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Apologia Report 12:3
January 18, 2007
Subject: Scientists trying to reproduce religious experience
In this issue:
APOLOGETICS - N.T. Wright's Simply Christian, superior to Mere Christianity?
LOCAL CHURCH/LIVING STREAM - recently formed coalition of evangelicals criticizing the movement post "open letter"
SCIENCE - the top "25 greatest science books ever written"
+ the past decade's best-selling science books listed
+ scientists searching for a way to give "permanent, blissful, mystical self-transcendence" - without religion
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APOLOGETICS
Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, by N.T. Wright [2] -- reviewer Samuel Wells finds Simply Christian superior even to Mere Christianity [3] and notes how he has used Wright's book to help people determine if the Christianity that they claim to have rejected is indeed "the real thing."
Wells summarizes: "Simply Christian has all the elegant simplicity one could hope for in a work of everyday apologetics. It communicates wonder without being pious or sentimental, it narrates a particular story without adopting Christian jargon, it accepts and addresses common criticisms without losing humility or becoming weary, and it is full of lively metaphors and analogies. The book begins with four 'echoes' of God's voice - the longing for justice, spirituality, relationship and beauty - then offers a lucid account of the Christian story.... Wright neatly concludes by pointing out that Christianity fulfills the longings he noted at the outset. ...
"The book takes us to the heart of Wright's theology. His work has widely been associated with two themes: his articulation of the Christian story as a five-act play (creation-fall-Israel-Jesus- church), and his emphasis on Jesus as the One who brings the exile to an end. In Simply Christian these two familiar concerns are subject to an overarching argument - namely, that incarnational Christianity constantly steers between paganism (which sees God in everything, particularly today in the self) and dualism (which assumes that God is far away in heaven and thus renders the whole presence of God in the world problematic)."
Wright "portrays a vision of the world infused by heaven - a vision embodied in the incarnation, ignited by the resurrection and still to be fully realized.
"This enables Wright to do something that is extraordinary in a book of apologetics: he leaves out theodicy [a response to the problem of evil] altogether. He does not even highlight the fact that he is doing so. But one can see that if God is not inherently distant, theodicy is not the millstone for apologetics it has long seemed to be. I applaud this subtle argument." Wells' final word of appreciation is for the way that the book's "assumed reader is an intelligent skeptic with relatively little Christian vocabulary." Christian Century, Nov 28 '06, pp42-44.
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LOCAL CHURCH/LIVING STREAM
In what appears to be a reaction to inferred recent evangelical support of the Local Church movement (see AR 11:38), a coalition of evangelicals critical of the movement has formed to post an "open letter" about the controversy <http://www.open-letter.org>.
On January 8, using the AR-talk online discussion group created by Apologia for career apologists, James K. Walker, president of Watchman Fellowship, summarized the effort this way: "More than 60 evangelical Christian scholars and ministry leaders from seven nations have signed an unprecedented open letter to the leadership of the 'local churches' and Living Stream Ministry. Signers include the presidents of eight seminaries and Bible Colleges.
"This letter is a public appeal to disavow and withdraw controversial statements made by their founder, Witness Lee, on the doctrine of God and the doctrine of man. The letter also asks the 'local churches' and Living Stream to renounce statements made by Lee that denigrate evangelical Christian denominations and organizations. Finally, the letter appeals to the leadership of the 'local churches' and Living Stream to discontinue their use of lawsuits and threatened litigation against Christian individuals and organizations to answer criticisms or resolve disputes."
Some of the points noted in the open letter include quotations from Witness Lee demonstrating areas of concern regarding the nature of God, the nature of humanity, and Lee's views of evangelical churches and denominations. Signers include E. Calvin Beisner, James Bjornstad, Darrell Bock, Ronald Enroth, Norman Geisler, H. Wayne House, Gordon Lewis, John Warwick Montgomery, and Ron Rhodes.
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SCIENCE
"All-Time Essential Reading List" of the top "25 greatest science books ever written" by the editors of Discover magazine -- Sure to spark a ruckus, the list includes: #21, Sexual Behavior, by Alfred Kinsey et al.; #22 Gorillas in the Mist, by Dian Fossey; and #25, Gaia, by James Lovelock. While the academic world may turn up its nose at Discover's popular approach, the obvious influence of the magazine's million-strong print run appears to attract individual scientists as contributors easily enough. Each book receives a long one-paragraph summary. We've made a small Excell spreadsheet [1] out of this list which allows you to sort by rank, title, author, and of particular interest, by date. The sidebar, "Best Sellers" (p63), provides a list of the past decade's best-selling science books, year-by-year. Discover, Dec '06, pp58-62, 77.
"The God Experiments" by John Horgan -- profiles five researchers who are attempting to achieve an empirical scientific understanding of religion within the individual, be it induced, psychological, genetic, or biochemical. In their pursuit, they are "applying brain scans, genetic probes, and other potent instruments as they attempt to locate the physiological causes of religious experience, characterize its effects, perhaps replicate it, and perhaps even begin to explain its abiding influence."
Some researchers "come to study religious experiences with very different motives and assumptions. Some of them hope that their studies will inform and enrich faith. Others see religion as an embarrassing relic of our past, and they want to explain it away."
First of those profiled, "Stewart Guthrie, an anthropologist at Fordham University in New York, is in the explain-it-away camp of researchers. Noting the plethora of gods that populate the world's religions, many with minds and emotions similar to our own, Guthrie argues that the belief in supernatural beings is a result of an illusion that arises from our tendency to project human qualities onto the world. ...
"Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has focused on the tendency of people from different religious traditions to report similar mystical experiences, which typically involve sensations of self-transcendence and 'oneness.' These commonalities indicate that the visions stem from the same neural processes, Newberg hypothesizes." To test his theory, Newberg scans the brains of people who are supposedly having such experiences.
Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist in Sudbury, Ontario, "attempts to explain religious experiences" as a possible "cerebral mistake" regarding "our sense of self." For example, "When the brain is mildly disrupted - by a head injury, psychological trauma, stroke, drugs, or epileptic seizure - our left-brain self may interpret activity within the right hemisphere as another self, or what Persinger calls a 'sensed presence.' Depending on our circumstances and background, we may perceive a sensed presence as a ghost, angel, demon, extraterrestrial, or God. ...
"Dean Hamer, head of gene structure and regulation at the National Cancer Institute, is endeavoring to link religion to a specific gene." His studies are "the first to suggest a genetic component to what ... researchers called 'intrinsic religiousness,' which includes the tendency to pray often and feel the presence of God. ...
"Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project and a devout Christian, calls Hamer's claim 'wildly overstated.'
"Rick Strassman has proposed a theory even more reductionist and far-fetched than Hamer's, yet one that has empirical support. Strassman, a psychiatrist in New Mexico, traces spirituality to a single compound, dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. ...
"A Zen Buddhist, Strassman was intrigued by the possibility that endogenous DMT plays a role in triggering mystical experiences. ...
"From 1990 to 1995, Strassman supervised more than 400 DMT sessions involving 60 volunteers at the University of New Mexico. These were the first sanctioned psychedelic experiments involving human subjects in the United States since the mid-1970s. ...
"Volunteers ... reported visions that did not fit neatly into Strassman's scientific or spiritual worldview.... One of Strassman's subjects claimed to have been eaten alive by insectoid creatures. In part out of concern about his negative experience, Strassman discontinued his research.
"Science cannot tell us if God exists only in our imaginations or as an entity beyond our comprehension. ... In principle, these findings could lead to methods -call them 'mystical technologies' - that reliably induce the state of spiritual insight that Christians call grace and Buddhists, enlightenment. ...
"Suppose scientists found a way to give us permanent, blissful, mystical self-transcendence. Would we want that power? ... Persinger warns that in the wrong hands, a truly precise, powerful God machine, capable of implanting beliefs or signals that seem to come straight from the Almighty, could be the ultimate mind-control device. 'Just think of the practical impact,' he says. 'People will die for this.'" Discover, Dec '06, pp52-57.
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Sources, Digital:
1 - <http://apologia.org/b/Discover's-Top-25.xls>
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Sources, Monographs:
2 - Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, by N.T. Wright (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006, hardcover, 256 pages)
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060507152/apologiareport>
3 - Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis (HarperSanFrancisco, 2001, paperback, 227 pages)
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060652926/apologiareport>
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