From the Foreword of "The Soul Fallacy", by Victor Stenger:
It should be obvious to both proponents and truly open minded skeptics that this ambitiously arrogant and overconfident agenda amounts to writing a bunch of large value checks that will inevitably bounce at the bank of fact checking, for reasons that are too numerous and tedious to go over here. I marvel at the sheer arrogance of Musolino in attempting to show "compassion" for what he really regards as the superstitious, magical and foolishly wish fulfilling belief systems of the great majority of mankind, from immemorial.
In fact this represents the "old guard" of scientific orthodoxy defending what has come to be regarded by more open minded and progressive members of the scientific profession as a failed, dead paradigm. It is dramatically out of touch with the latest thinking, in particular with the growing popularity amongst the scientific intelligentsia of panpsychism, which is in dramatic opposition to reductive materialism and at least recognizes the fundamental separation between subjective conscious experience and the material, with the latter being all that science can investigate.
I think Ian Wardell's excellent review demolishes everything important in Musolino's claims, and in detail.
(This post was last modified: 2022-07-12, 03:22 PM by nbtruthman. Edited 4 times in total.)
Quote:"...in this beautifully written, impeccably researched, and compassionate book by Rutgers psychologist Julien Musolino, we are now in a position to eliminate perhaps the most deeply personal and destructive superstition held by the bulk of humanity: the immaterial, immortal soul.
Musolino provides a compelling scientific case for the nonexistence of the soul. The author makes it clear that he is not presenting his own idiosyncratic view but that of the wide consensus of psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists - not to mention biologists and physicists. As a physicist who has never seen the hand of God in any observable phenomenon, I view the scientific rejection of the soul as the ultimate validation of reductionist material monism.
The elimination of the soul will be the final, fatal blow to religious belief."
It should be obvious to both proponents and truly open minded skeptics that this ambitiously arrogant and overconfident agenda amounts to writing a bunch of large value checks that will inevitably bounce at the bank of fact checking, for reasons that are too numerous and tedious to go over here. I marvel at the sheer arrogance of Musolino in attempting to show "compassion" for what he really regards as the superstitious, magical and foolishly wish fulfilling belief systems of the great majority of mankind, from immemorial.
In fact this represents the "old guard" of scientific orthodoxy defending what has come to be regarded by more open minded and progressive members of the scientific profession as a failed, dead paradigm. It is dramatically out of touch with the latest thinking, in particular with the growing popularity amongst the scientific intelligentsia of panpsychism, which is in dramatic opposition to reductive materialism and at least recognizes the fundamental separation between subjective conscious experience and the material, with the latter being all that science can investigate.
I think Ian Wardell's excellent review demolishes everything important in Musolino's claims, and in detail.
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