Religious Exaltations and Brain Anomalies

Do you feel that He is with you and watching over you every day of your life?

Do you walk through life feeling His divine presence?

Does He speak to you; Or through you to communicate His message?

If you are one of the [potentially] millions who would answer Yes to these questions, hold onto your jockies – it’s not Him; It’s You.

This article in Scientific American [thanks Mom] discusses potential correlations between temporal lobe anomalies (or abnormal brain activity) and claimed experiences of spiritual epiphanies. In sum: there is evidence to suggest that “experience and belief in God are merely the results of electrical anomalies in the human brain” and that spiritual sensations – feelings that you are not alone, that there is a divine presence that surrounds you, and other spiritual wonders – can in fact be manipulated and/or artificially induced to create or enhance a “religious experience”.

God, is nothing more mystical than the sum of psychological conditioning of the most common religious rituals paired with abnormal electrical impulses traversing the pathways of the human brain.

Hmm. OK.

For life, love or limb - Whether you are a life-long believer or newly transformed.. any emotionally charged moment will produce abnormal brain activity, including the need to believe in something greater than yourself. Sadness, grief, loneliness, love and happiness (and the fear of losing them both) are all fixtures of electrical impulses that talk to the brain. And so naturally Science can prove where and how feelings of the mystical can materialize in the human body – just as mathematical theorems can prove that you actually can hold a 5-ton elephant over the edge of a 5-story building with nothing but a paper clip and an inch of thread (or was it a daisy??).

But we know better.

The point is - it's an interesting perspective and I love to dissect it's possibilities but in the end, Science is not proof.

As an agnostic I can neither accept nor deny the notion that abnormal brain activity is at the heart of every individual's spiritual or religious experience. I need more data. But there's an obvious correlation no doubt and in most circumstances this explanation is perhaps the most likely. After all, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one. A Divine experience or are you just really, really happy and creating your own sensations of the divine...

Either way, the idea does bring up interesting thoughts about my own personal experiences. There have been more than a few fragile moments in my life - moments filled with sadness or trepidation or uncertainty - and in those moments I’ve found myself looking up in the hopes that there exists something in the mystical, something greater than myself, that has the power to guide the directions of my fate. *Oh pretty please* And in many of those moments, I’ve felt it. That sense of absolute truth. That sense that in this moment there can be no doubt. And in all honesty, those moments have always given me the greatest comfort and peace.

Flash forward to the here and now and well, maybe it wasn’t Him; maybe it was Me. Did I feel the divine or did my own heightened sense of need create in my mind, the feeling of the Divine? When people go to Church and they reach that sense of connected peace - is it because they truly feel the presence of God and the mystical or is it because being surrounded by thoughts of love and happiness in fact changes our brain patterns and the electrical impulses going to and from the brain, thereby inducing the feeling of a "religious experience"..?

Seeing is believing? Or is believing, seeing?

I don't know but as I've said before it makes for interesting conversation. Probably the more relevant question is, if you feel happier and more fulfilled in your life, does it really matter? You decide.

The Stuff of Life

Christopher Reeve once said in an interview regarding a film he made called ‘Somewhere in Time’ (I love that movie – cheesy love-story). There’s a scene at the end of the movie where the character dies and his soul leaves his body and ascends upward and into the heavens (naturally to be rejoined with the soul of his long, lost love). At the time, ascention of the soul was a notion that Reeve found "unlikely".

During Reeve’s interview (and years after the movie), he recalled having a similar experience at the time of his crippling accident which led to a change of mind. Reeve claimed that after the accident he flat-lined for 50 seconds during which time he had an out-of-body experience; He actually floated above himself, looked down at himself on the hospital table watching as doctors scrambled to revive him <> Doctors eventually gave him a massive dose of epinephrine and instantly he was back in his body.

I don’t know if it’s true but it brings up an interesting thought: if people are made up of the stuff of stars and the universe as we know ourselves to be (excluding dark matter since we don’t even know what it is) and if an out-of-body experience is possible... how does matter in the form of hydrogen and helium (and other universal matter that constitutes our make-up) produce conscious thought and translate images into visual acuity? Could an out-of-body experience suggest the existence of the human soul - a “celestial” entity that can carry our conscious selves after our bodies have “died”. And if so, would the existence of a human soul suggest the existence of a supernatural being along with heaven and hell?

Maybe not.

For everything we know about the brain and the mind, there are more things about the two and how they work that we do not know; And will likely be the case for a very long time. If the brain were at it's most fully-functioning state (and maybe there are circumstances when we die where this would happen - an eclipse of all functions all at once) perhaps we could experience peripheral existence. Given that the universe is made mostly of the “stuff” we can’t see, feel, or touch or even distinguish (i.e., dark matter) it’s possible that we as people are also made up of stuff that is not material (excluding the known universal elements; another form of energy perhaps) that cannot be seen, felt or even distinguished based on the known elements. Maybe it's this "stuff" that can carry our memories and thoughts, in the form of radio waves and frequencies, into what we consider to be a transcendental state of existence.

As for the question of sight (being able to look down at yourself), well...this may very well be far-fetched but perhaps there is a moment before the brain dies where the electrical impusles that speak to our brain and translate messages into visual images are still connected and speaking to the "stuff" carrying our thoughts and memories; And thus we maintain visual acuity for a brief period. Hey, why not? the body is a magnificent wonder of mechanical perfection. Thoughts, feelings, sight...it's all fundamentally based on electrical impulses that talk to the brain (in simplistic terms anyway). And we only use a very, small portion of our brain so at its' most fully functioning state isnt it at least, not completely implausible...?

Crazy theories - maybe - but it's fun to think about and disect.
Of course, If such a possiblity exists then where would we go after we die – dreams, memories, thoughts and all - float up into space where the rest of the “stuff” of the universe is?

What If...

What if you were an omnipotent being. What would you do with all the non-ends of your days? According to true christian belief, only if you believe that Jesus Christ is your Lord and Savior will you go to Heaven. It's not a matter of being "good" in your life or necessarily how you live your life. It's a requirement. But is it really?

While my dad and I have very different opinions on the subject of religion, I agree with his take: requiring mankind to believe is vanity and of human implementation. And as I've recently discovered, asking the question makes for some interesting debate. I engaged a friend of mine in a most hearty discussion with the following scenario.

If you are an omnipotent being with all the powers of the universe - life might be kind of boring. Wouldn't it be fun to idle your time away by playing a funny little game - create man, let chaos abound, then send your “other self” in the form of man and give the little people a few thousand years to believe you really exist. Feed them controlled bits of information and at the end of it all, if you don't believe - screw you. If you do believe, well then maybe you get a prize - but it's not what you think.

Unfortunately he's religious and it only led to a spattering of heated arguments about religion, Christianity, god and the whole lot. But I still think it's a fun scenario to ponder...Besides, who said an omnipotent being was compassionate?

Cosmology, God and the Big Bang

My fascination with the science of cosmology has grown increasingly over the last two years: the evolution of it, the study and science behind it, it’s impacts on the fundamentals of religion, the question of other intelligent life (and occasionally the question of our own intelligent life haha), and the ultimate fate of the Universe. <> Understanding the beginning and end of the cosmos (and everything in between) is for me, part of a larger effort to try and attain some personal direction for finding my faith, so to speak. I mean if heaven and hell really do exist and non-believers are doomed to live an eternity in hell – I don’t want to find myself in the wrong boat for lack of trying.

Battling the question of religion of course is such a huge undertaking – and in truth – one that might never lead anywhere. It is after all, a matter of faith at this point. I’m a details woman who likes to have the facts so naturally the concept of “blind faith” poses a bit of a problem for me. And it really is “blind” faith since the evolution of religion in the context of what we know it to be today is riddled with the stuff of legends followed by dated first/second/and third person interpretations, followed by re-writes and more interpretations (and therefore also misinterpretations), as well as blatant fabrications and half-truths intended to support the agendas of political and religious leaders of the times (think “The King James” version of the bible – a revision of an earlier translation created during a time when support for protestant reformation was in full swing and reforms were underway to change the Christian-community). After all, the teachings of "god" and "religion" are governed by man and it’s a fools notion to believe that after a 1,000 years - man never had his own agenda. Is it possible that religious and political leaders (societal roles that often intertwined back in the day) created a religious doctrine to govern the ungovernable? To create a more civilized society by dictating "the laws of man"..? Possibly. I wouldn't discount it.

In any case, I do not believe that the paths of cosmological and religious studies are mutually exclusive - they’re roots reach back to the same fundamental questions as do almost every major point of revelation thereafter. Fortunately for me, cosmology alone is such a fascinating study that even if I never find my spiritual ground, I will have found plenty else in it’s stead.

Einstein was a spiritual man who believed in the existence of a God – though not a God as a religious deity but rather a God that was, essentially, the sum of all of things in the universe.

Through observational evidence in the last few years we’ve determined that the universe as we know it has a beginning but no end. It was born from a fiery bang, with all the stuff of life and dark matter defined within ten-trillionths of a second, and it will continue to expand forever thanks to gravity giving way to the force of anti-gravity. As the universe continues to expand and the heat of matter eventually begins to cool...we know that one day in the distant, distant [distant] future the state of the universe will be a soup of lifeless, cold, dead matter. It will die an icy-death.

The idea that the universe has a beginning would seem to imply the existence of an omnipotent being who created the universe. But does it have to? Certainly not the first time someone has asked this question but a first for me.. What if the “Big Bang” was a massive explosion that began in the fabric of some other space and time – an explosion so immense that it became point zero for the creation of the universe as we know it. According to the law of energy conservation: the amount of energy that exists before any event must be the same as the amount of energy that exists after the event. It can dissipate, change forms and turn into matter but it cannot dissapear nor can it come from nowhere. If these fundamentals hold true, then isn't it possible that the energy that existed after the Big Bang came from the same amount of energy (in similar or dissimilar form) that existed before the big bang; And if that's the case then wouldn't that very notion overrule the existence of supernatural creation, meaning, the same amount of energy pre-dated the moment the universe was created...

We know that every massive particle has it's opposite twin, called an anti-matter doppelganger. When matter and it's anti-matter collide they wipe each other out of existence. Fortunately (for us) the symmetry between matter and it's antimatter isn't equal. There are subtle differences between the two that makes matter easier to create and thus after the Big Bang - when matter and it’s anti-matter annihilated each other, there was some matter left over resulting in the universe we live in.
Isn't it possible then that an “anti-universe” existed before the big bang...and the unstable “state” of this anti-universe (in that anti-matter could not easily be created to support continued expansion of the anti-universe) eventually led to a “big crunch” which was point zero for “the big bang”???

I don't know; obviously. But it brings up some interesting theory on the need for an ominpotent creator at all..