Articles
Free Will Faith?
“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.” (Romans 1:22)
Controversial new research suggests that whether we believe in a God may not just be a matter of free will. Scientists now believe there may be physical differences in the brains of ardent believers.
Inspiration for this work has come from a group of patients who have a brain disorder called temporal lobe epilepsy. In a minority of patients, this condition induces bizarre religious hallucinations.
Professor VS Ramachandran, of the University of California in San Diego, believed that the temporal lobes of the brain were key in religious experience.
So he set up an experiment to compare the brains of people with and without temporal lobe epilepsy. He decided to measure his patients’ changes in skin resistance, essentially measuring how much they sweated when they looked at different types of imagery.
What Professor Ramachandran discovered to his surprise was that when the temporal lobe patients were shown any type of religious imagery, their bodies produced a dramatic change in their skin resistance.
The activity of specific neural circuits makes these patients more prone to religious belief.
“We found to our amazement that every time they looked at religious words like God, they’d get a huge galvanic skin response.”
Scientists now believe famous religious figures in the past could also have been sufferers from the condition. St Paul and Moses appear to be two of the most likely candidates.
We will never know for sure whether religious figures in the past definitely did have the disorder…<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2865009.stm> (condensed)
Let me see if I've got this straight. Paul and Moses became famous, hard-working, zealous men of God because they may have “suffered” from a “brain disorder”??? Makes me wonder; were Abraham, Noah, Elijah, Peter, or John “sufferers” of this “disorder” also? Are we to then believe that Jesus may have been a victim of “bizarre religious hallucinations”? If Prof. Ramachandran’s argument is followed to its logical end, it seems to me we’d have to conclude the very existence of the Bible itself comes as the result of this “condition”. And I’d suspect that most of us have never considered that our belief “in a God may not just be a matter of free will.”
I love and appreciate the life extending advancements and the technological comforts and luxuries science has given us. Sometimes though, I hate the way that science, by virtue of its very nature, prefers experimentation and explanation to faith. To suggest a “brain disorder” as even the remotest possibility of a Christian’s faith and zeal is purely mind boggling and crosses the borders of theory into the realm of blasphemy. Talk about reaching new heights in lows!! I’m neither scientist nor prophet, but I’m going to venture a great big guess that on that last day when “the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God” (1 Thessalonians 4:16 ESV), there’s likely to be some very real “surprise”, “amazement” and “suffering” when the Lord reveals where the "disorder" really lay.
“And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight, The clouds be rolled back as a scroll; The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend, Even so, it is well with my soul.” (From the hymn, “It Is Well With My Soul”)
“For we walk by faith, and not by sight” (1 Corinthians 5:7)
"Amen", anyone?
