The Boyle Lectures and the Brain: Concerns about ISSR’s Public Sphere Claims about Human Minds and Intelligence

Michael Spezio, Ph.D., M.Div.

Associate Professor, Psychology, Data Science, Neuroscience, Scripps College, Claremont, CA USA

Minister of Word and Sacrament, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Presbytery of San Gabriel, Temple City, CA USA

The public sphere of pluralistic liberal democracy is in danger of collapse due to sustained attacks on sound, coherent, evidence-based discourse, thinking, and the corrigibility of claims. Anti-vaccine campaigns are reshaping public health. Anti-evolution advocacy is reshaping science education. Climate denial is reshaping energy policy. The institutions themselves are now being directed by commitments that contradict the scientific consensus they were built to apply. None of this is incidental to the work of science and religion. Our field exists, in the long arc of its institutional life, to strengthen public sphere reasoning across confessional difference. When the field of and interdisciplinary work in science and religion do this work well, they equip public deliberation with the analytic and empirical care that pluralistic democracy requires. When they do not, they provide cover for the very failures of reasoning that are collapsing the public sphere itself.

This essay raises a concern about how ISSR is doing that work right now. It is offered in a collegial spirit but with serious intent, with respect for the institutions and the persons involved. The concern is about content, claims, and process. Recent events, including the 2026 Boyle Lecture and its panel discussion, have embraced, with little critical reflection, a view of human intelligence and of human persons, minds, and brains that borders on pseudoscience and sometimes crosses over into it. The concern is also about the standing of the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR) in the empirical and philosophical disciplines on which our field depends.

The charter

The Boyle Lectures were founded by Robert Boyle’s will and inaugurated in 1692. The first lecturer, Richard Bentley, prepared his sermons in direct correspondence with Newton himself (Newton [1692–93] 2004). The series was revived in 2004 at St Mary-le-Bow, with ISSR holding the central role on the Boyle Lectures Board ever since (Re Manning and Byrne 2013). The revived lectures inherit both the founding charter and the founding standard.

The standard is the point. Boyle and Bentley did not appeal to scientific language absent standards of trust, to the best of their abilities. They engaged the most empirically careful natural philosophy of their time as a co-participant in public reasoning, holding their public theological claims to the same standards of analytic coherence and empirical adequacy that any public claim requires. Public claims become provisionally trustworthy by meeting these standards, not by retreating from them. Hans Reichenbach, one of Einstein’s first students of the new relativity physics in Berlin (Salmon 1977), called any claim with this structure a posit: a statement adopted on the best available evidence, treated as if true for inquiry and action, and held open to revision under new evidence (Reichenbach 1938). Cynthia Schuster (1950), Reichenbach’s PhD student at UCLA, developed these ideas further.

A precedent ISSR has set, and a closer parallel to current directions

In 2008, ISSR commissioned a seven-author statement that named what happens when this standard breaks down. “We believe that intelligent design is neither sound science nor good theology” (ISSR 2008). The statement identified three failures: that ID admits supernatural intervention as scientific explanation, that it functions as a “science stopper,” and that it has not opened a new research program. The standard ISSR set then was that we will not lend our platforms to claims the relevant empirical sciences have substantially disconfirmed.

This standard is not a 2008 invention. It continues what Boyle, Bentley, and Newton envisioned for the lectures in 1692, and what ISSR and its partners took up again at the 2004 revival (Re Manning and Byrne 2013). The lectures have always been a public sphere event, accountable to the best empirical reasoning of their time. The 2026 lecture and following discussion were serious departures from this charter.

ID was a coordinated political movement. The efforts and events at the heart of my present concern are not. A closer structural parallel comes from within the cognitive neurosciences themselves. Paul MacLean, a respected NIH neuroscientist, proposed in his Triune Brain hypothesis (MacLean 1990) that the brain comprises three evolutionarily sequential layers, a “reptilian complex,” a “paleomammalian limbic system,” and a “neomammalian neocortex.” Theologians, psychotherapists, and educators adopted the model widely. Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden (Sagan 1977) carried it to the broader public, winning the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Comparative neuroanatomy had already shown the layered evolutionary claim to be without much basis (Reiner 1990; Striedter 2005), and avian brain studies decisively undid it (Jarvis et al. 2005). Cesario, Johnson, and Eisthen (2020) titled the field’s verdict: “Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside.” The model persisted in theological and popular literature for decades after disappearing from provisionally trustworthy neuroscience.

The pattern is consistent. A scholar with primary expertise outside an empirical specialty proposes a framework new to that specialty. It develops a compelling cultural and theological narrative. The relevant sciences had already shown the central claims without much basis. Such a framework persists because it underwrites theological commitments. The damage is structural.

A deeper issue lies underneath. The lecture’s framework, hemispheric attentional dualism, claims to honor an attention attuned to wholes, contexts, embodied relations, and the implicit, the very features that build relational trust between persons and disciplines. Its practice is the opposite. Evidence is tailored to fit the conclusion. Divergence of claims from evidence is denied when challenged. Critics’ findings are treated as misunderstandings. The structure of the framework’s defense undermines what its content professes to honor.

That tailoring is most clearly documented in the methodological asymmetry. Neuroimaging is dismissed as unable to detect “true” lateralization; lesion-deficit data are treated as privileged. The argument rests on a 2004 paper by Rorden and Karnath titled, as a question, “Using human brain lesions to infer function: A relic from a past era in the fMRI age?” The paper’s actual conclusion was that lesion methods complement neuroimaging, not that they are superior (Rorden and Karnath 2004). The same authors’ 2018 review advocates multivariate lesion-symptom mapping, lesion network mapping, and integration with resting-state fMRI and diffusion tractography (Karnath, Sperber, and Rorden 2018). Two decades of consensus has moved toward integration.

A sharper point follows. The relevant empirical literatures do not support the framework’s central claims, and they have not supported them at any point since the framework was articulated. Lesion-deficit methods, the channel the framework treats as privileged, do not support its central claims. Cardillo, McQuire, and Chatterjee (2018), in matched lesion patients and controls, found that every patient with a selective metaphor deficit had left-hemisphere damage; no right-hemisphere patient showed selective impairment. Klooster et al. (2020) extended the result to left-hemisphere neurodegeneration. The imaging literature, the channel the framework treats as unreliable, does not either. Huang and colleagues (2023) pooled thirty fMRI studies and 480 participants and found that metaphor comprehension activates five brain regions, all of them in the left hemisphere. Neither the channel the framework prefers nor the channel it dismisses supports its central claims for metaphor, art, and religious cognition (see also Spezio 2019). To cite 2004 as if 2018 did not happen, and to treat the question as a paradigm dispute rather than one to be weighed on the body of published evidence, is to forfeit the relational trust on which our field’s place in public reasoning depends.

The ISSR standard set in 2008 is live. It is the field’s posture, and it is our ongoing practice of the standard that builds and holds the relational trust on which our presence in any conversation about science in public life depends. What concerns me is not a single event but a pattern: an incorrigibility (Spezio 2018) slowly grown across recent ISSR programs and events, where claims the relevant empirical sciences have substantially disconfirmed are repeated without engagement of the disconfirming work.

When theology enters the public sphere

Confessional communities have every right to develop and express their commitments in their own voice. Scholarship of religion and in theology, in engaging or challenging empirical claims from neuroscience, AI, evolution, and similar specialties, enter the public sphere. When theological reasoning makes empirical claims about work funded by, performed in, and accountable to the public sphere, including claims about brain function, human intelligence, artificial systems, education, medicine, or policy, those claims have, by the mode of their expression, entered the public sphere (Spezio, forthcoming-b). They cannot retreat to the confessional voice once challenged on empirical content. They did not arrive in the confessional voice. They arrived addressed to publics whose deliberation they sought to shape. The translation proviso (Habermas 2006) does not block confessional contributions to public reasoning. It clarifies what those contributions must satisfy in order to ground shared public commitments. The question is whether what is said meets the standards.

What the 2026 Boyle Lecture occasioned

The 2026 Boyle Lecture and its panel discussion are public sphere events, broadcast publicly and prepared for publication. The twin standards apply: analytic coherence and empirical adequacy (Spezio, forthcoming-a; Spezio, forthcoming-b). Without these, the public sphere becomes a contest of assertions.

The lecture’s central neural claim, hemispheric attentional dualism, posits an opposed pair of “manners of attention” mapped to right and left hemispheres and treated as if they were two ontological kinds. The claim does not specify thin constructs, operational definitions, measurements, or evaluation criteria under which it could be assessed against evidence. This is cryptocriteriology: public claims advanced without the standards that would make them assessable. The framework was given a peer-reviewed test in a 2019 special issue of Religion, Brain and Behavior, and the three responding neuroscientists, in two independent reviews, concluded that the neuroimaging evidence does not sustain it (Spezio 2019; Kundu and Smith 2019). An earlier PLoS Biology essay had documented the empirical failures of the framework’s central claims (Corballis 2014). None of this work, nor the post-2019 lateralization literature, was engaged in the lecture or panel.

The lecture’s central claim about intelligence settles the question by etymology. The Latin gloss is offered as if it could substitute for the empirical construct. It does not engage the field’s consensus statement on intelligence, which has shaped psychological science for nearly thirty years (Neisser et al. 1996). Intelligence, in scientific psychology, is what is operationally specified, measured, and refined under the criteriology that field has developed. Intelligence cannot be defined out of artificial systems by a Latin gloss. Psychological and cognitive science and neuroscience must themselves remain corrigible as they seek more provisionally trustworthy theories and claims about intelligence. ISSR can serve as a useful intellectual home for this collaborative and critical engagement, as long as the claims its leadership and scholars advance are similarly corrigible and do not move into anti-evidential forms of rhetorical advocacy or dogma.

The lecture’s claims about AI do not engage the production architecture of contemporary systems. Pretraining, posttraining, and inference-time methods are absent. What is present is a portrait of “machines” whose features match no architecture in current research or deployment.

The panel that received the lecture included no neuroscientist, no psychometrician, and no scholar in philosophy of mind or philosophy of language who has published a critique of the framework under discussion. The three respondents endorsed the framework. One panelist did raise a substantive question, gesturing at the dispositional-versus-propositional belief distinction in analytic philosophy. That panelist works in philosophical theology with analytic methods, not in philosophy of mind or philosophy of language, and the reply did not return to the question’s implications for the framework. The panelists are accomplished scholars; the concern raised here is structural. A public sphere event grounded in claims the relevant empirical sciences have not been able to confirm, where the structure and process did not bring to the table the scientific and philosophical views able to challenge error and lend voice to provisionally trustworthy claims in a spirit of public reasoning, cannot meet the lectures’ founding charter or ISSR’s 2008 reaffirmation of it.

Why this matters for ISSR

ISSR is the field’s flagship learned society. Its standing rests on the willingness of working scientists, philosophers, and theologians to recognize it as a serious interlocutor. That recognition depends in turn on whether the society’s public claims meet the standards of the disciplines it convenes. Psychological science, cognitive science, and neuroscience have corrigible criteria for what types of evidence are required for provisionally trustworthy claims about brain function and cognition. Philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and epistemology have corrigible criteria for the analytic care required for provisionally trustworthy claims about consciousness, intelligence, meaning, and reference. Human flourishing depends on the trust such public sphere criteria and reasoning elicit. Human flourishing collapses when the public sphere collapses, and cannot occur in the anti-evidential pursuit of confessional dominance. This standard was set at the lectures’ founding and renewed again and again, including by ISSR in 2008. It lives as long as we practice it.

When ISSR’s most prominent annual platform hosts claims that the relevant empirical sciences have substantially disconfirmed, the cost is borne by the very communities the field exists to serve. Confessional communities depend on a public sphere whose claims are not filtered through frameworks insulated from empirical reach. Pseudoscience under theological cover cannot do that work. It cedes the public sphere to actors who do not need our help.

This essay closes with a respectful invitation. The standard the Boyle Lectures carry, set at their founding and renewed again and again, is intact. ISSR has the standing and resources to structure future lectures and panels so that the scientific and philosophical views able to challenge error and lend voice to provisionally trustworthy claims are at the table. Theology and the empirical sciences as co-participants in public reasoning, each corrigible, each accountable, each serving human flourishing. That is our practice, and it may not always be the thing we do best, but in the public sphere, it just could be the best thing that we do.

References

Cardillo, Eileen R., Marguerite McQuire, and Anjan Chatterjee. 2018. “Selective Metaphor Impairments After Left, Not Right, Hemisphere Injury.” Frontiers in Psychology 9: 2308. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02308.

Cesario, Joseph, David J. Johnson, and Heather L. Eisthen. 2020. “Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 29 (3): 255–260. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721420917687.

Corballis, Michael C. 2014. “Left Brain, Right Brain: Facts and Fantasies.” PLoS Biology 12 (1): e1001767. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001767.

Habermas, Jürgen. 2006. “Religion in the Public Sphere.” European Journal of Philosophy 14 (1): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0378.2006.00241.x.

Huang, Yanyang, Jiayu Huang, Le Li, Tao Lin, and Laiquan Zou. 2023. “Neural Network of Metaphor Comprehension: An ALE Meta-Analysis and MACM Analysis.” Cerebral Cortex 33 (21): 10918–10930. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhad337.

International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR). 2008. “ISSR Statement on the Concept of ‘Intelligent Design.’” Cambridge: ISSR. https://www.issr.org.uk/issr-statements/concept-intelligent-design/.

Jarvis, Erich D., Onur Güntürkün, Laura Bruce, András Csillag, Harvey Karten, Wayne Kuenzel, Loreta Medina, et al. 2005. “Avian Brains and a New Understanding of Vertebrate Brain Evolution.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 6 (2): 151–159. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1606.

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Klooster, Nathaniel B., Marguerite McQuire, Murray Grossman, Corey McMillan, Anjan Chatterjee, and Eileen R. Cardillo. 2020. “The Neural Basis of Metaphor Comprehension: Evidence from Left Hemisphere Degeneration.” Neurobiology of Language 1 (4): 474–491. https://doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00022.

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Neisser, Ulric, Gwyneth Boodoo, Thomas J. Bouchard Jr., A. Wade Boykin, Nathan Brody, Stephen J. Ceci, Diane F. Halpern, John C. Loehlin, Robert Perloff, Robert J. Sternberg, and Susana Urbina. 1996. “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns.” American Psychologist 51 (2): 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.51.2.77.

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Re Manning, Russell, and Michael Byrne, eds. 2013. Science and Religion in the Twenty-First Century: The Boyle Lectures 2004–2013. London: SCM Press.

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Spezio, Michael. Forthcoming-a. Justice by Design: Ethical AI Governance Worthy of Public Trust. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press / Taylor & Francis.

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A brief reply to Dr. Michael Spezio 

I thank ISSR Fellow Michael Spezio for following up on my invitation to write a blog on the public role of ISSR. For the sake of clarity, I should point out that ISSR makes no “public sphere claims about human minds and intelligence.” Such work is done by individual scholars and teams, and is tested by other scholars. The controversial nature of many scientific theories is obvious, as evidence is taken from different sources, e.g. including neuroscience, psychological experiments and social analysis. 

ISSR’ is grateful for its collaboration with the Boyle Lectures that have offered an important platform for public discussions on science, religion and culture. The 2026 Boyle Lecture by the renowned psychiatrist and public intellectual Iain McGilchrist, like earlier lectures, addressed modes of attention, ethics, and cultural frameworks, as well as conflicting views on technology, including AI. 

ISSR is always committed to upholding scholarly standards of excellence across disciplines. That remains the case when ISSR moves from physics and biology, history, philosophy and theology into the territories of cognitive science, psychology and the medical sciences, and further on to ecology and the social sciences. 

Prof. Niels Henrik Gregersen, 

ISSR President

A Response from Fraser Watts

I welcome Michael Spezio’s scientific critique of Iain McGilchrist work, as I always welcome good scientific debate. I don’t want here to take sides in that debate, as I see merit in both sides, but I think it is a scientific debate, not a clash between science and “pseudoscience”.

1. Spezio is correct in his summary of the brain scanning data. The question is how relevant it is to McGilchrist ‘s theoretical position. McGilchrist argues that it is not. Brain scanning studies monitor blood flow when people are given a particular task, but McGilchrist says his theory is about how the two hemispheres approach particular tasks, not about what they can do.
2. Data from lesion studies is generally supportive of McGilchrist’s position. In chapter 2 of The Master and his Emissary he assembles an impressive body of supportive research. Spiezio, in his blog, mentions a lesion study on metaphor that challenges McGilchrist. That study may indicate that the theory needs refinement, but it does not completely invalidate it.
3. As well as careful summaries of the data, science needs broad, integrative theories that are correct as a first approximation, even if they stand in need of refinement on particular details. McGilchrist has provided such a theory. Many philosophers of science have argued that science properly incorporates metaphysics.
4. McGilchrist contrasts two different modes of cognition. There is much support for some such distinction between two fundamentally different modes of human cognition. Though McGilchrist defends his lateralisation theory, others are free to take his work as a scientific proposal in cognitive psychology rather than in neuroscience.