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