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(Towards Corrected Models of the World continued)
This
discussion of human perception now provides a basis for moving on to analyze consciousness and to gain insight into that phenomenon.
Perhaps the things most obvious to us about our own consciousness are that it exists and that its existence is inseparably
bound to our core self. Our consciousness convinces us that we are a self and that our self endures: It tells us that the
self that exists now is in some fundamental sense the same self that existed yesterday.
A slightly less obvious thing
is that our level of consciousness varies. The variation ranges from acute awareness to no recognizable awareness. It takes
insight to realize that it varies, however, because people tend to identify the core self most strongly only with the higher
levels of awareness. People recognize that they sleep, but they tend not to identify the sleeping body with the self. It
is almost as if the core self passes out of existence when a person sleeps, but upon awakening the person regains awareness
of the self and recognizes (perhaps after a delay, if the sleep was deep or dreams vivid) that the self is the same self that
existed before.
It is the core self that most profoundly recognizes its continuity. For example, when people age,
they may acknowledge changes in their body and changes in their outlook, but they often consider their essential self to be
unchanged. If a grown man reminiscing about his childhood says, “I spilled the punch at a birthday party when I was eight
years old,” the “I” is not just an intellectual acknowledgment that the man’s body grew out of the child’s but represents
instead a conviction that some fundamental essence of the child then was identical to some fundamental essence of the man
now. Thus consciousness of the core self is characterized by great variability inside an insistent continuity. It is perhaps
this strong, involuntary insistence of continuity that convinces people that death of the body cannot be the end of the self.
An understanding of what enhances or diminishes our degree of consciousness should yield insight into what consciousness
might be like for other things living or nonliving. My own level of self-awareness peaks when I am away from other humans
and free of anything in the physical environment, including every component of my own mind and body, that demands or threatens
to demand my attention. In other words, it peaks when I am as free as I can be. It peaks when my mental alertness peaks.
It peaks when intimacy with God peaks. As I implied earlier, when I draw all the parts of my body spiritually into a single
point of being, all these conditions may be satisfied.
The implication is that high consciousness requires the high
unification of disparate but relatively free components. All the various specialized organs and cells of the body must submit
to overriding unification. It is clear that the human brain has something to do with the ability to unify the human person,
but at its peak, consciousness involves the whole body. The brain, marvelous as it is, functions as a helper.
Having
identified requirements for reaching the peak of consciousness, we can now effectively speculate about reasons for the existence
of lesser degrees of consciousness. Consciousness in humans diminishes when alertness diminishes. Alertness diminishes when
the body relaxes. When the body relaxes, the person’s existence as a point of being disappears, and the body becomes a collection
of parts and organs. Its spirit, so to speak, becomes drowsy or sleeps. Consciousness does not disappear in sleep but becomes
distributed among the various organs rather than centrally localized. Legs can still feel pinpricks, and ears can still hear
sounds. If any stimulus gets intense enough, it can cause the body to pull itself back into a single, centrally controlled
entity and spring into action.
Dick McFarland, a psychology professor at a California state university and a personal
friend, explained to me that mental and emotional processes during certain dreams are practically indistinguishable from mental
and emotional processes when awake. These dreams are the ones associated with rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. As far as
the brain is concerned, then, consciousness can seem to continue almost unchanged during sleep.
But people correctly
distinguish between dreams and wide-awake experiences. The mental processes while dreaming might well be identical to those
while wide-awake, but people can reliably tell the difference between what is a dream and what is not. The sleeping mind
cannot tell the difference, but the wide-awake mind can. This increased capability of the wide-awake mind thus indicates
what most people probably consider intuitively obvious, that a person’s level of consciousness is higher when wide-awake than
when sleeping.
McFarland went on to say that the brain’s commands to the body’s skeletal muscles are normally blocked
in sleep, so that people do not act out their dreams. Such blockage between brain and body is consistent with the idea that
sleep involves relaxation into a collection of parts that is less well unified than when awake.
Humans, we believe,
are able to achieve the highest level of consciousness among all known entities with physical bodies. The high level of consciousness
is aided by the brain, but there is more to consciousness than just brain function. At the most fundamental level consciousness
results from integration and unification of all the diverse parts of the body into a single whole.
For some reason
a high level of consciousness in physical beings requires both great diversity and great unity. The ability to unify diverse
components seems to be the key. But exactly what kind of diversity and how much of diverse substance is needed is unclear.
What we know for sure is that humans have it. We infer from the behaviors of other entities in our world that humans have
it to a higher degree than any other physical beings.
An atom, I guess, is a highly unified entity, but its components
are few and simple, so its level of consciousness must be very low. A living cell is much farther along because it unifies
quite well a vast array of different molecules. But none of these compares with the human body when it comes to diversity
of components.
Let us postulate that the highest consciousness results from the fullest possible unification of a
great many component parts of great diversity. Each component part has some level of consciousness of its own that is lower
than that of the unified being. The level of consciousness of each part depends partly on the nature of its interactions
with other entities in its environment: From introspection I judge that, if the interactions are conducive to freedom and
spirituality, consciousness is high; if not, it is low. Complex molecules moving relatively freely in cell endoplasm among
a great diversity of other molecules have higher levels of consciousness than molecules immobilized by rigid bonding in solids.
Entities made of components with high levels of consciousness have higher consciousness themselves than entities made of less
conscious components. Living cells consequently have higher consciousness than comparably sized grains of rock.
What
is the effect of environment on consciousness? When people are forced into close proximity to other people as objects and
must continually interact with them, their level of self consciousness must drop. Their focus cannot be on their own soul
or on other people as spiritual beings; instead, they must attend to the details of the interactions. They may maintain a
high degree of alertness, but they are attuned to specific sensory stimuli and not to spirits. Changing freeways in heavy
traffic at high speed is a good example of the kind of interaction with others that requires alertness but diminishes spirituality
and awareness of the self.
How is it that alertness promotes high levels of consciousness in some cases but not others?
Alertness that involves some parts of the person much more than other parts defeats spirituality. Changing freeways requires
concentrated visual activity for perceiving objects and motor activity to control the car but little else. Alertness necessary
to perceive God involves the whole person, each part contributing as fully as it can. The highest levels of consciousness
come only when spirituality peaks.
Interactions of people with one another as spiritual beings can raise levels of
spirituality. If the people interacting are diverse enough and their goals and beliefs compatible enough, and if they all
have defined roles that enable them to work together rather than in competition, the net consequence of the interaction will
be to generate a comprehensive person. The group takes on a spiritual identity that transcends and unifies the interacting
individuals.
I have witnessed such a group identity emerge on a small scale numerous times, and so, I suspect, have
most other people, though they’d probably not describe the phenomenon as the emergence of a comprehensive person. It happens
commonly at times of commemoration and celebration among members of close-knit communities. In my experience the clearest
emergence of a group personality has occurred among groups of teenage boys out enjoying themselves on a summer night. People
call it “chemistry”. The boys in the group often find themselves doing things, sometimes mischievous, that they’d rarely
if ever even think of doing if they were alone. The group develops its own spirit.
The emergence of a comprehensive
person is what the New Testament refers to when it describes the Church as the bride of Christ. Will such a person develop
her own consciousness? If so, will it be at a higher level than that of individual humans? These are interesting questions,
and there is no way at present of finding answers. It is consistent with the framework I am here aiming towards, however,
to suggest that such a comprehensive person will become conscious of herself, and that her consciousness will arise when her
diverse members become adequately unified, as the cells in a human body.
It is possible for an individual to know
God vividly by seeking him in the remote places. That is my way. But it is also possible as an individual to find God by
interacting spiritually with others who love him and becoming an integral part of the bride’s body. That is the way of most
Christians.
We see that environment has a major effect on consciousness. Individuals in isolation can attain a high
level of self-awareness, while individuals interacting with many others as objects find it difficult to perceive themselves
vividly. They may, however, contribute to a group consciousness if they interact with others as fellow spirits.
A
rock has a very low level of consciousness because it is made up of many very similar molecules so tightly bound that each
has practically no awareness of anything but neighboring molecules. The molecules of the rock do not have diversity and individual
mobility or freedom to join together and function as an organism. Possibly individual molecules of the rock, if they were
to become isolated from others, could experience a degree of freedom and a higher level of consciousness. Possibly living
organisms attain higher levels of consciousness than nonliving because their components are freer to act as individuals than
are components of tightly bound nonliving matter.
Ultimate health may also be closely related to consciousness.
If the peak of consciousness for an organism occurs when the organism is most effectively unified, all the components of its
being presumably must work together to achieve this peak. To the degree that some parts go their own way because of disease
or other disability, the peak level of consciousness presumably must drop.
The ultimate loss of consciousness for
an organism occurs at its death. We can imagine that an organism continuously attuned to God and united with him might live
indefinitely in good health partly because all the components of such a body work in harmony and ward off any influence that
might disrupt the unity. Cancer, a terror of our time, which involves cells selfishly appropriating the body’s resources
for their own short-term benefit without regard to the overall health of the body, presumably could not get started if all
cells were in harmony with one another through God. Thus there is at least a speculative rationale for the Christian belief
in eternal life.
Finally, let us return once more to the principle of collaboration that we found earlier was necessary
to explain why diverse molecules work together to form and preserve a living cell. What could possibly cause molecules to
collaborate in this way? Could it be that the molecules have a high enough level of consciousness to recognize the value
of such interaction? If so, consciousness at the level of molecules would partly explain life. Once an adequate collection
of molecules had gathered into a living cell, the members would become aware in their rudimentary way that they were supporting
a yet higher level of consciousness and, so to speak, would consent to participate in this life effort. The emerging conscious
being to a limited degree would then lead and guide its component molecules.
If a principle of collaboration can
explain the origin of life, then life would tend to arise spontaneously; molecules themselves would “want” to collaborate.
Christian thinkers often want to keep life as a special mystery fully dependent on God. In fact a principle of collaboration
need not eliminate God’s unique role as life-creator and preserver. DNA studies and other chemical evidence suggest that
that all life has a common origin. If so, even a principle of collaboration among molecules is not enough to get life to
emerge routinely all over the place. If other kinds of life ever existed, they apparently were not able to establish themselves;
and no new kinds seem to be emerging now.
At every level in the hierarchy of being there are forces opposing collaboration.
We can detect them easily among humans. People collaborate to form social groups; but once a group forms, there are always
members of the group who work against it from within. Any collaboration is tenuous and temporary. We assert that any collaborations
that last do so because the Spirit of God communicates with the individuals and molds them into a unified whole. Collaboration
of molecules to form life, we assert, would not have succeeded if God had not communicated personally with the molecules and
thereby overcome the barriers to collaboration. It is difficult to see how this principle might apply also to atoms and atomic
nuclei, but this could be just because we have a poor grasp of what matter is really like at those levels.
Once a
form of life was created by collaboration of molecules in this way, it would have a sufficiently high level of consciousness
to preserve and propagate itself. Once it had generated large numbers of offspring, the offspring themselves sometimes would
tend to collaborate to form more complex offspring. But once again it would take God’s action to bring about a collaboration
that could last.
Apart from God’s intervention, and up to the point at which the human spirit emerges, the framework
outlined here may be considered as materialistic as any; it’s just that matter now is not matter in the parsimonious scientific
sense but has become more compatible with God by taking on the property of consciousness. Just as animals other than humans
are motivated to a considerable degree by instincts they cannot control, but they may nevertheless possess also a fairly high
level of consciousness, so atoms and molecules would be even more highly constrained by their “instincts,” the properties
that physicists and chemists use to manipulate them; but they still possess a rudimentary consciousness.
If atoms,
molecules and living cells are conscious, they must be able to perceive. Atoms and molecules have no known sensory organs.
If they have none, their perceptions would have to be extrasensory. If so, then extrasensory perception is more elementary
than sensory perception. My personal introspection supports this view. Extrasensory perception is more elementary but less
efficient than sensory perception. Hundreds of millions of years of organic evolution under God’s influence have yielded
sense organs that enable living beings to interact very efficiently with their environment. Among humans the sense organs
dominate perception to such a degree that people can easily overlook or deny any ability for extrasensory perception.
If
atoms and molecules are capable of rudimentary perception, so what? What difference would it make, unless they can also exercise
some will to respond to their perceptions? Perhaps atoms do have something like a will and some ability to respond. Quantum
mechanics with its indeterminacy implies that an atom under the same conditions as a neighboring atom of the same kind will
generally not behave in the same way as its neighbor. Why doesn’t it? No one knows. Perhaps it just wants to be different.
To understand life is a great challenge even if we acknowledge that molecules are conscious and can exercise some
kind of rudimentary will power. But without some such principles, physics has no chance of explaining life.
The
emergence of the human spirit perhaps should be regarded as a higher level in the hierarchy of being, even though parsimonious
science cannot recognize or acknowledge it. The emergence of the comprehensive person, the bride of Christ, creates a higher
level yet.
Evolution of life is partly the evolution of chosen organisms to higher forms of consciousness, into beings
that become capable of such a high level of unification that they can interact with God as spirits and themselves become spiritual
beings. By encouraging all things to commune with him, God has drawn us out of the mud and into the fullness of his love.
Through him we vessels of clay can be made worthy.
•
We briefly summarize these musings.
The underlying
motive was to come up with a spiritual interpretation of the physical world. Without violating any finding of science we
can attribute a low level of consciousness to matter even down to atoms and molecules. Such consciousness can supply a motive
for molecules to collaborate to form living single cells and for single cells to collaborate to form many-celled organisms.
That is, the components become aware in some rudimentary way that they are parts of a higher being that deserves to be preserved,
so under the aegis of that higher being they work to preserve and propagate that being. This activity is crudely analogous
to what happens when large numbers of people come to the realization that they are a nation and then act to promote themselves
as a nation.
Combining many diverse but relatively free beings with low levels of consciousness into an organic whole
generates a being with a consciousness higher than that of any of its components. Under the right conditions the resulting
organism can become aware of itself. Self-awareness, which implies the existence of an ego, is characteristic of a person.
Thus out of matter persons have emerged who are capable of interacting as persons with God.
These mental exercises
now allow us to look at matter in a way that makes interaction with God seem not only possible but natural.
These
views of matter account in a more satisfactory way for the existence of a will to survive than the parsimonious interpretations
of scientists. Many scientists do not ascribe a will to living beings, especially the simpler beings. Behavior, they say,
is simply the outcome of myriads of chemical reactions. But people recognize in themselves a will to survive and propagate,
and they observe behavior in other living beings that indicates also in them a will to survive and propagate. It is natural
to suppose that such a will arises out of consciousness.
•
This chapter articulates a frame of reference,
a worldview, that enables me to accept and rejoice in my personal experience. I have indulged in speculation here rather
more than usual. I acknowledge further that God’s role in these speculations has been relatively peripheral; I cannot claim
a high level of his inspiration for some of the details. But the overall thrust comes directly from him. In a world and
in an age where purely materialistic explanations of all phenomena dominate among educated people, it has been essential for
me to oppose the material and assert the spiritual. Not to do so would be to live a contradiction: My experience would be
in perpetual conflict with my frames of reference.
Furthermore, while this worldview differs radically from the current
worldview of science, it is nevertheless compatible with the findings of science. As a scientist I respect the established
findings of science too much to live at odds with them. From time to time I have also regretted having had to jettison the
scientific method and framework outside of working hours, but I value and respect my personal experience too highly not to
do so.
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Belief and Conversion
The word was in the beginning....
All things came into being through it, and not one thing that came into being did so apart from it (John 1:1, 3).
To
the gospel writer, the word is the power of God by which God makes himself known in the world, the power that appeared on
earth 2000 years ago as the man Jesus. Everything originally came into being through this word, the writer says. Is this
credible? Can the word be so powerful?
When people think of power, images that come to mind might be of earthquakes
or of nuclear explosions or perhaps of giant airplane engines or turbines in action. But, we ask, what causes edifices or
airplanes to be built, what causes cultures to thrive, armies to march, books to be written, understanding to grow? In every
case it is a word, a belief, an idea, a principle. Without a belief to drive it, action quickly becomes chaotic, meaningless,
dissipative. Beliefs, ideas, words are the most powerful things in the universe for bringing order and meaning out of chaos.
Things that have no physical substance shape the things that do. The word brings order out of chaos and shows us God.
If
we define goals for ourselves, our actions can become focused and effective. If societies enunciate principles, they can
accomplish impressive things. The great pyramids of Egypt owe their existence to beliefs about death and an afterlife; the
cathedrals of Europe witness to faith and devotion. Those who directed the construction could not have succeeded had they
not built on a foundation of belief. In modern times imposing government buildings and lavishly appointed skyscrapers testify
of human pride, wealth and technology, but at a deeper level they exist because of ideas and beliefs.
Where do beliefs
come from? At the scale of societies and nations, beliefs are embodied and preserved in cultures. If a society escapes conquest
and the forced imposition of new culture, the lifetime of its culture can be measured in thousands of years. The cultures
of ancient Egypt and of China, the Hindu traditions in India, the Islamic in the Near East and, of course, the Christian in
Europe all come to mind as major cultures that lasted for more than a thousand years. Elements of Jewish culture have endured
for millennia despite conquest and dispersion of its adherents. Over their lifetimes these cultures have undergone evolution,
perturbation and reform. Often languages, cuisine and art forms are characteristic, but these are externals. Core beliefs
about God or gods, the meaning of life and the place of humans in the universe have persisted as well—persisted enough, at
least, to maintain the culture’s identity and allow us to recognize it as something unique.
While the specific origins
of some cultures are lost in antiquity, those of the Judeo-Christian and Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions are well known.
Christianity imposed itself on the ancient Roman world not by military conquest but by the conquest of human hearts through
religious conversion. From then until the 20th century European cultures had a distinctly and obviously Christian character,
and so did the cultures of the nations spawned by Europeans in the New World. Not all elements of these cultures were consistent
with the teachings of Jesus, to be sure, but the cultures nevertheless defined themselves as Christian.
At a rate
accelerating since the beginning of the 20th century, Christianity has been supplanted by secular ideologies. Communism in
Eastern Europe did its best to suppress Christianity there, and materialistic philosophies supported by ideas from science
eroded the influence of Christianity in the West. By the end of the 20th century, although Christian influence remained strong
in enclaves, culture as a whole of both North America and Europe had become essentially secular. The people lost their religion
in the sense that Christianity, instead of serving as the cultural frame and substance for individuals, cities and whole nations,
had at best been squeezed into only one of what had become life’s many compartments. Instead of dominating the culture, the
culture dominated it, where it still existed at all.
So a new culture of materialism propagated by mass media, especially
television, has swept the world, defeating not only Christian cultures but many other cultures as well. Among the major cultures
only the Islamic in conservative Islamic states of the Middle East seem relatively unaffected. What we have witnessed in
recent decades, then, is a massive conversion of the world’s population to fundamentally materialistic ideologies and the
emergence of a radically new world culture.
Materialism in the USA and parts of Canada is of particular interest
because it epitomizes the way in which materialism can gradually supplant other cultural values. Every major culture has
many subcultures, but in most countries the subcultures are physically separated from one another, often by geography. In
the US more than elsewhere they have been homogenized: A great many different cultures and subcultures are mixed inextricably
together and exist in close physical proximity.
Typically none asserts itself publicly for fear of infringing on
sensibilities of others. People fear embarrassment from drawing attention to themselves because of their cultural peculiarities,
their deviations from the homogeneous cultural norm. People fear being different unless convinced either that their own culture
is overwhelmingly superior to others or that their peculiarities will lead to embrace and not rejection. Hence, instead of
asserting traditional values people seek ways of compromising with the world’s values in order to make their culture more
palatable to outsiders.
The laws of the land cooperate in suppressing peculiar outward expression. For example,
they stipulate in effect that public schools not uphold tenets or practices of any particular culture without giving equal
emphasis to all. A result is that the only topics for public discussion are those in which all can share freely, without
embarrassment. Religion as anything other than abstraction or socio-political force is rarely if ever discussed in the typical
public school or public gathering.
The practice of religion has shrunk more and more away from external expression
to internal. Is this not what Jesus was advocating? Christianity is indeed a religion of the spirit, the inward person,
not the external. But it is a religion that requires also external expression. Otherwise children see only the secular.
Despite the homogenized exterior of the secular culture, however, opinion polls consistently show that Americans
hold fundamental religious beliefs more strongly than Europeans. And many cities and towns across the US have dozens of churches—although
more often than not they are small and inconspicuous. The multiplicity of different churches has helped to make religion
become just another aspect, another compartment, of a homogenized secular culture. Six days a week we lead our secular, materialistic
lives. For a few hours on Sunday mornings we unlock our churches to take care of whatever happens to be in the religion compartment.
God does not rule. It is no wonder that he seems such a foreigner. By exposing himself to me God made the contrast
clear. The world is on the verge of losing touch. By exposing himself God laid on me and all those who still love him the
burden of asserting his preeminence in this new culture. In exposing himself to me God has said his box in the homogenized
secular culture is not enough. Only a position of preeminence will do. Just as Jesus’ apostles imposed Christianity on the
Roman world, so we now impose God on our secular world.
•
Children believe what they believe because they
grow up in a culture that imposes its values on them in innumerable ways, and they cannot escape it. They define themselves
in terms of their culture. The details of what children believe vary according to their individual experiences, but core
beliefs and the principles for interpreting their experiences come down on them from the culture into which they were born.
Adult beliefs in many cases are only sophisticated versions of childhood beliefs. They are tempered by broader experience
but still constrained by the tenets of the culture. Unlike children, however, adults at some point may have exchanged one
set of core beliefs for another. This act of sloughing off one set of core beliefs and fitting oneself inside another we
call conversion. It is an act of redefining oneself, or of submitting to a new culture to be redefined in it.
Changes
in beliefs can grade continuously from the insignificant to the profound, and they can happen slowly, over a period of years,
or very quickly, within a day or less. The word “conversion” can apply to slow changes but not to minor ones. To undergo
conversion a person must change core beliefs, the beliefs by which he defines himself. Often in conversion the change in
beliefs has more to do with level of commitment than content: The content of beliefs may change little, but the relevance
hugely increases.
Personal beliefs come in all shapes and sizes. Some may last for a few minutes, others for a lifetime.
Sometimes after reading a newspaper editorial I become convinced by the arguments until perhaps a day later, when I read
an opposing editorial and flip-flop. Beliefs that change so readily all have one thing in common: They concern peripheral
things. None of those things is crucial to how we define ourselves, none touches our core. On subjects that we delve into
deeply and into which we invest our energies, however, beliefs do not change easily. Beliefs reinforced by decades of tradition
cannot change easily. Those beliefs take on emotional values, they come closer to the core. Conversion means a change of
core beliefs, either in content or emphasis, and core beliefs are bound tightly to our person by strong bonds of emotion.
Conversion sometimes happens when an adult of one culture encounters a new culture and recognizes the superiority
of the new to the old. (I’m using “culture” here in a restricted sense to mean something like a subculture or perhaps just
a particular philosophy of life. I do this to signify that a person’s core beliefs are not just intellectual principles but
the foundation for a way of thinking, feeling and living that can be called a culture.) The intellect is important in conversions,
but the intellect is the servant, not the master. The master is a set of emotions that signals to the person that the new
is better. After the person gives emotional consent, then the intellect goes to work to justify the change.
St.
Anselm of the 11th century is known for his efforts to provide logical support for Christian teachings, but he did not delude
himself into thinking that his arguments had power to convert unbelievers. He acknowledged that the role of reason was not
to create faith but serve it. In Cur Deus Homo? he describes how believers requested rational explanations “…not for the
sake of attaining to faith by means of reason, but that they may be gladdened by understanding.” Some of the scholastics
were perhaps not as irrelevant as their reputation in the modern world makes them out to be.
In a similar way my
essays on science in this book are not aimed at modifying the views of scientists but at providing a perspective that allows
me to be comfortable with my experience.
No amount of intellectual effort, no set of arguments however refined or
elaborate can convert a person of one culture to another culture if the person has not already given emotional consent to
the new culture. Rational arguments given to convert someone may cause momentary doubt or hesitation, but if they are effective,
they are perhaps more likely to drive the person against whom they are directed into rigidity, into a shell where the old
culture still survives intact.
There are powerful arguments from radioactive minerals and from fossils that the world
is very old and that major organic evolution occurred, but people whose culture requires them to believe the world was made
in six 24-hour days will not be convinced. They may attempt to argue against each detail. Should they fail, they retreat
to some unassailable haven: “God (or the devil) for reasons we do not understand created the fossils just as we find them.”
Evidence of materialistic organic evolution to a person of one culture is evidence of God’s providence to a person of a different
culture. The intellect is the servant, not the master.
Verbal assault, then, is not the most effective way to win
converts. What is effective? In practice, converts are won more often because they are ready to be won than because someone
confronts them with powerful arguments. When people in a relaxed frame of mind begin to harbor doubts about their traditions
or simply begin looking around for something new and more meaningful, they open themselves to the possibility of conversion.
If what is new is also not threatening, they may open themselves wider. Words at that point can have an important role in
converting them, but words that stir up feelings and speak to the soul are more likely to be effective than words that speak
to the intellect.
Threats undeniably can and do have a role, but the results are unpredictable. They can push away
as effectively as they can push towards. Threats of disaster or actual physical trauma in some cases will cause aversion
to what is new, while in other cases they will catalyze a reaching out to embrace. In every case, to become a convert, a
person needs to be in a receptive frame of mind.
Jesus’ disciples were in a receptive frame when the Spirit of God
came upon them at Pentecost. Until that moment they had been living in the old culture; they had interpreted Jesus all along
in terms of their inherited traditions. It was the inward personal encounter, the filling with the Spirit, that propelled
them from Judaism into Christianity. The person of the Spirit made them see the difference and come suddenly to the realization
that they did not belong to the old culture but were instead the chief proponents of the new.
How receptive to the
new was Saul, that vigorous persecutor of Jesus’ followers, when he confronted Jesus in his vision on the road to Damascus?
One might be tempted to say not receptive. But in Saul’s case the trauma of confronting Jesus in person pushed him across
the boundary. He suddenly acknowledged the superiority of the new and abandoned the old. He went from Saul the persecutor
to Paul the apostle.
Students in their late teens and early 20s are often more open to new beliefs, more open to
conversion, than people of any other age group. At that age they have come to define themselves, they have fully absorbed
the culture they grew up into, but they have not yet established their role in the world. So they are in a searching frame
of mind, receptive to new ideas.
Young adults in that age group raised in a fundamentalist Christian culture sometimes
change their beliefs about world origins to those of scientists. This may happen, for example, upon exposure to a university
environment. What causes such conversions? It is not merely the weight of the evidence. Instead, the students perceive
a whole new culture at the university that is significantly different from what they knew at home. They perceive university
faculty members who are very much more knowledgeable about their specialties than their own parents. The students become
emotionally overwhelmed by what appears to them as the superiority of the new culture, and then their intellects go to work
rationalizing the conversion.
No one will be surprised to hear that people hold religious beliefs primarily for considerations
other than purely intellectual. It may come as more of a surprise that those who espouse views of a world without God do
so also for considerations other than purely intellectual.
Some profess to accept the reality only of things for
which there is evidence, and by evidence they mean primarily scientific evidence. Wouldn’t the beliefs of such people be
purely intellectual, controlled only by reason? For those who have never had vivid knowledge of spirits, such beliefs may
indeed seem purely rational. However, such beliefs rest on assumptions that cannot be supported by scientific evidence.
One of those assumptions is that God does not influence the world. Another is that the only valid knowledge about the nature
of reality is knowledge that comes through the scientific method. Human knowledge of spiritual beings they assume is delusion.
Those assumptions are foolishness to one who knows God. Therefore any claim people may make to the effect that their
beliefs come exclusively from the intellect and from human reason is false. To assert categorically that the scientific method
is the only source of truth is an emotional assertion, partly because it implies there is no religious truth. But no one
can prove there is no religious truth.
Some say the lack of consensus among religious teachers is evidence that they
do not know what they are talking about. Lack of consensus does indeed imply certain things about religion, but it does not
refute spiritual reality. Some say the sins and failures of religious people prove that religion is ineffective; but Christianity
has always been the religion of sinners.
Some conversions are more strongly influenced by the intellect and by well-couched
arguments than others. St. Augustine’s conversion at age 31 was profound and enduring, but his intellect had a major role.
So much so, in fact, that some scholars have claimed that he accepted Christianity because he saw a way of fitting Christian
teachings into the system of Neoplatonic philosophy he had come to love. A more constructive interpretation would be that
the Neoplatonic ideas opened him up, prepared him, to receive the Christian teachings. As he writes in his Confessions, “I
believe that [God] wanted me to encounter [the Platonist books] before I came to study [God’s] scriptures…. I would learn
to…distinguish…between presumption and confession, between those who see what the goal is but not how to get there and those
who see the way…to the home of bliss….”
(Chapter continued on next page)
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