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October 29 - November 10, 2018
Then comes perhaps the most complex narrative that our brain and senses sell us: personal consciousness.
what’s the difference between you and a toaster or you and an earthworm? Why
The president of your brain is the prefrontal cortex, a patch of tissue right behind your forehead.
This is where your conscious awareness emanates from—a patch of tissue right behind your forehead, mostly on the left side.
Like the president, your prefrontal cortex doesn’t have absolute control of your thoughts, senses, and emotions. For one, it’s slower than the more ancient parts of the brain where feelings originate.
When you recall those actions later, you’ll remember them as if you were consciously in control the whole time. But that’s a lie—in that moment of crisis, your limbic system will have bypassed the prefrontal cortex.
Here’s why: Brains are energy hogs, and it would require enormous energy to ramp up your prefrontal cortex and your amygdala at the same time. This is one reason we think of rational people as cold, and why people often seem unreasonable when they’re angry or sad. It takes too much energy to be analytical and angry at the same time. Your brain doesn’t have the resources to pull it off.
I spent so much time analyzing God that I didn’t have time to experience Him. Over time, this caused the feelings I had about God to fade. God was becoming nothing more than an abstract idea, and one that could easily be torn away by the thinkers’ books I was consuming. The process of losing God took months of reconditioning, but when the loss finally hit me, it felt like a heart attack: sudden and violent.
“For God so loved the world” seems absurd from the Voyager’s vantage point. Earth is a waterlogged pebble, one planet among countless others. What possible significance does the salvation of humankind hold?
I went to bed anxious and fearful, unsure about everything I’d always “known.” Sagan’s words had found footholds in my mind where Dawkins’s, Hitchens’s, and Harris’s had not. Sagan didn’t bother with a direct assault on the absurdity of God. Rather, he shifted the frame and revealed the notion of a God who cares for our Earth as being silly in a cosmos whose scale dwarfs our imagination.
Without God, life had no objective purpose. All those tough days I had pushed through, believing that I served a higher purpose—that purpose was nothing but a comforting self-delusion. My life was meaningless.
and I could lose everything that mattered to me. Not because my friends were bad people—they weren’t—but because this was the inevitable outcome of the Evangelical belief system. The flock must be protected from wolves.
I grew up believing that atheists were angry at God. But listening to actual atheists taught me that most atheists simply want to be free to believe as they wish, without persecution from the faithful. Despite the media narrative around the New Atheists, most atheists don’t even care if others believe or not. They just want to be left alone.
Humanists see value in humanity; they see our species as full of potential and goodness. They seek solutions to life’s problems of suffering and need, concerned only with improving the conditions of human life.
I didn’t know it at the time, but there’s a good reason that astronomy and vast, outdoor spaces yield an experience similar to intense religious contemplation. Brain scientists have found that the farther you shift your focus away from yourself and toward an expansive view, the more likely you are to feel this kind of awe.
There’s a study that says 42 percent of Americans will undergo a faith transition at some point in their lives. They’ll leave the tradition they are a part of and move on.
Our churches will never be healthy as long as those experiencing doubt feel they have to hide. In too many churches, the response to doubt and tough questions is shaming, passive rejection, or probes about a possible “sin problem” in the questioner. All this reaction does is push the doubting away from their faith. It has to stop. Or that 42 percent will never come back.
Rob described holism—the theory that says the parts of a whole are interconnected to such an extent that they cannot exist independently of the whole—using human consciousness as an example.
“Brené Brown says that the opposite of faith is not doubt. Faith and doubt need each other. The opposite of faith is certainty,” Bradley said. “When I heard that, I realized, no wonder I was such a screwed-up Fundamentalist. But when I let the doubt just be there, my faith grew.”
If you’re a Christian who wonders what to do with someone who’s in doubt, consider these words carefully: Love and grace speak loudly. The first and best response to someone whose faith is unraveling is a hug. Apologetics aren’t helpful. Neither are Scripture references. The first thing a hurting person needs is to know they’re not alone. My path back to God was paved with grace by those who received my doubt in love.
It’s just that when I pondered Rob Bell’s challenge to put all my questions in a mental bucket called God, I felt God again.
Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann suggests that American Evangelicals train their brains’ reality-sensing mechanism to project some of their own internal life onto an external source. In essence, the rituals and culture of many churches teach Christians to experience God personally by paying special attention to certain thoughts and feelings.
Scientists call this phenomenon a mystical experience.
Mystical experiences transpire outside the realm of thought and language. Mystics refuse to try to describe them. They simply sit with the experience and let it change them. So that’s what I did.
Your brain is divided into two hemispheres: left and right. The two halves of your brain communicate via a thick channel of nerves called the corpus callosum. In men, the two halves of the brain don’t talk to each other too often.
Feedback is self-amplifying and self-sustaining. In the 1960s, scientists learned that epileptic seizures are a form of feedback: feedback on the corpus callosum between the two hemispheres of the brain.
This strange, unsettling phenomenon is called alien hand syndrome, or AHS, and it’s unique to patients who’ve undergone this particular surgical procedure. Something happens when the two hemispheres of the brain can’t communicate directly.
If you really have to, you can survive with only half your brain. But there are some differences between the two halves.
The prefrontal cortex is the brain’s decision maker. Scientists believe it’s where all the competing loops and systems of the brain converge, creating the experience we call “consciousness.” Generally, the left prefrontal cortex is the dominant one, so, by some definitions, the “you” you think of as “you” is in your left prefrontal cortex.
Another patient was asked what he believed about God. His left brain spoke and said he was an atheist, but his right brain said he was a believer.
We’ll look at the most puzzling question of all: Why Jesus? Why do I choose to follow a man who hasn’t been seen in 2,000 years and who, some scholars argue, didn’t even exist in the first place?
In these chapters, I want to show you how I’ve learned to let go of certainty.
The more certain you are the further you move from Yahweh.
Our Western culture wants a clear winner, and a lot of this has to do with our neurological craving for certainty.
This illusion is great for helping me sift through the overwhelming amount of information that is reality, but it’s an oversimplified picture of what’s really going on. Contrary to what we may feel, we humans weren’t designed to find truth or objective reality. We were designed to find food and to mate, to avoid predation and to maintain social standing in our tribes.
The first step on that long journey was to address the most basic question of all: How do I know God is real?
When someone says, “I believe in God,” they’re being vague. It’s a necessity because when people discuss God, they’re often working from a false assumption: that we all mean the same thing when we say God.
When we look deep into the night sky with telescopes, we find that all galaxies are moving away from one another and that the rate of their outward movement is increasing.
Now, if you build a mathematical model that accurately describes those galaxies’ expansion and run it backward for billions of years, everything begins to converge to a single point: something scientists call the Initial Singularity.
When I read about the Singularity, I think of God. We’re talking about a unified energy that caused everything to be, that is beyond our language and our math, beyond our very imagination.
But when I studied cosmology and astrophysics looking for God, it seemed to me that there was, ultimately, no reason to decide between the two. I’ve heard theologians describe God as the “Great Mystery,” and scientists generally agree that whatever predated the Big Bang sits behind an impenetrable veil—the temporal edge of the universe. Either way, we’re talking about something that our existing methods of measurement can’t describe.
That idea might provoke awe and wonder in us, but it doesn’t give us a God we can seek in worship or encounter in prayer.
This is why theologians don’t just name God as a Source of all. They also claim that God is the “Ground of Being,” meaning that God doesn’t simply create the universe—He also sustains it to this day.
Early in the 20th century, Albert Einstein demonstrated that matter and energy are made of the same basic stuff, and that not only is everything that is “solid” in the universe made up of mostly empty space, but that what little actual “mass” there is only exists because some particles interact with a universal, invisible field called the Higgs field.
Cosmology describes a force that created us and then transformed itself into a system of forces and energy that continue to sustain the universe. This sounds at least a little like what Paul told the people of Athens: “In him we live and move and have our being.”
“How do you know God is real?” I know God is real because I see the work of God via telescopes, space probes, and particle accelerators.
God is at least the set of forces that created and sustain the universe.
It seems unbelievable to us that time slows down as you move faster—that when you sit in an airplane seat flying through the atmosphere, the seconds tick more slowly than when you’re resting in your favorite chair at home. But it’s true, and it’s not just theoretical, either. When we make GPS satellites that can orbit Earth at thousands of miles per hour, we have to accommodate the effects of relativity, or else the blue dot on your iPhone would become less accurate with each passing second
This is a huge problem, though, because the Standard Model works by pretending that gravity doesn’t exist. No, seriously. The only way we can make the math match our observations at the quantum level is to pretend that there’s no such thing as gravity.
We know the Standard Model is incomplete, but we use it anyway. That’s because no more complete, competing model stands up to the tests we perform in particle accelerators.
Science relies on a trial-and-error approach that’s dependent on failure—on being wrong but admitting it.
