Re: A "God" Part of the Brain?

From: Dr. Blake Nelson (bnelson301@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Aug 15 2003 - 10:02:52 EDT

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    --- Don Winterstein <dfwinterstein@msn.com> wrote:
    > Blake Nelson wrote in part:
    >
    > "All communication from God, assuming He exists, is
    > necessarily mediated in *some* physical manner ...."
    >
    > Some might call me a mystic, as I have had extended
    > personal encounters with God. I disagree with
    > Blake's statement here. None of my personal
    > encounters with God involved physical mediation; all
    > were purely spiritual.

    Not to be pedantic, but if you remember those
    experiences, then they are almost certainly mediated
    by a physical medium -- your brain. As I noted in my
    original post, the only way that I can think of to
    conceptualize an unmediated experience of God is a
    total dualism of some sort. Perhaps, what I should
    have also made explicit is that even if one can have
    the experience unmediated in some sense, it is still
    mediated by one's memories of it, which I have no
    reason to suspect *do not* have a physical component
    in our brain because lots of good evidence from
    neuroscience clearly suggests that it does.

    BTW, I forgot to mention another decent although now
    somewhat dated resource on this topic -- CTNS along
    with a Vatican conference issued a book on
    Neuroscience and religion as I recall. There a
    variety of essays from experts in the field and
    non-experts like Polkinghorne and Ellis. The token
    atheist in the mix, Michael Arbib, IIRC suggested that
    the sense of God may be a learned thing like
    embarassment, which puts a different spin on the
    question of a "God" part of the brain. Along similar
    lines, Pascal Boyer I think has also written fairly
    extensively on the evolutionary benefit of believing
    in gods from a pragmatic standpoint of seeking causal
    explanations for things as a survival enhancing
    activity...

    (snip)

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