{"id":1165,"date":"2012-01-19T15:23:34","date_gmt":"2012-01-19T20:23:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/badcatholic\/?p=1165"},"modified":"2013-06-20T13:05:57","modified_gmt":"2013-06-20T17:05:57","slug":"in-defense-of-the-unmiraculous-why-science-doesnt-disprove-religious-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/badcatholic\/2012\/01\/in-defense-of-the-unmiraculous-why-science-doesnt-disprove-religious-experience.html","title":{"rendered":"In Defense of the Unmiraculous"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/p>\n

There is a fear that causes Christian legs to tremble, a fear well-exploited by the New Atheism, and \u2014 all things considered \u00a0\u2014 a very stupid fear \u2014 that of the unmiraculous.<\/p>\n

The Christian runs to the atheist, silver cross sailing in the wind, filled with joy, saying \u201cI felt the presence of God!\u201d The atheist looks up from his Macbook and says something along the lines of, \u201cReligious experience is just the result of decreased activity in your right parietal lobe<\/a>.\u201d And he\u2019d hardly be alone in the effort to reduce religious experience to the alteration of brain activity. Evolutionary biologist Lionel Tiger called<\/a> religion \u201ca secretion of the brain.\u201d<\/p>\n

To which the Christian has three available responses. He may go home, cry, and spend the rest of his life reading Dawkins\u2019 tortured prose, or he may do the fundamentalist dance. This, of course, would involve putting his pinkies in his ears and his thumbs up his nose, shutting his eyes and spinning in circles, singing \u201cThis is just a test of my faith, a test my faith\u201d to the tune of Chris Tomlin\u2019s Everlasting God.<\/p>\n

Or he might reason as follows:<\/p>\n

The fact that religious experience manifests itself in an entirely unmiraculous way \u2014 in the physical activity of the brain \u2014 does not\u00a0call into question the reality of religious experience. In fact, it strengthens the possibility that religious experience is a response to a reality<\/em>, not delusion. Why? Because effects require a cause. Your amygdala, for instance, that part of the brain that controls fear and anxiety, does not randomly \u2018turn off\u2019. It turns off in response<\/a> to the chemical oxytocin released during orgasm. Orgasm is caused \u2014 usually \u2014 by having sex, which is a real, tangible, human experience. The man who would say, \u201cthe pleasure of sex is the result of decreased amygdala activity, and therefore you aren\u2019t really<\/em> having sex\u201d is on the exact same plane of logic as the atheist who says, \u201cthe feeling of religious experience is\u00a0just the result of decreased activity in your right parietal lobe \u2014 therefore you\u2019re not really<\/em> having a religious experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

If there is an effect \u2014 the decreased activity in the right parietal lobe \u2014 it stands to reason that there must be a cause. We could say \u201cit\u2019s just random,\u201d but in doing this we would not only deny the fact that the majority of religious experience is habitual, not random, but also the functionality of the human mind: If the functions of my parietal lobes are random, and humans have religious experiences uncaused by anything rooted in reality, then it may be equally true that the functions of the left side of my brain \u2014 that part responsible for the logic that leads us to make statements such as \u201cthere is no God\u201d \u2014 are entirely random, with no bearing on reality, and may be discounted as such. We could say it\u2019s all\u00a0coincidental\u00a0stimulation, but we dismantled that.<\/a><\/p>\n

The unmiraculous facts of religious experience go much further in testifying to the existence of a God than if they were purely undetectable miracles. For as it stands, there exists parts of our brain that seems to respond to a spiritual world, parts that respond to prayer, to adoration, etc. Either there is a God and our brain is doing its job, or there is no God, and we have an inexplicably misleading part of our brain that distorts reality and makes us stupid with no conceivable benefit. (Note that if the atheist were to belligerently affirm the latter proposition, saying, \u201cWell, it simply must<\/em> be the case,\u201d \u201cevolution isn\u2019t perfect,\u201d or something of the sort, the Christian is obliged to answer, \u201cThen how can we trust our brains at all?\u201d)<\/p>\n

The Christian, erroneously seeing himself as a soul trapped within a body, thinks that for a spiritual event to interact with and alter the body somehow devalues it, and is thus frightened of any scientific analysis of religious experience. But we are not a soul rattling inside a machine. We are human. What changes our soul should invade our body \u2014 our brain, our lungs, our guts and our blood, for when God interacts with us he does not do so as a magician, but as a person, meeting us in the entirety of our personhood, which includes the body.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a fear that causes Christian legs to tremble, a fear well-exploited by the New Atheism, and \u2014 all things considered \u00a0\u2014 a very stupid fear \u2014 that of the unmiraculous. The Christian runs to the atheist, silver cross sailing in the wind, filled with joy, saying \u201cI felt the presence of God!\u201d The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism-2","category-destupidification"],"yoast_head":"\nIn Defense of the Unmiraculous<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"There is a fear that causes Christian legs to tremble, a fear well-exploited by the New Atheism, and -- all things considered \u00a0-- a very stupid fear --\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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