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Nigel Farndale
Born
in Ripon, North Yorkshire, The United Kingdom
September 30, 1964
Website
Twitter
Genre
More books by Nigel Farndale…
“Can you prove to me that there's no God, professor?'
'I could prove there is no need for a god, which is the next best thing. The Big Bang is the explanation. The Big Bang followed by billions of years of evolution by natural selection.'
'But what was there before the Big Bang?'
'Nothing.'
'Surely that is based on belief, too. You believe there was nothing. You cannot prove it.'
'Just as there are laws of physics, so there are laws of biology and the main one, the one which explains every living thing on the planet - and every planet in the universe, for that matter - is that all things must start simply and become complex. The complex dolphin began its evolutionary journey hundreds of millions of years ago as a simple, single-celled prokaryote. For a god to create the universe he would have to be hyper intelligent. But intelligence only evolves over time. The argument for a god starts by assuming what it is attempting to explain - intelligence, complexity, it amounts to the same thing - and so it explains nothing. God is a non-explanation. The Big Bang followed by billions of years of evolution is an explanation.”
― The Blasphemer
'I could prove there is no need for a god, which is the next best thing. The Big Bang is the explanation. The Big Bang followed by billions of years of evolution by natural selection.'
'But what was there before the Big Bang?'
'Nothing.'
'Surely that is based on belief, too. You believe there was nothing. You cannot prove it.'
'Just as there are laws of physics, so there are laws of biology and the main one, the one which explains every living thing on the planet - and every planet in the universe, for that matter - is that all things must start simply and become complex. The complex dolphin began its evolutionary journey hundreds of millions of years ago as a simple, single-celled prokaryote. For a god to create the universe he would have to be hyper intelligent. But intelligence only evolves over time. The argument for a god starts by assuming what it is attempting to explain - intelligence, complexity, it amounts to the same thing - and so it explains nothing. God is a non-explanation. The Big Bang followed by billions of years of evolution is an explanation.”
― The Blasphemer
“Hallucinations relate to the higher cognitive functions of the brain. I was reading about someone at Columbia who asked volunteers to differentiate between houses and faces. Signals in the frontal cortex became active whenever subjects expected to see a face, irrespective of what the actual stimulus was. They would look at a house and "see" a face.
It's called, you know Predictive coding. The brain has an expectation of what it will see, then compares this with information from the eyes. When this goes tits up, hallucinations occur. Our eyes don't present to our brains exact photographs of the things we see. They are more like sketches and impressions chattering along the optic nerve for the brain to interpret. That's what optical illusions are about. The brain's software is perfectly capable of simulating a vision in this way”
― The Blasphemer
It's called, you know Predictive coding. The brain has an expectation of what it will see, then compares this with information from the eyes. When this goes tits up, hallucinations occur. Our eyes don't present to our brains exact photographs of the things we see. They are more like sketches and impressions chattering along the optic nerve for the brain to interpret. That's what optical illusions are about. The brain's software is perfectly capable of simulating a vision in this way”
― The Blasphemer
“Do you know what I mean by the "God spot"?'
'Read something about it in Nature once. They did an experiment in which quasi-religious epiphanies were induced under laboratory conditions. Didn't they use nuns?'
'Carmelite nuns. But they were also able to produce these visions in non-believers. Basically they showed that there's a circuit of nerves in the brain which explains belief in God.”
― The Blasphemer
'Read something about it in Nature once. They did an experiment in which quasi-religious epiphanies were induced under laboratory conditions. Didn't they use nuns?'
'Carmelite nuns. But they were also able to produce these visions in non-believers. Basically they showed that there's a circuit of nerves in the brain which explains belief in God.”
― The Blasphemer
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