Does science really have laws? The proposition that it does is at the root of the argument that science is based on undisputed "facts" while religion is based on subjective "values." Moreover, if science has laws that are known to be incorrigible, then miracles would seem to be impossible.

So what exactly are scientific laws and what degree of certainty can we attach to them? This question was raised in a recent email I received. "My question concerns your summation of Hume's position concerning scientific laws," the writer says. In my book on Christianity, I cited Hume to make the point that "no finite number of observations, however large, can be used to derive an unrestricted general conclusion that is logically defensible."

This raised for my correspondent the following question: "How do you suppose a modern-day Hume would answer someone who points out that all humans are made from DNA? Surely he would not be so stubborn as to insist on the possibility that there are a few of us walking around without DNA. What say you?"

Here is my answer. Consider the proposition that all life forms--including all humans--are made from DNA. Hume would say this is not a "law." Rather, it is an observation based on common experience and testing. The reason we cannot speak of a "law" is that we haven't checked every human and every life form that has ever existed to ensure that every one is made of DNA.

So where do we get this so-called "law"? And where do we get other laws, such as Newton's inverse square law or the law that says "light travels at the speed of 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum"? Hume would argue that we have measured many humans and other life forms and found DNA and therefore we infer that all humans and other life forms are made of DNA. Similarly we have measured the speed of light frequently and from this we derive the idea that light always and everywhere travels at the same speed.

Hume's point is not to deny the practical utility of these conclusions, but to deny that we know something as a law just because we have measured it many, many times. As Hume writes in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, from the proposition "I have found that such an object has always been attended with such an effect," it is impossible to derive the conclusion, "I forsee that other objects which are in appearance similar, will be attended with similar effects." Logically, Hume notes, this is a non-sequitur.

In particular, just because we have measured light at a given speed a hundred or a thousand or ten million times doesn't mean that light always and everywhere travels at that speed. How do we know that on a distant star, light travels at the same speed as it does here? In truth, we do not know. Along the same lines, if tomorrow a life form was located on, say, Mars, and this life form did not contain DNA, we could no longer hold that all life forms are made of DNA.

From this we can conclude that: scientific laws are not really "laws" but merely generalizations based on previous tries. Once we recognize this we see why miracles are entirely within the realm of scientific possibility. Since we cannot name a single empirical scientific law that is in principle inviolable, we cannot rule out deviations from these so-called laws. I'm not arguing for the validity of this or that miracle. I'm simply saying that the idea that these things cannot happen is based on an ignorance of what science shows and doesn't show.

Hume, generally regarded as an exploder of metaphysics, was also an exploder of the pretensions of scientific knowledge. Recognizing the power of Hume's argument, the philosopher Karl Popper conceded that science is incapable of "verifying" truth; it can merely "falsify" hypotheses and thus (we hope) draw us a little closer to truth. This truth, however, remains elusive, just over the horizon. The biblical notion that "we see through a glass darkly" turns out not to be theological hocus-pocus but a clear-eyed summary of the human situation.

The New York Times today has a story about a possible wind farm in New York. Because of rising gas prices and the high cost of being dependent on the Middle East for energy, we clearly have to develop our own energy here at home. But today's article points out some of the reasons wind hasn't saved us yet, despite the American Wind Energy Association and other advocacy groups' insistence that it's the answer:

Industry experts say offshore wind farms are rare in North America because of the difficulty of finding suitable locations, the cost of running transmission lines to shore, and the thicket of environmental regulations. Shipping lanes also need to be considered, as well as a shortage of equipment available to plant turbines in deep water. Nearby residents often object to offshore turbines because of aesthetic concerns, as was the case with the Jones Beach proposal, which also exceeded initial cost estimates.

Does anyone have wind turbines near them? What's it like? And what's wrong with nuclear power? Sure, there have been a couple of disasters, but assuming we can get on top of safety concerns, it seems like that has to be one of the better energys sources, right? MIT thinks so.

Sigmund Freud is no longer the revered figure he once was. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education noted that Freud is no longer routinely assigned even in psychology curricula. In a way, Freud is following the downward path of that other great totem of the last couple of centuries, Karl Marx. It's hard to believe so many intelligent people spent their lives studying these two thinkers. Intellectuals, we have to conclude, are often fatally attracted to far-out theories that tease the mind but that bear little relation to what's actually going on in the world.

Marxism worked well in academic laboratories and only failed miserably when it was actually tried. Similarly for decades Freud spun out his elaborate theories, and they sounded so scientific and so modern and so avant garde. Depression? Well, that's because your sister abused you when you were four, and you have concealed from yourself the memory of it, but if you do hundreds of hours of therapy, you can excavate the source of your anxiety, and by coming to terms with it you can slowly overcome it. But today when you go to the doctor and are diagnosed with depression, he gives you a pill and you feel better. No need for most people to visit the therapist's couch.

Freud also argued that what we are secretly attracted to, we make into a taboo. Freud explained the "incest taboo" by saying that we secretly want to have sex with our mothers and our sisters, and so we repress those feelings and outlaw them. In Freud's words, "The strength of the incestuous wishes can be detected behind the prohibition against them."

The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker pointed out the shortcoming of this theory. Pinker notes that by Freud's logic the fact that humans are averse to eating cow dung shows that we secretly want to eat it. Pinker's point is that there are sound evolutionary reasons both for avoiding cow dung and for avoiding incest. The former is unhealthy and attracts disease-carrying insects; the latter results in biological abnormalities. So natural selection produces humans who avoid both. Once again, Freudian fantasy is replaced with a much more plausible scientific alternative.

I've been reading Freud's The Future of an Illusion, where Freud makes the case that religion is a form of "wish fulfillment." Freud writes that for the individual "life is hard to bear," and beyond this there is "the painful riddle of death, against which no medicine has yet been found." And so to "make helplessness tolerable" man invents God and religion not because they are true but because we wish them to be true. " For Freud, one may say, Christianity is adult Disneyland. We forget that Freud is the author of this portrait of religion that is widely espoused in our time.

Well, let's examine this Freudian explanation in an entirely secular and rational way. Imagine a bunch of people who have gathered in a room because they want to avoid life's difficulties--sickness, suffering, death--by making up a religion that will make them feel better. I can entirely see how such a group would come up with the concept of heaven. Heaven is a place where there is no suffering and no death. Eternal bliss would surely fit into my wish-fulfillment scheme.

But I don't see why this group would come up with the concept of hell. (We are not talking about why priests might later use the concept to enforce doctrinal obedience or institutional loyalty. We are talking about why wish-fulfilling humans would invent the concept in the first place.) Hell is not only worse than sickness but also worse than death, because death is merely the end, while hell implies eternal separation from God.

I also don't see why seekers of wish-fulfillment would come up with Christian morality. Who needs the Ten Commandments or other such rules which make our lives more difficult by asserting a series of "Thou Shall Nots"? Even Christians recoil from the severe demands of their ethical code. Recall the church father Augustine, who kept putting off his conversion to Christianity, praying to God, "Make me chaste, O Lord, but not yet." In other words, a project of wish-fulfillment would seem to dictate a much more libertine social morality than the one we find in the Old and New Testaments.

Bottom line: Judaism and Christianity, not to mention the other great religions, hardly look like they are the product of mere wishful thinking. In fact, they posit a God and a moral universe that makes some fairly stern demands on humans. It's almost wishful to think that God does not exist, so that we can escape those demands. This is a point that does not seem to have occurred to poor Sigmund Freud.

I appeared Monday on the Riz Khan show on Al-Jazeera with Richard Dawkins, and guess what? We had a civilized three-way dialog. No one erupted into Hitler-type yells. The Gestapo didn't show up, nor the Inquisition police, to drag Richard Dawkins from the studio. Host Riz Khan interviewed me for the first half of the show on the compatibility of Darwinism and religion, and on the issue of how to teach evolution in the schools. Then Khan interviewed Dawkins for the second half, mainly on why he encounters resistance to evolution and also why he rejects arguments for God as the creator of the universe.

Unfortunately Al-Jazeera hasn't yet posted the show on the web, so I'll withhold comment on Dawkins's central argument until I can link to it. But I do think that there is something on which everyone who sees the show can agree. Dawkins's excuses for not debating me (Dinesh is a "creationist" or Dinesh uses Hitler-style "yells and shrieks") are utterly absurd. Why won't Dawkins simply admit he's afraid? I don't really mind a coward as long as he's an honest coward.

I'm not the only one befuddled by Dawkins. So is evolutionary biologist and atheist David Sloan Wilson. Several months ago Wilson wrote a savage review of Dawkins's The God Delusion for Michael Shermer's magazine Skeptic. Basically Wilson said that Dawkins is supposed to be an expert about evolution but his book fails to examine religion from an evolutionary perspective. Rather, Dawkins insists on faulting religion based on claims--theological, philosophical, historical--that lie entirely outside his area of knowledge. No wonder that Dawkins's one-paragraph "refutations" of the likes of Aquinas have an amateurish, even juvenile, quality.

Wilson argues that a true scientist would develop a hypothesis about religion and then test it to see how it holds up. For instance, against Dawkins's and view that religion is a kind of destructive virus, a culturally transmitted epidemic that may benefit its parasitic carriers (the preachers) but certainly not those who succumb to the infection, Wilson offers a rival hypothesis. Wilson's view is that "religious groups are products of cultural group selection....A given religion adapts its members to their local environment, enabling them to achieve by collective action what they cannot achieve alone or even together in the absence of religion. Even though elements of religion often appear bizarre, irrational, and downright dysfunctional to believers, when examined closely most of them will make sense."

In his book Darwin's Cathedral, Wilson offers the case study of the Calvinists in sixteenth-century Geneva. At a time when factionalism and internecine conflict was rending the social fabric of the city, Calvin and his deputies introduced the Ecclesiastical Ordinances. Wow, do they sound harsh! Fines for dancing and jail for gambling are only the beginning. Yet Wilson surveys a wide body of historical scholarship that concludes that "there is little doubt that Calvinism was instrumental in solving the problem of factionalism and helping the city of Geneva survive as a social entity."

How? Basically Wilson found that morals are the key to restoring social morale. (The two terms "moral" and "morale" are connected by more than the similarity of their sounds.) Wilson writes, "I was especially impressed by how the mechanisms for preventing cheating extended to the leaders in addition to the rank and file. The head of the church was not a single individual but a group of pastors who made decisions by consensus. Calvin shared all the duties of a pastor, despite his enormous additional workload as primary architect of the religion. Double accounting methods were used to prevent the inappropriate use of charitable funds. The egalitarian spirit of Calvinism is perhaps best illustrated by the duty of caring for dying plague victims. This life-threatening task was decided by lottery."

Wilson concludes, based upon this data, that at least in this one important case, the Dawkins view is wrong and his hypothesis is vindicated. The Calvinist leaders were not out to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else. It is simply wrong to say that they got ahead while everyone else suffered. Rather, the opposite is true. Calvinism's dour doctirnes of original sin and predestination contributed to an unprecedented identification of leaders and followers and caused the introduction of checks and balances to curb the suspect tendencies in human nature. To put it in blunt evolutionary terms, Calvinism was socially adaptive.

So what does Dawkins have to say about all this? The short answer is: nothing. Dawkins wrote a lame response to Skeptic, noting that he didn't purport in his book to be using an evolutionary understanding of religion. This would be like a doctor saying, "Well, I wasn't claiming to be giving a medical opinion." I suppose Dawkins considers it normal for an evolutionist to ignore his own field and dispense folk prescriptions based on a cursory persusal of other disciplines. I hope that Wilson does not invite Dawkins to debate this issue. What excuse will inventive Richard come up with this time?

My Las Vegas debate with Christopher Hitchens continues to attract attention and comment. If you'd like to read an account of the debate, you can do so here.

Also on Monday July 21, at 4.30 pm Eastern time, I'll be debating Richard Dawkins (yes, Richard Dawkins!) on Al-Jazeera (yes, that Al-Jazeera). This is a noteworthy development because Dawkins has so far refused to debate me. But now we're appearing together on the Riz Khan television show, which I understand has some 25 million viewers worldwide. If you want to watch Monday's debate live you can watch it here. The segment will also be posed on the web and I will link to it on this blog.

I also hope that, upon seeing for himself that I am not a Hitlerite kind of speaker, Dawkins will summon up the courage to step into the public arena with me. Like one of the atheist commenters recently said on Dawkins's own website: all the best spokesmen for unbelief have gotten a whipping from this D'Souza guy and it's now up to Dawkins to try and redeem the reputation of atheism.

Given that my thoughts are currently focused on how to deal with Dawkins, I'm going to post here on a question that seems to mystify him and many other scientific atheists. These fellows wonder: if there is reasonably good evidence for evolution--as, by the way, both Dawkins and I believe there is--why do around 50 percent of Americans refuse to accept it? The conventional wisdom among Dawkins and others is that Americans oppose evolution because they are religiously committed to a literal reading of the Book of Genesis.

But there is a much better explanation of why Americans reject evolution: the idiotic claims of leading champions of evolution who are promoting an atheist agenda. Consider Dawkins himself, rebutting the claim that there are significant "gaps" in the fossil record. Dawkins concedes that there are such gaps, but then writes this: "The gaps, far from being anoying imperfections or awkward embarrassments, turn out to be exactly what we should positively expect."

In other words, the absence of evidence for evolution is itself proof that the theory is correct! This is so bizarre that it makes one wonder what the presence of evidence might do to this theory. Would a complete fossil record without gaps be evidence against Darwinian evolution, as we hear that Dawkins and his fellow biologists "exactly" and "positively" expect that such evidence should not be present?

Dawkins finally puts his cards on the table by saying of evolution: "Even if the evidence did not favor it, it would still be the best theory available." And if Dawkins is dismissed as a crank, here is Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker making the same point. "Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it."

We have here the weird spectacle of so-called scientists who are so wedded to a theory that they cannot even imagine it not to be true. This is a level of dogmatism that would embarrass any theist. Even the strongest religious believer can imagine the possibility that there is no God. So how can these self-styled champions of reason adopt so closed-minded an approach?

The short answer is given by Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin, who in a 1997 essay in the New York Review of Books makes a revealing admission: "We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant proises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment--a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation for the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori commitment to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, the materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

And you thought I was making this stuff up! No wonder Americans are skeptical of these apostles of skepticism. They are peddling their own metaphysical dogmas in the name of science, even though few are as honest as Lewontin in admitting it.

Sigmund Freud is no longer the revered figure he once was. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education noted that Freud is no longer routinely assigned even in psychology curricula. In a way, Freud is following the downpath path of that other great totem of the last couple of centuries, Karl Marx. It's hard to believe so many intelligent people spent their lives studying these two thinkers. Intellectuals, we have to conclude, are often fatally attracted to far-out theories that tease the mind but that bear little relation to what's actually going on in the world.

Marxism worked well in academic laboratories and only failed miserably when it was actually tried. Similarly for decades Freud spun out his elaborate theories, and they sounded so scientific and so modern and so avant garde. Depression? Well, that's because your sister abused you when you were four, and you have concealed from yourself the memory of it, but if you do hundreds of hours of therapy, you can excavate the source of your anxiety, and by coming to terms with it you can slowly overcome it. But today when you go to the doctor and are diagnosed with depression, he gives you a pill and you feel better. No need for most people to visit the therapist's couch.

Freud also argued that what we are secretly attracted to, we make into a taboo. Freud explained the "incest taboo" by saying that we secretly want to have sex with our mothers and our sisters, and so we repress those feelings and and outlaw them. The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker pointed out the shortcoming of this theory. Pinker notes that by Freud's logic the fact that humans are averse to eating cow dung shows that we secretly want to eat it. Pinker's point is that there are sound evolutionary reasons both for avoiding cow dung and for avoiding incest. The former is unhealthy and attracts disease-carrying insects; the latter results in biological abnormalities. So natural selection produces humans who avoid both. Once again, Freudian fantasy is replaced with a much more plausible scientific alternative.

I've been reading Freud's The Future of an Illusion, where Freud makes the case that religion is a form of "wish fulfillment." We forget that Freud is the original author of this slogan that is so widely repeated in our time. How often do we hear people say, "People only believe in Christianity because they want it to be true." Well, let's examine this Freudian explanation in an entirely secular and rational way.

Imagine a bunch of people who have gathered in a room because they want to avoid life's difficulties--sickness, suffering, death--by making up a religion that will make them feel better. I can entirely see how such a group would come up with the concept of heaven. Heaven is a place where there is no suffering and no death. Eternal bliss would surely fit into my wish-fulfillment scheme.

But I don't see why this group would come up with the concept of hell. (We are not talking about why priests might later use the concept to enforce doctrinal obedience or institutional loyalty. We are talking about why wish-fulfilling humans would invent the concept in the first place.) Hell is not only worse than sickness but also worse than death, because death is merely the end, while hell implies eternal separation from God. I also don't see why seekers of wish-fulfillment would come up with Christian morality. Who needs the Ten Commandments or other such rules which make our lives more difficult by asserting a series of "Thou Shall Nots"? A mandate for wish-fulfillment would seem to dictate a much more libertine social morality.

Bottom line: Judaism and Christianity, not to mention the other great religions, hardly look like they are the product of mere wishful thinking. In fact, they posit a God and a moral universe that makes some fairly stern demands on humans. It's almost wishful to think that God does not exist, so that we can escape those demands. This is a point that does not seem to have occurred to poor Sigmund Freud.

Robert Jastrow, one of the noted astronomers of our time and, as it happens, a former professor of mine at Dartmouth, died earlier this year. This is my overdue tribute to his life and work.

Jastrow was one of the great popularizers of science. One of his books, Red Giants and White Dwarfs, became a national bestseller and conveyed to a whole generation of Americans the excitment and mystery of space exploration. When American astronauts landed on the moon, Jastrow provided expert commentary for the TV networks covering the event.

But Jastrow never permitted popularization to get in the way of serious professional accomplishment. After getting his doctorate in physics from Columbia, he became head of the theoretical divison at NASA. Later he was appointed head of the Goddard Space Institute. In 1992 he became chairman of Mount Wilson Observatory in California.

In addition to medals for scientific achivement, Jastrow also won acclaim as a gifted teacher. At Dartmouth, I always found him friendly and accessible. Later our paths crossed because Jastrow became an energetic and resourceful defender of President Reagan's strategic missile defense initiative, dubbed by its critics as "Star Wars."

While critics like physicist Hans Bethe said Star Wars would never work, the Russians agreed with Jastrow that it would, and they desperately sought to outlaw it. (Obviously if the Russians felt it was a boondoggle they would have supported it, since this would be a great way to waste America's defense budget.) In his last years Jastrow became increasingly skeptical of claims that global warming is destroying the planet. He saw global warming as an effort to exploit science for ideological ends.

One of Jastrow's gems is a little book called God and the Astronomers in which Jastrow, although himself an agnostic, made a startling argument. He argued that "the astronomical evience leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world." Jastrow not only documents his claim but shows why leading scientists including Einstein resisted the new discoveries, because they threatened the dogma that scientific laws enjoy eternal validity. Jastrow showed that in reality the laws of physics themselves came into existence with the Big Bang; beyond or apart from our universe, there are no such laws.

Jastrow's story reads like a detective novel, with the only difference that the facts he recounts are true. And here is his stunning conclusion: "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

Time magazine has a new article about "the gay brain," illustrated by this sculpture of this gay head fragment. Here's an excerpt:

Scientists at the Karolinska Institute studied brain scans of 90 gay and straight men and women, and found that the size of the two symmetrical halves of the brains of gay men more closely resembled those of straight women than they did straight men. In heterosexual women, the two halves of the brain are more or less the same size. In heterosexual men, the right hemisphere is slightly larger. Scans of the brains of gay men in the study, however, showed that their hemispheres were relatively symmetrical, like those of straight women, while the brains of homosexual women were asymmetrical like those of straight men.

When Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, philosopher Michael Ruse was quoted as saying that the book "makes me embarrassed to be an atheist." What especially galls Ruse is Dawkins' pig-headed insistence that anyone who embraces the Darwinian account of evolution cannot remain a Christian.

Ruse is a noted philosopher at Florida State University, an atheist champion of evolution and Darwinism, and author of several critically acclaimed books including Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?

I've been reading Ruse's book, and in it he counters Dawkins' simple-minded argument that God has been proven irrelevant since chance and natural selection now constitute "the blind watchmaker." Ruse writes, "It still leaves open the option of God's designing at a distance. Perhaps God put His design into action through the medium of unbroken law. Perhaps a God who works in this way is superior to a God who has to intervene personally and miraculously."

But doesn't evolution contradict a literal reading of the first chapter of Genesis? Yes, but Ruse points out that there are only two groups of people who insist on reading Genesis in a close-mindedly literal way. The first group is ignorant fundamentalists. And the second group is ignorant atheists like Dawkins.

By contrast, Ruse shows that from earliest times thoughtful Christians like the church father Augustine read the creation account figuratively. And for nearly two thousand years the Catholic Church has followed in this tradition. Ruse adds that while Calvin was a bit more literal-minded than Luther, both leading reformers also allowed for non-literal understandings of creation. Indeed Calvin introduced his doctrine of "accommodation" in which he argued that the Bible is sometimes written in a form as to make itself intelligible to people who are not well educated and don't have a sophisticated understanding of science.

Ruse 's conclusion introduces subtleties that seem entirely beyond the capacity of Dawkins. "Is the Christian obligated to be a Darwinian?" Ruse answers no, but urges Christians to take evolutionary biology seriously because they don't want a Christianity practiced in the dark. "Is the Darwinian obligated to be a Christian?" Again, the answer is no but Ruse adds this advice: "Try to be understanding of those who are." Finally Ruse gets to the big one. "Can a Darwinian be a Christian?" To which he offers the resounding answer: "Absolutely!"

Science is wonderful at doing certain things, like popping warm toast out of my toaster and making heavy objects float and fly. Without science we wouldn't be able to do those things. No wonder that science enjoys a position of high prestige in our society.

But the achievements of science blind many people to the fact that science is a limited tool for understanding ourselves and the world. In some areas science has showed astounding progress, but in other areas science has taught us no more than we knew since the time of the Babylonians.

Consider some of the most important questions facing us as human beings: Why are we here? Where ultimately did we come from? Where are we going? Science can provide us with very limited answers. As the philosopher Wittgenstein once put it, one has the feeling that even if all possible scientific knowledge could been obtained, the biggest questions of life would remain largely untouched and unanswered.

Skepticism is of course a central tool of science, but many skeptics make the mistake of failing to apply skepticism to science itself. They are skeptical within science but they are not skeptical about science. They naively believe that science can answer all the questions that require answers. Thus they demand of science what science has never provided and is not likely to provide in the future.

I call this the "atheism of the gaps." The basic idea is that if science hasn't figured something out, just wait a few years, because the brilliant scientists are working on it. Have faith that they will come up with good answers in the future, just as they have in the past. In other words, we should assume that people who are smart enough to make toasters are also smart enough to figure out whether there is life after death.

Yes, it's laughable, and that's why I'm sorry to see smart fellows like my friend Michael Shermer succumbing to this science-worship. Shermer is the editor of Skeptic magazine and author of some fine books including most recently The Mind of the Market. We've done several God v. atheism debates, the most recent one before 2,500 people at Fresno State University. It was one of our liveliest, and you can watch that debate here.

Shermer used to be a Christian fundamentalist. He always gets off a funny line about how he used to go door to door handing out literature, and now as an atheist he wants to go back to those people and take back the stuff he gave them. In a way, though, Shermer remains a believer. He still places his faith in men in white robes. Only these men happen to work not in pulpits but in laboratories. Science is now Shermer's religion.

In a couple of my debates, I asked Shermer what kind of scientific evidence he would require to be convinced that God exists. I asked him, "What if we discovered a new planet tomorrow and emblazed on it were the words: YAHWEH MADE THIS. Would you then believe that there is a God?" Shermer said no. He would automatically conclude that some chance combination of chemicals must have generated those words. In short, he is closed to supernatural explanations, no matter what the data, and is only open to natural explanations.

This I consider a selective sort of skepticism that is actually a lamentable sort of dogmatism. I see it also in Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris and Dennett. In a way they are much narrower than religious believers. That's because the religious believer admits both natural and supernatural explanations. By contrast, these unbelievers have closed themselves off to all possibilities that don't fit their naturalistic outlook. One may say that science has blinded them to the things that science cannot possibly tell them.

Every time we channel surf past Larry King, he's asking someone something like, "So, string beans really cause cancer, huh?" And then not challenging their crackpot theory at all, except by inviting someone equally daffy to half-heartedly beg to differ. The only person we've seen King really press is Denise Richards, whom he scolded for cursing on her TV show. But this interview with a man claiming to have recorded an alien out his window five years ago lacks even more journalistic integrity than most.

In his book A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness, V.S. Ramachandran says it "never ceases to amaze me" that "all the richness of our mental life--all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions--is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in our brains. There is nothing else." Here is the voice of materialism, the doctrine that holds that matter is all that there is, and mind is simply an epiphenomenon of matter. It is the intellectual foundation of the new atheism espoused by Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett and others.

Dawkins, Pinker and Dennett offer nothing to prove the doctrine, and neither does Ramachandran. The best Ramachandran can do is cite exotic ailments: the fellow who could recognize shapes but not faces; the fellow who thought his mother was an imposter in disguise, the patient who responded to pain with laughter, and so on. Turns out that these peculiarities emerge as a result of damage to particular parts of the brain.

But so what? When I bash my radio, the sound stops. Does that mean the radio is creating the sound waves? Isn't it more reasonable to say the radio is simply the instrument or conduit that makes it possible for us to hear those sound waves? Similarly when it rains on the Wimbledon tennis court, play is cancelled. Does this mean that the tennis court is responsible for Federer's serve? No, it simply shows that Federer's serve requires a tennis court for us to be able to watch and appreciate it. In the same vein, all that Ramachandran's outlandish examples prove is that the brain is the site or venue where mental activity takes place. The brain may well be the necessary vehicle for mental activitity. It does not follow that brains and minds are identical.

In his excellent new book The Spiritual Brain, neuroscientist Mario Beauregard turns Ramachandran's argument on its head. He shows that if matter can shape mind, it's equally true that mind can shape matter. In my last post I offered one line of Beauregard's evidence, focusing on placebo and nocebo effects. Here I offer a second. Beauregard matches Ramachandran with his own list of ailments: patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, patients who are depressed, patients who have various phobias such as fears of spiders and cats, and so on.

It turns out that many of these disorders are the result of mental traumas of one sort or another. These traumas leave scars or effects on the physical structure of the brain. Drugs can sometimes help, but frequently they have unpleasant side effects. So what many skilled health care professionals now do is they train the patients to think differently about their condition. For instance, patients who are scared of spiders are shown and taught that most spiders are quite harmless. Eventually the patients train their minds learn to control their paranoia.

Now here is the remarkable thing. When the patients learn to use their wills to control their fears, researchers have discovered that this mental activity also changes the workings of the patients' brains. In other words, mental activity can change the very structure and distribution of the neurons and circuits in the brain. Call it "mind over matter."

What Beauregard is saying that that since minds can regulate brains, therefore minds are not the same as brains. And if my countryman Ramachandran is amazed that little pieces of matter can shape our mental life, I am equally amazed that purely mental events can remake the physical operations of our brains. One day we will figure all this out, and then I predict we will find that minds are much more than an epiphenomenon of matter.

Conventional wisdom holds that the human mind is nothing more than the human brain. This belief derives from materialism. By "materialism" I don't mean the mania to shop unceasingly at the mall. Rather, I mean the philosophy that material reality is all that there is. Immaterial or spiritual realities are, in this view, simply epiphenomena of the material world.

We find the materialist view ably expressed in Francis Crick's The Astonishing Hypothesis. What Crick finds astonishing is that our thoughts, emotions and feelings consist entirely in the physiological activity in the circuitry of the brain. Daniel Dennett argues that "mind" is simply a term for what the brain does. And how do we know that the brain and the mind are essentially the same? The best evidence is that when the brain is damaged, the injury affects the mind. Patients whose brains atrophy due to stroke, for instance, lose their ability to distinguish colors or to empathize with others.

But in his book The Spiritual Brain, neuroscientist Mario Beauregard shows why the Crick-Dennett position is based on a fallacy. Yes, the brain is the necessary locus or venue for the mind to operate. It does not follow that the two are the same. Beauregard gives a telling analogy. "Olympic swimming events require an Olympic class swimming pool. But the pool does not create the Olympic events; it makes them feasible at a given location." Far from being identical to the mind, Beauregard argues that the brain "is an organ suitable for connecting the mind to the rest of the universe."

A provocative idea. Beauregard produces several lines of evidence, but there I focus on just one: the placebo effect. The placebo or sugar-pill effect is one of the most widely-attested phenomena in medicine. One medicine journal notes that "the history of medicine is the history of the placebo effect." So powerful is the impact of the sugar pill that today the effectiveness of drugs is measured by the FDA in comparison to the placebo effect.

Yet as Beauregard points out, the placebo effect is an embarassment to the simple-minded conception of the mind as an ephiphenomenon of the brain. The reason is that this effect shows the mind shaping the brain. The mental expectation of being cured leads to an actual alteration in the physical workings of the brain, and the patient experiences a measurable physiological improvement. One doctor who cured a patient through the placebo effect was asked what he gave the patient that produced such an incredible result. His answer? "Hope."

Beauregard also writes about something I didn't know much about: the nocebo effect. "The nocebo effect is the harmful health effect created by a sick person's belief and expectation that a powerful source of harm has been contacted or administered." So if patients are strongly convinced that a particular pill will give them nausea, they frequently become nauseous, even when the pill they have taken is not the one they expected but only a sugar pill.

Materialism is based on the assumption that the only way to alter the mind is to alter the physical operations of the brain. But Beauregard uses the placebo and nocebo effect to show the reverse. The mind can also regulate the operations of the brain. Beauregard writes that he placebo and nocebo effects are not triggered by the sugar pill but rather are "triggered by the patient's mental state. In other words, they depend entirely on the patient's state of belief."

But if minds can control brains, them minds are not the same as brains. This leads to the unavoidable conclusion that there is an aspect of thought and feeling that lies outside the realm of the material. This is what Beauregard calls "the spiritual brain." Atheists too have one, even if they refuse to admit it.

Atheists seem very eager to claim Einstein for one of their own. Richard Dawkins devotes a whole section to Einstein in The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens' Portable Atheist is peppered with Einstein quotations seemingly rejecting all belief in God. Recently an Einstein letter surfaced which showed the great scientist scorning the idea that the Jews were in any sense God's chosen people.

But all that these quotations prove is that Einstein was not an orthodox believer. He rejected the idea of a personal God "who would directly influence the actions of individuals or would sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation." Einstein also rejeted the immortality of the soul, noting that "one life is enough for me."

At the same time, Walter Isaacson in his celebrated new biography Einstein provides ample evidence that Einstein not only believed in a higher or transcendent power, but also that Einstein despised atheists. Here are some quotations, drawn from Isaacson's book with full documentation, that I offer as a needed counterbalance to the one-sided list provided by Dawkins, Hitchens and the others.

On whether he considered himself religious: "Yes, you could call it that. Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this foce beyond anything we can comprehend is my religion."

On whether he accepted the historical existence of Christ: "Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life."

On whether he considered himself an atheist: "I'm not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what that is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the most intelligent human toward God."

On the nature of God: "That deeply emotional conviction of a presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God."

On whether science leads to religion: "Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of nature--a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort."

On how religion motivates scientific inquiry: "The cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research."

On whether science and religion are at odds: "The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

On how he feels about atheist efforts to claim him as an ally: "There are people who say there is no God, but what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views."

On how he regards atheists: "The fanatical atheists...are creatures who cannot her the music of the spheres. I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist. What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos."

It's widely believed that Charles Darwin lost his faith when he discovered evolution. And many contemporary atheists proclaim themselves followers of Darwin in this sense. Michael Shermer, for instance, writes that he abandoned Christianity when he learned about evolution; finally he could see how there could be design--or the appearance of design--without a designer. Richard Dawkins writes that it was Darwin who finally made it possible to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist."

In reality Darwin's atheism had little to do with his discovery of evolution. First of all Darwin was never a very devout Christian. He was raised as a nominal Anglican. It says something about Anglicanism in Britain that a lukewarm Christian like Darwin actually considered becoming a clergyman. What turned Darwin against Christianity, however, was two things.

First, several of his children either died or has chronic illnesses. This was probably heriditary, as Darwin himself suffered for most of his life from one ailment or the other. When Darwin's daughter Annie died at a young age, however, Darwin was inconsolable. Usually a man of the stiff upper lip, Darwin could not stop himself from weeping even in public. Darwin blamed God for Annie's untimely death. This was several years before Darwin published his Origin of Species.

After Annie's death, Darwin began to reflect morbidly on mortality, and during his process he recalled that his own famous grandfather Erasmus Darwin, as well as several other family members and friends, were unbelievers. Since Darwin saw them as good and respectable people, he angrily fulminated against the doctrine of eternal damnation, asking what kind of a God would consign good people to hell just because they refused to accept Christianity? The thought of all these people in hell filled Darwin with such revulsion that he completely jettisoned Christianity.

At the same time Darwin recognized that his theory of evolution was quite compatible with Christianity. When the American biologist Asa Gray wrote Darwin to say that his theory of evolution demonstrated how God created species, Darwin congratulated Gray for being the first one to see the point. In England, the preacher-poet Charles Kingsley argued for the compatibility with evolution and Christianity, and Darwin encouraged his efforts.

True, evolution is inconsistent with the six-day account of creation, but since the earliest days of Christianity, Christian writers like Augustine have had no problem with interpreting the first book of Genesis allegorically. After all the Hebrew word can mean "day" but it can also mean "period" or "epoch." Only a small segment of Christians--mostly fundamentalists--are uncompromisingly wedded to the six-day account.

Evolution, however, says nothing about who or what created the universe. Evolution doesn't even say anything about how life got started. Evolution merely describes how one life form gave rise to another. Somewhat comically writers like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett argue that evolution is a kind of master key that unlocks the universe. It isn't hard to see that atheism is getting in the way of clear reasoning here. If you doubt this, go to Youtube and watch again my debate with Daniel Dennett. Unfortunately I cannot also direct you to my debate with Dawkins, since Timorous Richard doesn't want to get into the arena with me.

Darwin lost his faith over the "problem of evil," an issue that has been coming up in my recent debates, and one that I intend to address in future blog postings. It's time to set at rest, however, the old myth that evolution is a scientific refutation of theism in general or Christianity in particular. Darwin himself knew it was not so, even if his dimmer acolytes haven't figured that out yet.