God and the Brain — Or Brain God?

One of the real advantages of not professionally professing literature any longer is expanding my range of reading. I have decided to get just educated enough about brain research to be dangerous, hence my latest Amazon order: books on Flannery O’Connor, Emily Dickinson, and the relation between brain science, psychology, and religion.

I’ll report on the latter if I find the book interesting, but in the meantime I thought I’d stake out my pre-enlightenment position, just so I can show how much I’ve grown once the experts clue me in.

A lot is made of the fact that certain parts of the brain light up when people are engaged in certain activities—including prayer, meditation, speaking in tongues, and the like. Some conclude—rather hastily I think—that this shows that all things spiritual and religious are actually only physical.

Not at all, mush brains! What it shows is that many scientists are lousy thinkers once you get them outside their narrow area of expertise. (It is the “only” that is the problem.) It also reinforces what I, personally, learned from John Henry Newman (19th c.), but which many have pointed out since—that a fact is not significant until it is interpreted. That is, put within a system of thought. When that happens, the “fact” can serve either truth or falsehood, depending on how it is used.

If it is true that parts of the brain light up when one is engaged in “spiritual” things, it “only” suggests that there is sometimes (often? always?) a physical dimension to such things. If there is a God, then God uses the physical world he created—including our brains–to communicate with us. Not surprising, nor new, though evangelicals are perhaps only recently catching on to God’s stubborn love of the physical.