologetics, and counterapologetics over the years, and have spent so much time and effort thinking about this stuff and discussing it that I feel like I can't just throw it all away.

I don't know what to do. But I need to figure something out. And, more importantly, I need to follow through with whatever decision I make, which is hard to do when you feel convinced that you can't succeed no matter what you decide.

The Mind as a Pair of Scissors

Jonah Lehrer, author of the delightful neuroscience blog The Frontal Cortex, posted an entry today about his new book How We Decide. This entry explains that the book examines the various factors that go into producing the various kinds of decisions we make including everything from choosing which flavor of Cheerios to buy at the supermarket to whether to take out a subprime mortgage.

In a Q&A section extracted from Amazon, Lehrer likens the mind to a pair of scissors. In this metaphor borrowed from Nobel Prize winning psychologist Herbert Simon, one blade of the scissors represents the brain and the other represents the brain's environment, and, just as we can't understand the operation of the scissors without understanding the simultaneous movement of both blades, so we can't understand the choices the mind makes without understanding the interaction of brain and environment.

In the comments section, this is what I wrote:

Jonah--
I look forward to reading your book, and, judging from Publisher's Weekly's starred review, you have nothing to be nervous about.

No doubt you address the free will vs determinism issue in your book. Herbert Simon's delightful metaphor of the brain and environment as the two blades of a pair of scissors reinforces my view that brain and environment are what the philosopher Alan Watts called a "unified field" and that the choices issuing from this field are the inevitable products of the conditions within it.

In other words, there is no freedom to choose other than what the conditions within the field produce, and there is also no determinism of something outside the field causing it to choose as it does, because, ultimately, the field encompasses everything of which there is nothing outside.

I do look forward to reading this book and to reviewing it here someday.

A Fascinating Meeting With a Neuroscientist

I recently met with a prominent local neuroscientist to discuss with him whether I could be a research subject and perhaps receive help for my learning difficulties. The website of the institute where he works says this about him:

[He] is a pediatric cognitive neuroscientist. His research focuses on the neural basis of cognitive impairments seen in genetic disorders that produce mental retardation, developmental disability and psychopathology. Building on his influential theory of the foundations of numerical competence, [he] investigates how dysfunction in specific neurocognitive processing systems, such as attention and spatial cognition, can generate a range of cognitive and behavioral impairments. His goal is to develop remedial intervention programs that will minimize such disability. [His] current projects center on studies of visuospatial and numerical cognition in children with chromosome 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, also known as DiGeorge and VeloCardioFacial syndrome. He is also engaged in similar studies of children with Fragile X, Williams, and Turner syndromes. Besides cognitive processing analyses and psychometric testing, [he] uses cutting edge neuroimaging methods, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Voxel Based Morphometrics, and Diffusion Tensor Fiber Tracking in order to study the structure, function and connective patterns in the developing brain.

This sounds pertinent to my situation and impressive, and I found the man it describes to be extremely impressive in person. This is one brilliant and tremendously knowledgeable guy! We talked for over an hour. Actually, he did most of the talking and I listened with utter fascination. I don't claim to have understood most of what he said, but here is the essence of what I think I understood:

He works mostly with children but has been approached recently by several adults close to the same age from different parts of the country. We all report similar symptoms. That is, there seems to be an uncommonly large gap between our relatively high verbal facility and low nonverbal ability. He characterizes these symptoms as probably resulting from several factors.

First, we are like computers connected to much lower resolution digital cameras than most people are. In other words, our visual-spatial representations of the world are so much less detailed than most people's that when we try to focus on and thoroughly understand some part of our representation, we get a blurry image when most people get a much clearer one.

Second, if attention is likened to the narrow beam of a flashlight in a large, dark room, while most people's attention moves fairly smoothly and systematically from one portion of the "room" to another until they're able to piece together a coherent perspective of the entire room from all of the areas the "flashlight" illumined, the attention of people like me tends to flit haphazardly from one portion of the room to another, and we're subsequently unable to reconstruct a coherent image or representation of the entire room. This makes it much more difficult for us to understand with visual-spatial thinking the structures and functioning of various places and systems. In my case, it makes it exceptionally difficult for me to conceptualize the filing system where I work. I can't visualize or mentally represent to myself the flow of files into, through, and out of the file room to various units and departments., and I can't readily conceptualize how to perform various tasks involved in the operation of this system.

Third, not only do we take in less visual information than most people and in a more unsystematic manner, but we also process this information more slowly, making us markedly slower at tasks affected by our disabilities.

I've been told and have long suspected that my difficulties probably stem from perinatal brain damage. However, this neuroscientist believes that they may result from genetic anomalies. At least two of the other adults who've approached him have shown unusual duplications or deletions in the base pairs of certain genes in certain chromosomes, and he's curious to know whether I have this same anomaly.

So, he'd like me to submit a blood sample that will be screened for these and other genetic anomalies that could be related to my learning difficulties. He'd also like to subject me to a functional MRI scan and to much more specialized psychometric testing than I've received so far. Finally, he thinks that the human brain exhibits a high degree of what he calls "neuroplasticity."In other words, he thinks it has a remarkable ability to change itself as a result of experience and to compensate for injuries and malfunctions. He's currently working with other researchers to develop video games to train the brains of people with various nonverbal learning difficulties to increase their visual-spatial "bandwidth" and to improve their attentiveness and processing speeds, and I might be included in this research. In the meantime, he speculated that some kind of occupational therapy might help me to either accommodate better to my current job or to find and keep a more suitable one.

All in all, I was very pleased by our meeting, and I'm grateful that such a busy man, who is currently in the middle of seeking a grant from the NIH so that he can continue a promising line of this important research, would take over an hour of his precious time to meet with me and then propose that we go forward with the steps I just listed. I'm now waiting to proceed with my blood and other tests and to find out all that I can about what ails my brain and what I might be able to do about it.