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DICK STAUB Comments 0
Published: November 12, 2009

(RNS) Are you a brain, or do you have a brain?

This clever question was asked of our panel during a recent "Kindlings Muse" podcast in which we discussed Barbara Bradley Hagerty's book "Fingerprints of God."

Bradley Hagerty, National Public Radio's religion correspondent, offers a travelogue through the world of research into the unseen. She is neither a scientist nor a theologian but a journalist who makes observations at the intersection of the two.

The "brain" question nicely summarizes one of the central inquiries of the book, namely: Can everything you are, including your spiritual capacity, be explained materialistically?

There is a breed of scientists who eliminate the importance anything that cannot be observed, measured or quantified. Francis Crick, one of the co-discoverers of the molecular structure of DNA, is among them. He famously said, "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

''Fingerprints" is an ambitious project that juxtaposes neurologists, physicists, and psychologists with individuals whose lives have been permanently transformed by experiences that appear to transcend the physical.

We meet Sophie, who had a numinous encounter at the Inca ruins at Machu Picchu that she maintains changed her at a cellular level; people with near death experiences; and contemplative Tibetan monks and wild-eyed Pentecostals in Toronto. Haggerty layers story upon story to illustrate why the materialist position seems to ignore a major component of human reality.

Materialist neurologists offer alternative explanations for these experiences, theorizing that the Apostle Paul's Damascus Road experience, Joan of Arc's visions, and Theresa of Avila's ecstatic breakthroughs are likely nothing more than epileptic seizures. Other scientists explain that our quest for spiritual experiences actually originate in a God gene embedded in our DNA.

These seem too reductionist, so Hagerty identifies and interviews a renegade merry band of contrarian scientists who find the fingerprints of God in spiritual encounters.

The rising body of work done by scientists whose findings suggest a spiritual component to human existence raises the fascinating possibility that science may soon reach a tipping point where it can no longer ignore a human dimension beyond what is physically measurable.

In "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," Thomas Kuhn shows that science has always involved a series of "peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions." He observes science often "suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments." A historic example is Ptolemy's theory that the sun revolves around the Earth, which was overthrown by Copernicus, but not without resistance from scientists and the church.

Some, like Mario Beauregard of University of Montreal, believe we are approaching a paradigm shift, and science will soon take our spiritual nature more seriously. "There are too many data coming from parapsychology, transpersonal psychology, now spiritual neuroscience, quantum physics and various lines of evidence, all pointing to major failures in the old materialistic paradigm. So for me, it's only a matter of time before there will be a major paradigm shift," he tells Bradley Hagerty.

If Hagerty's personal journey is any indication, religion will experience a paradigm shift as well. Most people who experience mystical encounters with "the other," or "the light," emerge from such experiences less interested in religion and its exclusivity and more interested in the connectivity of all things. Their view of God is changed.

Bradley Hagerty is teasing out the notion that both science and religion are about to experience a paradigm shift that will require both to reexamine reality even when it subverts our basic commitments.

Only then will we be able to understand what we mean when we proclaim, "I have a brain and I am a soul."

(Dick Staub is the author of "The Culturally Savvy Christian" and the host of "The Kindlings Muse," www.thekindlings.com. His blog can be read at www.dickstaub.com)

dsb/dea END STAUB