From: Robert Schneider (rjschn39@bellsouth.net)
Date: Thu Aug 14 2003 - 14:35:42 EDT
The volume Dr. Blake refers to is _Neuroscience and the Person. Scientific
Perspectives on Divine Action_, ed. Robert J. Russell, Nancey Murphy, Theo
Meyering, and Michael Arbib, 1998. It is the fourth in the series of
volumes based on international conferences co-sponsored by the Vatican
Observatory and CTNS. The volumes are distributed by U. of Notre Dame
Press. I've not yet dipped in to these papers and would welcome further
comments from Blake and anyone else who has.
The other volumes issues are _Physics, Philosophy and Theology_,
_Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature_, _Chaos and Complexity_, and
_Evolutionary and Molecular Biology_, which I am presently using for my
forthcoming essay entitled "Evolution for Christians." A fifth collection
of papers, on quantum field theory, is in the works, if not yet out.
Bob Schneider
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dr. Blake Nelson" <bnelson301@yahoo.com>
To: "Don Winterstein" <dfwinterstein@msn.com>
Cc: "ASA" <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2003 10:02 AM
Subject: Re: A "God" Part of the Brain?
>
> --- 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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