Is God a Spot on Our Brain?

Sound ridiculous? I must admit, when I read the article where certain scientists are searching for a spot in people’s brain to explain away God, I thought of the verse, “Professing to be wise, they became fools!” (Romans 1:22). Here is part of what the article stated:

Searching for God in the Brain…Researchers are unearthing the roots of religious feeling in the neural commotion that accompanies the spiritual epiphanies of nuns, Buddhists and other people of faith. Scientists and scholars have long speculated that religious feeling can be tied to a specific place in the brain. In 1892 textbooks on mental illness noted a link between “religious emotionalism” and epilepsy. Nearly a century later, in 1975, neurologist Norman Geschwind of the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital first clinically described a form of epilepsy in which seizures originate as electrical misfirings within the temporal lobes, large sections of the brain that sit over the ears. Epileptics who have this form of the disorder often report intense religious experiences, leading Geschwind and others, such as neuropsychiatrist David Bear of Vanderbilt University, to speculate that localized electrical storms in the brain’s temporal lobe might sometimes underlie an obsession with religious or moral issues. Exploring this hypothesis, neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran of the University of California, San Diego, asked several of his patients who have temporal lobe epilepsy to listen to a mixture of religious, sexual and neutral words while he tested the intensity of their emotional reactions using a measure of arousal called the galvanic skin response, a fluctuation in the electrical resistance of the skin. In 1998 he reported in his book Phantoms in the Brain (William Morrow), co-authored with journalist Sandra Blakeslee, that the religious words, such as “God,” elicited an unusually large emotional response in these patients, indicating that people with temporal lobe epilepsy may indeed have a greater propensity toward religious feeling.

These scientists just can’t figure out why people all over the world have at least some sort of belief in God. The Bible has the answer: Rom. 1:19 “…because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.”

You can read the entire article at www.sciam.com.

CREATION EVANGELISM

On these blogs, I often like to give an example of real Creation Evangelism. Here is an example sent to me by one of our customer service staff:

Just an little info I wanted to pass along. I had sent some DVD's to a lady in New Mexico---she has called and asked for something she could pass out for Halloween. She just called back and ordered 300 of Buddy's Six Short Days. She is excited to have something for not only the English kids but the Spanish kids as well. She wanted me to pass along that is great to have something that is not only great for kids but has the gospel message in it as well.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying

Ken