that gift of faith

"For thousands of years, we've meditated, fasted, and communed, we've prayed and chanted to make contact with the divine. But what if all you need is a magnet on the right hemisphere of your brain to see God?"

An introduction made by Morgan Freeman in TV program Through the Wormhole: Is There a Creator

"One neuroscientist believes our experiences with the divine can be induced by sending electromagnetic signals into the brain. Does this mean the divine is actually biological?"

An experiment was done by sending electromagnetic stimulations to a certain part of the brain and it produces a similar effect that of a divine experience. The Persinger experiment. I'm not arguing any further. Science is trying to explain God away.

=========================

Skeptics of religion are quick to claim that the brain's handwriting proves that God has no real existence, that it's all in the brain." The real common denominator here is brain activity, not anything else," says Ron Barrier, a spokesman for American Atheists based in Cranford, New Jersey. "There is nothing to indicate that this is externally imposed or that you are somehow tapping into a divine entity."

But Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, isn't so sure. "We can't say they're wrong," he says. "On the other hand, if you're a religious person, it makes sense that the brain can do this, because if there is a God, it makes sense to design the brain so that we can have some sort of interaction. And we can't say that's wrong, either. The problem is that all of our experience are equal, in that they are all in the brain. Our experience of reality, our experience of science, our mystical experiences are all in the brain."

In fact, he goes on, practically the only way we can judge the reality of an experience is by how real it feels: "You can have a dream and it feels real at the time, but you wake up and it no longer feels as real. The problem is, when people have a mystical experience they think that is more real than baseline reality - even when they come back to baseline reality. That turns everything around." To Newberg, it means that reductionist science, powerful as it is, has its limitations.

Religious expert agree. "You could say Shakespeare's sonnets are nothing but a combination of pencil lead and cellulose," says Harper. "But you could also say this is the outflow of a great soul, and that would also be true." He says there are different levels of explanation which are each true at their own level, but which don't offer a comprehensive explanation.

Just as physicists cannot fully understand the electron as wither a particle or a wave, but only as both at once, says Newberg, so we need both science and a more subjective, spiritual understanding in order to grasp the full nature of reality.

Excerpt from In Search of God - Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

=========================

All things point to the glory of God. Reductionism sucks.

That's why faith is a gift. I've heard nothing. Seen nothing. Felt nothing. Yet I still believe.