But to Hitchens: why not school people in precisely how the human mind does work at this point in the argument? It certainly does obey laws—laws so material that the notions of subjectivity and consciousness on which the theist’s argument rest get blown to smithereens. If a human subject with a “mind” who makes ethical decisions that transfer to his or her immortal soul suffers a brain injury impairing his or her interpretive systems, ability to read human emotions (key to the brain response we know as ‘compassion’) then what’s happened to the soul? If I can remove the part of a person’s brain that enables ethical judgment, have I not surgically removed their moral soul? This connection between what the religious call the soul and what is known about material brain functionality severely undermines the theist’s notion of the “I” that makes choices that bear on “my” eternal soul. If I’m a neuroscientist, I can plug your immortal soul into a machine and map it’s [sic] electricity.

Descartes believed that somewhere in the brain there was a driver’s seat for the soul—the site where “you” make the decision to act, whether morally or immorally. But the “I” that so many take for granted is known to be nothing more than the brain’s interpretation of its own complex functioning. Multiple things occur in the brain that the “I” isn’t aware of and couldn’t control no matter how hard it tried. The notion of heaven, this place where all the “I”s will someday go because of things they did or didn’t do, is not commensurate with what is known about the brain. The human “I” in other words is little more than the transcendentalizing of an evolved brain phenomenon. If one accepts evolution, as D’Souza does, then one must also accept that these brains once had no ability to conceive of themselves in this way, much less to glorify it so. And so grows a new problem for the theist—not the atheist—to explain, one that isn’t unlike the ensoulment debate regarding abortion. Whence did the soul of the “I” come into being in terms of human evolution? And how can something be transcendent if it can be surgically removed?

Many have charged the new atheists of wearing out an old argument and passing off as if its [sic] new. But these questions are completely current. Francis Crick proclaimed the brain to be the great frontier of the 21st century and it has only been with the advent of computers in the last 20-30 years that the intensive acceleration in learning has taken place. Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, and Dawkins are not beating dead horses by the name of Russell or Nietzsche. They are pushing back the post-everything world’s increasing tendency to accept bullshit. And their rebuttals to this trend stand on foundations that aren’t hundreds or thousands but mere tens of years old. Hitchens could have been a bit more forward with some of this information. D’Souza could stand to be a bit more aware of it. But hey, the best bullshitters are the ones who believe their own bullshit.

• If we could ever duplicate the information processing in the human mind as an enormous computer program, would a computer running the program be conscious?
  
• What if we took that program and trained a large number of people, say, the population of China, to hold in mind the data and act out the steps? Would there be one gigantic consciousness hovering over China, separate from the consciousnesses of the billion individuals? If they were implementing the brain state for agonizing pain, would there be some entity that really was in pain, even if every citizen was cheerful and light-hearted?
  
• Suppose the visual receiving area at the back of your brain was surgically severed from the rest and remained alive in your skull, receiving input from the eyes. By every behavioral measure you are blind. Is there a mute but fully aware visual consciousness sealed off in the back of your head? What if it was removed and kept alive in a dish?
  
• Might your experience of red be the same as my experience of green? Sure, you might label grass as “green” and tomatoes as “red,” just as I do, but perhaps you actually see the grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as red.
  
• Could there be zombies? That is, could there be an android rigged up to act as intelligently and as emotionally as you and me, but in which there is “no one home” who is actually feeling or seeing anything? How do I know that you’re not a zombie?
  
• If someone could download the state of my brain and duplicate it in another collection of molecules, would it have my consciousness? If someone destroyed the original, but the duplicate continued to live my life and think my thoughts and feel my feelings, would I have been murdered? Was Captain Kirk snuffed out and replaced by a twin every time he stepped into the transporter room?
  
• What is it like to be a bat? Do beetles enjoy sex? Does a worm scream silently when a fisherman impales it on a hook?
  
• Surgeons replace one of your neurons with a microchip that duplicates its input-output functions. You feel and behave exactly as before. Then they replace a second one, and a third one, and so on, until more and more of your brain becomes silicon. Since each microchip does exactly what the neuron did, your behavior and memory never change. Do you even notice the difference? Does it feel like dying? Is some other co