(by Dave, 5-10 min)
Some time ago I asked a group of my Christian friends if they could discern communications from God. Although each experience was unique, everyone in the group was able to do it. We could identify the distinguishing attributes of these encounters and each one of us interpreted them as authentic just like other perceptions humans have (e.g. hearing a sound, touching a surface, or seeing an object), albeit of a different nature. For example, I became involved with a nonprofit solely because I felt an urging to do so when talking with one of its representatives. The urging was quite unique and came on hard and fast during a simple half hour interview. I knew God wanted me to work with this group.
Someone with a naturalistic perspective will have some trouble with this view. A very good atheistic friend of mine gently informed me many years ago that Christians are just fooling themselves. We want to have an encounter with God, and so our brains create one. By his thinking, my Christian friends were experiencing nothing more than brain activity they induced out of their desires. Want it hard enough, he argued, and your brain will deliver it.
But are not all perceptions dependent upon brain activity? If you are holding an object in your left hand, there are a bunch of neurons in your right brain that become very active. Shut those neurons down with an injury and you will not feel the object in your hand and be unaware it is there. Destroy enough of the neurons, and you may even deny that your left hand is your own. Destroy the visual part of the cerebral cortex, and even though your eyes work well and send electrical signals into your brain, you will not be able to see because the part of the brain that normally receives that information is not there to receive the signals. The person will be blind even though his/her eyes can still see.
All perceptions that humans have are thus dependent on brain activity. So, do neurons become active when Christians perceive God? In their book Why God Won’t Go Away Andrew Newburg, Eugene D’Aquili and Vince Rause reviewed investigations where brain activity was monitored in accomplished mystics while they were having a spiritual encounter. Mystics were defined as people who could perceive religious experiences through a well-practiced procedure. Regardless of the religious background, these folks had a similar activity pattern occur within their brains. Newberg and colleagues wondered if maybe the brain activity in their mystics is the neuronal activity associated with perceiving God.
One could easily argue that the difference between the brain activity of the mystics and the brain activity that occurs, for example, when light is shown in the eye is that no one can confirm God is communicating to the mystics. Shining a light in the eye can be confirmed by many other people or objective devices. We can take the light away and see if the brain activity stops. We can put the light back on the eye and see if the brain activity starts anew. Indeed, we can scientifically confirm a relationship between shining a light in the eye and activity that occurs commensurate with it. We can even control for a person’s desire by performing the whole experiment on an animal. Similar confirmatory experiments cannot be done with the brain activity of mystics or that of more typical Christians because the presence of communication from God cannot be confirmed and manipulated like the light source.
The light source also represents something for the naturalist that God cannot. Light is an unchanging physical reality that is unaffected by a subject’s desire. Even if the subject (human or animal) wanted to, they could not change the physical reality of the light. In fact, the whole ability to manipulate light for scientific experiments as described above is based upon the premise that the light isn’t changing. No amount of desire from the person’s brain can change the physical reality of light. The desire can certainly change the brain activity, but not the nature of the light. Therefore, it’s much easier to believe the brain activity associated with light is a genuine perception of light than it is to believe the brain activity of the mystics is a genuine perception of God.
But are light and the physical world truly this constant? In his book The Science of God, Gerard Schroeder describes experiments with light which indicate that it was not fully perceived initially by the scientific community. Scientists wanted to determine is light a wave or a particle and set up an experiment that definitively showed light behaved like a wave. For a very long time the wave nature of light was settled science.
Decades later an observation was made that suggested light was a particle. If you designed the experiment to detect a wave, light would behave like a wave. If you designed the experiment to detect a particle, it behaved like a particle. Much to everyone’s surprise, light was both wave and particle. The only reason it was believed to be only a wave for so long is because the wave property of it was confirmed first and objects having wave or particle properties were believed to be one or the other but not both.
If the nature of light is more than we initially detected, isn’t it also possible that the brains of mystics and those of ordinary Christians are capable of perceiving God because they have chosen to listen. By making the decision to believe, they have placed a detector into the world for the physical reality of God’s voice. Only when the particle detector revealed the particle nature of light was the property realized. Perhaps only the presence of a believing person will cause God’s voice to create brain activity.
Admittedly, this line of argument is far reaching, but it is nevertheless consistent with the reports from mystics and my collection of Christian friends. These people are all convinced they perceive something that is as real as the perception of light. Perhaps because they have chosen to listen, chosen to put a particle detector into the experiment so to speak, they are able to perceive something that others cannot. My work with the nonprofit opened my eyes to much about the world and myself and changed who I was in a very good and spiritual way. I wonder what I would lose had I not acknowledged and responded to the voice of God the day I interviewed the representative. Maybe when we feel like God has not interacted with us in a while all we need to do is start listening again.
May you have a rich communication with God this and every day of your faith journey.
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