Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion provoked many discussions. Typically, the praises came from materialists, that is, people who consider that there are only physical matter and processes in the universe and in living beings.

I am not a materialist, but I do not belong to any instituted religion either. I admit, as a working hypothesis, that there are non-physical processes in the universe and in all living beings, that is, processes that cannot be reduced to physical ones.

I have to comment on the phrase: "Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain." (p. 34). Richard Dawkins expresses it as truth. Unfortunately, this is not a scientific fact, it is at most a scientific speculation, because we don’t know how our thinking ‘emerges’ from our brain, and much less our emotions. We don’t even know where and how our memories are stored. For instance, neuroscience cannot point to the ‘place’ in the brain where a simple symbol as the following, 2, is ‘stored’, much less how it is stored and retrieved. Now take the concept of 2, what is common to all representations of this number, such as 2, II, ii, ||, .., ‘dois’, ‘two’, ‘dva’, ‘shtaim’, etc. This is a pure concept and has absolutely no symbolic representation, so how can it be physically stored in the brain or elsewhere in a human organism? Or take the concept of a perfect circle. Nobody has seen it, and it has no physical geometrical representation – we only see and draw approximations thereof. How can it be physically stored in the brain?

Richard Dawkins cannot point out where in our brain we accommodate mental models. This is pure speculation. The number 2, and of a perfect circle are pure concepts, which have no symbolic representation, thus impossible to be ‘stored’ in the brain. Other examples are the geometrical concepts of point, line and plane: they only exist as abstract concepts; how can they be physically represented and ‘stored’ in the brain? How is it possible that we surpass the necessary circular definitions in a dictionary?

It seems to me much more reasonable to get rid of Richard Dawkins’ prejudice against ‘supernatural’ entities, and suppose that these concepts do not reside in our brain, but in a non-physical Platonic world of ideas, and we are able to reach and observe it with our thinking. Rudolf Steiner wrote:

"... the content of a concept, which is added to the percept by means of thinking, is not subjective. This content is not taken from the subject, but from reality. It is that part of the reality that cannot be reached by the act of perceiving. It is experience, but not experience gained through perceiving. If someone cannot see that the concept is something real, he is thinking of it only in the abstract form in which he holds it in his mind. But only through our organization is it present in such isolation, just as in the case of the percept." Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom,  The Consequences of Monism

excerpt from AN EXTENSIVE REVIEW OF RICHARD DAWKINS’ THE GOD DELUSION
Valdemar W. Setzer