Staking Your Faith on Gaps in Empirical Knowledge

“BrainWork”is a free newsletter distributed by The Dana Foundation run by some of the most prominent neuroscientists, geneticists, and other biologists in the United States and — I believe — Canada. In the July-August, 2006 issue, there’s an interesting article, Out-of-body but in the Brain”.

The article tells us:

At every moment, the brain effortlessly integrates information from the body into a strong seamless sense of self. The proprioceptive system, for example, sends signals to the brain that allow you to know, without looking, where your hands, legs and feet are. The vestibular system in the inner ear relays information about your orientation to gravity. (Are you vertical, horizontal, or somewhere in between?)

The brain’s synthesis of this and other information creates a sense of being inside your body. The out-of-body experience, in contrast, produces a sensation of consciousness floating upward, providing a view of the body from an elevated perspective. It results from a breakdown of the brain’s ability to synthesize signals from the body.

It seems that near-death experience:

…involves a disruption of the sense of body integration, says Kevin Nelson, a neurologist at the University of Kentucky, but this disruption has a different cause [than the out-of-body experience]. It involves rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep intruding into waking consciousness.”

The final paragraph in the article reads:

Although recent research undercuts the notion that consciousness can exist apart from the body, it also demonstrates that consciousness is a tenuous creation of the brain. As Blanke says, out-of-body experiences “show that the perception of our own body and self are prone to illusion.”

In my book To See a World in a Grain of Sand, I claimed that Christians should have enough confidence in the Creator to accept the results of empirical investigations, in history as well as biology or physics. If God created us as bodily creatures without a separable soul, what does that matter to us? Why would we settle such a matter independent of an investigation of man’s nature?

Too many people have staked their faith on beliefs which concern empirical and speculative knowledge. Such knowledge can be wrong and can be proven to be wrong. Much of the empirical and speculative knowledge which fleshes out traditional Christian theologies has been proven to be wrong. Most Christians, and ex-Christians, seem incapable of recognizing the difference between the parts of their beliefs which are revealed truths and those parts which are speculative or even tied to empirical knowledge. As a result, many have lost their faith — especially in younger generations; surely, the Big Bang and all those bones in Africa prove the Bible is wrong. Not really, but they do prove that much of our inherited stock of speculative and empirical knowledge is wrong. Others have retained their faith by the bad strategy of either rejecting modern empirical knowledge or — more often — believing in both those bones in Africa and also in the literalistic interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve.

Given the great progress of empirical knowledge, in various fields of study and not just the physical and biological sciences, the opposition of many Christians to the best theories of the empirical world, including human nature, seems to put Christians in opposition to facts and plausible theories. Those Christians seem to be in opposition to the truth and those who try to believe both simply look silly to skeptical eyes. True it is that empirical investigation can only discover partial truths or even false truths about the physical universe. But, on the whole, empirical investigations point towards real truths about this physical universe and — in my terms — real truths about the world which is this physical universe understood in light of God’s purposes in creating it. It even seems true that pure physical facts and theories might give us some clues to God’s work as Creator, that is, His purposes in making this world.

There are not two truths and there is not your truth and my truth. Human beings either have souls separable from their bodies or they don’t. Right now, there is growing evidence that the various events of the human mind and human soul, that is — soulish aspects of our physical natures, are tied directly to physical events in the brain. That shouldn’t bother us Christians at all. We should move on, accepting the best empirical knowledge of our day and trying to understand it in light of the more important truths revealed to us in the Gospels of our Lord Jesus Christ.