"It's not so clear to me that it tells us all that much"

I think it's heading in the direction you mention: Neuroscience may find, after extensive future experiments, how to identify what happens in the brain when a person "feels a presence" when no one is present or "hears voices" when no one is speaking or "sees a figure/person" when no one is present. And/or we may discover how to reliably trigger these experiences.

(This is a different situation/experience from just thinking about or remembering someone or what someone said, which does not have that feeling of current reality.)

It may be discovered that there is a difference -- or no difference -- between having a hallucination of something that is objectively known to exist, such as a dog, versus something that isn't objectively known to exist, such as angels, demons, or a deity.

What that would mean would certainly depend on what is discovered.

I try to keep in mind, also, what Joan of Arc said, when a bishop asked her whether the visions she was having might just be her imagination. She replied, "How else would God speak to me but through my imagination?"

(The word 'imagination' then in French had a more serious connotation than currently in English. We might now say "brain.")

Hi Geena. Totally non-polemical note: The novel, "The Echo Maker" that I mentioned in my reply to Michael Murray (above) is a really cool exploration of Capgras syndrome (which you refer to above).

Now back to arguing ... I think that the brain research you refer to is fascinating, but I'm missing what you think that tells us about reality. One can study the part of my brain that lights up when I see a dog, and one can probably use some combination of drugs and electrophysiology to simulate the experience of seeing a dog. But what does all this tell me about whether dogs actually exist?

(This is a sincere question - I think it probably is the case that brain research can offer some insights into "what is real", but I guess it's not so clear to me that it tells us all that much.)

Amos - there were so many more great questions and thoughts in your message that I did not appreciate on first reading. I attempt to address a few more now ...

"I come from the sectarian Christian backwaters of working class Belfast".

This is probably a limited basis for a connection, but my life is still shaped by memories of visiting my cousins near Ballycastle. The older cousins (probably in their 50s in 1989) were still making a living by salmon fishing and moored their Currach right near the Carrick-A-Rede Rope Bridge and had a little warming hut right near there. We had a pint before heading out to collect the nets at 8 in the morning. Talk about mystical experiences.

"You are supposed to strive to be as faithful as Abraham".

I agree with that, but Abraham had to respond faithfully to his experience of God and I have to respond faithfully to mine. Abraham and I are both called to answer God's calling, but God had a different sort of message for Abraham than He does for me.

"Why [do you think the ancients were able to hear God directly, while we are not]?"

I'm interpolating a lot in terms of what you are trying to ask here, but if that's what you were getting at : I imagine God's relationship with humanity as being similar to my relationship with my kids. When they were infants, we had an immediacy to our relationship. Now that they are grown, that immediacy has been replaced by something that is equally beautiful and equally exciting, but undeniably more distant. I appreciate that this is hardly a proof that "that's the way it is", but I guess this is what predisposes me to thinking that things might have been different for our forebears than they are for us. Time passes, and some things are gone forever.

"by all accounts, your [conscience] seems to be a pretty good one."

Aww, shucks.

"Can you possibly envisage how stories got bastardised of eons, even if written down, which they were not."

I can, but those folks who passed on the stories weren't dimwits. It takes a whole lot of savvy and a good measure of skepticism to survive in the desert. I think they had a keen appreciation for the danger of passing on falsehoods.

"Fair enough Jim, but what god? ... Believers in other gods do exactly the same in convincing themselves that their favoured deity is the true god...to the point of violence in some cases."

I'm a big fan of insights from other religions. I am drawn especially to certain aspects of the Hindu tradition. Strange as it may seem, some of the stories about Krishna and the gopis were pivotal to my growth in the Catholic faith. Even more scandalously, the first time I ever had a profound experience at Holy Communion was after watching the Lakota guy in "Dances With Wolves" take a bite out of a still-throbbing buffalo heart. Somehow that is the same reality that is being conveyed through the eucharist, even if the Lakota version didn't involve explicit knowledge of Jesus and the full assent of the faith. So anyway, my thought about those other religions is this: their favoured deity IS the true God. They are actually following Jesus Christ, they just don't realize it. Their failure to realize it, in some cases, leads to a rejection of reason, which Catholicism mercifully does not require. I'm sure some adherents of other religions have a similarly diminishing view of "my deity", and I can live with that.

This is the Peter Kreeft bit I was thinking of:

"All God's signs should line up, by a kind of trigonometry. There are at least seven such signs: (1) Scripture, (2) church teaching, (3) human reason (which God created), (4) the appropriate situation, or circumstances (which he controls by his providence), (5) conscience, our innate sense of right and wrong, (6) our individual personal bent or desire or instincts, and (7) prayer. Test your choice by holding it up before God's face. If one of these seven voices says no, don't do it. If none say no, do it."

I don't consult this list every time I make a decision, but the essential point that I am agreeing with is that any one or two of these criteria in isolation are insufficient to make a good decision. You need to consider things from a variety of angles, which to me includes scripture, church teaching, and prayer, in addition to the remaining considerations that you and I could probably agree on.

(from http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/discernment.htm)

In my imagination, the Abraham story (and other stories in the OT where God speaks directly to people) is describing something much more mind-blowing than just someone having a sense of what God wants them to do. So, I am trying to distinguish by saying that we moderns should all apply something like Kreeft's critieria, while recognizing that it's possible that people like Abraham had such direct encounters that there was no need of such criteria.

(I'm not going to fight you on the historicity of the stories of the Old Testament. I understand that it is mythologized history, but I understand it to have a historical kernel in there. I don't think it is pure mythology in the sense that Greek mythology is, but anyway that is mostly orthogonal to the topic of our discussion.)

Is your underlying concern the fact that I am more at risk for craziness because I think it is (or was) possible for God to speak directly to people? If so, let me just say this: the way I imagine that experience (and again, I expect that neither I nor any other modern will ever have this experience) is that it would be so overwhelming and powerful that it would simply melt all of the intellectual edifices that I had constructed for myself. It would no longer matter whether I had considered myself Catholic or atheist. All of that would dissolve in the face of unmitigated truth. I think my adoption of an atheistic perspective would be a hopelessly weak inoculation against this. I know you weren't trying to convert me to atheism, but maybe this puts you at ease somewhat?

Men like Abraham, they were made of stronger stuff than I.

Fictional characters in literature will sometimes seem that way.

I don't think it was ambiguous for them.

I don't think it was ambiguous for anyone who acted upon the voice telling them to irrational actions. I think one would need to be damn sure in their own minds before jeopardising their freedom or lives in the service of their faiths. Either that, or they are brainwashed. It isn't such a big deal for those that condemn in the name of faith from a position of authourity with no consequence for their actions.

I have no doubt those 9/11 Muslims piloting the planes to their impending dooms believed the nonsense they had been brainwashed with...and they were hardly ignorant goat herders. Did Peter Suttecliffe hear God actual voice instruct him to hammer prostitutes heads in?.How do we know? Did God tell Moses to kill all the Israelites because of their apostasy? How do we know? It is very doubtful if there even was an Exodus. It is all very suspect for the rational to comprehend. It must pickle the head of a believer attempting to come to terms with it all. Especially those as yourself who can't envisage such a God.

I think God did speak to Abraham with a clarity that I will never experience in this life.

I think that is the purpose of such stories Jim. You are supposed to strive to be as faithful as Abraham, even if you know you can never achieve such. And it works very well indeed.

I think the ancients - and probably not just the famous Israelites - lived in a world where some of them were capable of hearing God directly.

That begs a plethora of more questions than it answers Jim, but it is enough for me to ask "Why?" for now.

So, I do think it's possible (that's why I'm willing to think carefully to the testimony of the ancients in scripture), I just don't think it happens to me.

I'm reminded of a quote from one of Mark Twain's last works.

"(On the Bible) It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies."~ Letters from the Earth, posthumously published.

The problem is sorting the wheat from the chafe.

For those of us who can't hear God so clearly (and I think that is most of us),....

The atheist would go farther and say all of us can't hear gods. I'm presuming you can only hear the one?

That what the theist hears is just their conscience and by all accounts, yours seems to be a pretty good one.

...we have to triangulate the truth.

Why?

Part of that is understanding the testimony of the ancients, part of that is rational reflection, etc.

It isn't though. You have attested to this yourself. Scriptures are telling the stories from millennia previous. We are sceptical of histories from decades ago, with all the modern mediums for accurate recording of data. Can you possibly envisage how stories got bastardised of eons, even if written down, which they were not.

I know Peter Kreeft is not the most popular guy with some of the commenters here, but one of the bits of writing on his website lists 6 or 7 criteria for figuring what God is telling us. That list rings pretty true to me.

Fair enough Jim, but what god? Kreeft gives a list of 20 arguments for Gods existence, but they are philosophical arguments, or arguments of assertion without evidence. They can easily be applied to any god being posited. Most of the list only get you as far as a deist god in any case.

Other criteria in Kreeft's articles that ring true to you are a case of confirmation bias. Believers in other gods do exactly the same in convincing themselves that their favoured deity is the true god...to the point of violence in some cases.

But it is not for me to be judge so long as you are happy with the status quo and are harming no one.

I would be interested in which of Kreeft's criteria you feel rings true with you though.

This reminds me a bit of Hamlet. People have wondered for centuries why Hamlet didn't spent so much time agonizing over what to do, but if you have a vision of the ghost of your father telling you he was murdered and commanding you to kill your stepfather, would you leap into action?

How would you know the visitation actually occurred, and if it occurred, how would you know the spirit were actually your father, and if were your father, how would you know if he were right?

These are the same questions atheists wonder about when we hear people say they've gotten instructions from God (Michelle Bachmann, for instance).

Geena, if I do get such an instruction, you can take comfort in the fact that I'm an incurable sinner. I have a bad habit of putting higher priority on my desires than I put on God's desires for me. Since it is my selfish desire to continue our delightful conversations, I think I would have to tell God to take a hike.

Jim, If it did happen that you got a completely clear, unambiguous message that was clearly and unambiguously from God, and that message told you clearly and convincingly that I am actually an evil person and have done great evil and I am planning to do an act of enormous evil, and God has chosen you, because of your great faith, to kill me before I can act -- would you kill me?

This kind of experience can also be triggered in many people by stimulating a certain part of the tempo parietal region of the brain. Certain drugs will generate it also in certain people.

As with Michael, I do not doubt for a moment that you have truly had this experience. What I am saying is that just because you had an experience that, to your brain, felt like a combination of a sense of presence and of feeling awe and possibly of feeling timeless and loved and completely safe, that doesn't mean that there was actually any entity present.

You may want to read Oliver Sacks' recent book "Hallucinations."

Hallucinations are in fact surprisingly common.

As an example of one way a hallucination can occur is if the sensory-interpretation parts of our brain are activated in the absence of actual sensory input. It feels exactly as real as an actual experience, because the same parts of one's brain that interpret sensory input and correlates it with the relevant memory and appropriate type and degree of emotional content and presents the whole package to your conscious mind are operating, but the input was falsely registered.

As another example, consider the experience of déjà vu. In these cases, the emotional experience of familiarity is inappropriately triggered along with a new visual input. That's not so bad. But the experience can happen the other way, and it's much worse - something or someone that is actually familiar is seen, but the brain does not correlate it with the appropriate emotional content. This can happen randomly in people, and is usually not so bad if it happens rarely.

But there are some people who have suffered an injury to the pathway between the vision center and the emotional center of their brain. For such a person, she will see her mother or spouse, who is actually standing in front of her, but she will be absolutely sure that this person is an imposter who looks exactly like her mother or spouse, but is absolutely not really that person. If the situation is not diagnosed correctly, you can imagine the paranoia that might develop: Who has kidnapped my real family and why won't anyone believe me?

Much more comfortable are experiences like yours, which feel wonderful and seem to satisfactorily answer some of life's difficult questions. But your fervent desire to do whatever you can to ensure getting a steady supply of that high down the road doesn't mean that it is actually there waiting for you.

Again, I don't doubt that you experienced what you experienced and that it was marvelous. And of course I cannot say whether what you think was real was actually real. But if it were me, I'd want to do some more research first to help me to understand what else it might have been, and also what physical and mental practices might be able to generate such bliss in my life on a regular basis.

Good exchange, IA.

I can see now how I didn't articulate my oak tree example very clearly. I guess I think there is a lot of variation in the clarity with which God speaks to us (or perhaps it is just variation in our ability to listen), and I wasn't at all clear about the clarity that I was imagining in that scenario.

Just to elaborate a bit more on what I am saying about clarity and ambiguity:

Men like Abraham, they were made of stronger stuff than I. I don't think it was ambiguous for them. I think God did speak to Abraham with a clarity that I will never experience in this life. I think the ancients - and probably not just the famous Israelites - lived in a world where some of them were capable of hearing God directly. So, I do think it's possible (that's why I'm willing to think carefully about the testimony of the ancients in scripture), I just don't think it happens to me.

For those of us who can't hear God so clearly (and I think that is most of us), we have to triangulate the truth. Part of that is understanding the testimony of the ancients, part of that is rational reflection, etc. I know Peter Kreeft is not the most popular guy with some of the commenters here, but one of the bits of writing on his website lists 6 or 7 criteria for figuring what God is telling us. That list rings pretty true to me.

EDITED for … clarity :-)