Getting Wired for God

A report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media.  This week’s item is from The Orange County Register, dated April 8, 2001, with the headline, “Scientists are trying to prove that consciousness survives death and that God exists and is evolving.”Once a month Laurie Campbell travels to the University of Arizona where she lets scientist hook her up to electrodes while she prays.Neuroscientist in the energy systems laboratory use high tech imaging to explore what happens to the Irvine medium’s body when she connect to what she calls, “the higher source of wisdom and the oneness of the universe.”They measure what happens when she meditates.Feelings of warmth and vibrations in her head and across her back.Their mission:to map what they call the god spot in her brain.Gary Schwartz, a University of Arizona professor of neurology and psychiatry chose Campbell, a medium, for some of his experiments because he found under carefully controlled experiments that she had high rates of accuracy in reading her clients.Such concepts once the domain of mystics, saints and philosophers intrigue a growing number of molecular geneticists, physicists, neurologists, and psychiatrists. This controversial science, neurotheology, probes the biology of belief, focusing on the limbic system and the right temporal lobes of the brain.It is in those areas that meditation, prayers, rituals, near-death experiences, trances and other altered states of consciousness show up as measurable, neurological fireworks.

Tom:

Dave this has some similarity to what we were talking about in our earlier segment.

Dave:

It has.

Tom:

Only now we have scientists trying to find God through some kind of biological or chemical reaction in the brain and they are particularly interested in their religion or finding the god they are looking for by primarily going through Eastern mystical groups.

Dave:

Tom I hope people out there don’t think that I’m just an impatient guy, but I’m sorry, I lose my patience with these people.I mean these are—

Tom:

Wait Dave; before you answer that let me just set it up this way.

Dave:

Okay.

Tom:

You have somebody reading this out there—they get the newspaper—they’re reading this and they say wow, now we can really get a handle on who God is and what he’s about because scientists are doing it.These guys are not dummies.

Dave:

Yes, but Tom they are not getting a handle on who God is.

Tom:

I know that.

Dave:

They are trying to find out what part of the brain creates this delusion of God and I don’t have to argue this.I mean it is so elementary.I am sorry Tom, I just feel bad.

Tom:

Alright, spell it out for me.

Dave:

I feel bad about saying this, but I don’t have patience with these men.They have PhD’s, they are brilliant men.A sunset then doesn’t exist does it?Because they could trace the area of the brain that enjoys a sunset.Oh, justice—there’s no such thing as justice because there is a part of the brain that wiggles and wobbles and has electrical current bouncing across it and chemical reactions when you think of justice.Come on!They’re not that stupid are they?In other words, nothing exists except our brain and we couldn’t even be sure that our brain exists because it’s our brain that tells us our brain exists, so I guess you and I aren’t really here because there is a part of my brain now that is seeing you.I don’t really see you, but there are light waves coming into my eyes with rods and cones and nerves and the lens and all that has transmitted that through the nerves up into my brain and there’s an image in my brain that corresponds we hope to the reality of Tom McMahon, but you don’t really exist, because my brain has this image and if I could only find the area of my brain that has an image of Tom McMahon then I can prove that you really come from my brain.You don’t even exist.Wait a minute!Tom, I think this is a little bit stupid.

Tom:

But this isn’t the only perspective that scientists who are looking into these things are taking.For example, Dr. Herbert Benson.You know that name.

Dave:

Sure.

Tom:

Harvard scientist, medical doctor—the relaxation response was one of his works, looking into meditation and so on.But let me give you a quote from him.Benson says perhaps God gave us the mechanism to understand and experience God in a certain way.In other words, what some scientists are saying is that this is how God communicates to us.

Dave:

Oh that’s okay, that’s a different thought.I wouldn’t quarrel with him on that.If God gave us a mechanism because we have to have vocal chords to talk, we have to have a brain to operate our body.It’s the spirit that is thinking and so forth.We’ve been through that in the past.So yes, I would say that God gave us the capacity within our emotions, our will and so forth.That’s different from what these other scientists.They are trying to analyze the brain to show it’s the brain that creates this idea of God.

Tom:

Right, well again….

Dave:

Benson’s got his own problems.

Tom:

Well that’s the point.Benson and others—they are trying to go past the Bible.The object to God’s Word, God’s revelation through his Word, but they’re looking now for other devices, other mechanisms in which God speaks to us and as I said earlier, Eastern mystical view, meditation, altered states of consciousness seem to be the domain that is most valid.

Dave:

Well, but the Eastern mystic would differ from them.They are materializing this.They are bringing it back to the brain, back to the body, whereas the Eastern mystic would say he’s having a transcendental experience.Well God is beyond our brain, our body.He says so, but He does reveal himself to us.But this is spiritual truth.This is not something physical and we can know God who is spirit and Jesus said God is a spirit and we must worship him in spirit and in truth.

Tom:

Dave, one last thing about this.Most of this is devoid of content.They are looking for mechanism, but it is as though the content doesn’t make any difference.This woman who’s a medium for example, she’s got a view of God.She calls him “the higher source of wisdom and oneness with the universe.”So even if the mechanism—there may be some validity there, but if the content is….

Dave:

To say there is a oneness to this universe again doesn’t make sense, because people are in opposition to one another, the natural world is in opposition to one another, lions against gazelles to eat them.There are all kind of explosions in this universe and so forth.No the universe itself is separated from God.The truth is with God and our unity only comes only in knowing him.Not in all these ideas that people are coming up with.