Cartisian Dualism vs. Cardiac Dualism.
It looks like the creationists and mystics are taking a new-or rather, old-approach in their attack on science.
Creationists declare war over the brain
"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."
His enthusiasm was met with much applause from the audience gathered at the UN's east Manhattan conference hall on 11 September for an international symposium called Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness. Earlier Mario Beauregard, a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Montreal, Canada, and co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, told the audience that the "battle" between "maverick" scientists like himself and those who "believe the mind is what the brain does" is a "cultural war".
Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing "non-material neuroscience" movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism - the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial - in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. The two have signed the "Scientific dissent from Darwinism" petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution.
Pay attention, I only want to have to debunk this once.
The creationists are indeed right. We live in a mystical world. But they are wrong about which organ is dualist, consisting of both natural and supernatural components. It's not the brain, it's the heart. Your heartbeat is actually caused by a genie. I will now address your objections.
"But if I shoot someone in the heart, they die!"
But of course, we're dualists here, both material and supernatural elements are necessary for proper function of the heart. That damaging the heart causes it to stop doesn't invalidate the need for a heart genie.
"So if I give someone a drug or a pacemaker to regulate heartbeat?"
They affect the physical part of the heart, allowing it to be more or less connected to its genie.
"But we understand the all the chemical pathways that allow a muscle like the heart to contract and expand!
Again, you're merely describing the physical side. The genie is still necessary.
"What about defibrillators?"
By stimulating the heart, you allow it to re-sync its spiritual connection to its genie.
"What happens if it doesn't get re-connected? What happens after a person dies?"
The genie is immortal, and continues to beat on, in another plane of existence.
"But I've seen experiments where they put dead heart tissue on a dish and shock it, and it jumps!
It's a mere brief mockery of a heart animated by a genie.
"And people wth artificial hearts?"
Are genie-less zombies. Their genie has already gone to the other side, and they're not living in any real sense. It's just an illusion. Try it. Ask them to prove to you that they have a genie. They can't do it.
"Heart transplants?"
They are not the person you once knew. They have a different genie. You might want to shun them.
"Do people with heart defects have damaged genies too?"
No, it's a just a flaw in the physical half of the heart. Heart genies always function perfectly on their plane of existence. However, they may be corrupted by sin, which will affect their disposition in the hereafter. We can fix that, for a low, low fee.
The burden of proof lies with those who assert the positive.
If you abandon this rule, you can propose a "genie" or a "soul" for every single organ in your body. All equally plausible. Hell, there's no need to stop there, you can propose a "spirit" in every plant, every animal, every stone, even in the air around us. Then you are truly living in what Carl Sagan called The Demon-Haunted World.
Of course, people will disagree about which spirits exist and which don't, but with no standard of evidence, you're left with nothing but arguments from authority: shamen and priests declaring each other's spirits non-existent, because they say so.
If that's a valid argument, I'm as much of an authority as anyone. They're all wrong.