There’s no way to get around it – for
many of you this is going to be a very strange series of entries – one that
will seem completely crazy. But I hope
you will humor me for a bit and consider this topic at face value.
We have been talking about
communicating with God; aka “prayer”. In
the previous entry <*here*> I talked about two important elements: 1) go
to a quiet place, and 2) talk to God.
This time we are going to talk about the third element I mentioned:
“listen to God”.
I have to say that the topic of
“listening to God” is an odd topic even for those who say that God “speaks” to
them all the time. I have talked to lots
and lots of people who mention casually that God spoke to them, but I can’t
ever remember hearing anyone give an in-depth lesson on what it really means to
say “God spoke to me”. What I find even
more interesting – even somewhat troubling – is that the Bible does the same
thing. God speaks to lots of people in
the Bible, from Adam in the Garden to the Apostle John on the Island of Patmos,
yet I don’t know of any passage in the Bible that talks about the principle of God speaking to human
beings. How does hearing God really happen???
All I can do is relate my own
experiences and my own thoughts about the whole concept of listening to
God. I already gave one example from my
own life <*here*>.
Actually, I don’t think the concept of
hearing from God, or at least some outside influence, is that foreign to
anyone. We are all familiar with the
cartoon character who is trying to decide what to do and has an angel on one
shoulder and a devil on the other, both of them arguing with the character,
trying to get him to make either a good or bad choice. We don’t have to be told what that means
because we’ve experience it ourselves. We’ve had our own internal debates about what
to do. We have a sense that we are being
pulled to the good or pulled to the bad.
We describe an “inner voice.”
What is that? People who hear
audible voices are often considered mentally unstable. So why is hearing voices in our minds so
normal? We feel urges of all sorts that
seem to come from outside our brains.
From where??
Another thing we see in cartoons that
immediately makes sense to us is the lightbulb above the character’s head. We know what that means. We’ve all experienced the “aha” moment. An idea pops into our head. From where? Or we suddenly understand something that
we’ve never understood before. How?
Well, if you are a good materialist
and don’t believe the mind is anything more than neurons firing, then you won’t
ascribe any of these concepts to anything other than…neurons firing. What else could you ascribe it to? You might say that some of these thoughts,
ideas, daydreams, etc. are actually due to random neural activity. If there is something fundamentally random in
the universe, then it might affect neurons and occasionally they might just
fire off a random thought. Such an event
must not be entirely common or otherwise our thoughts couldn’t be
rational. It could be that neurons fire
randomly all the time but they are normally suppressed by all the rational
thinking going on in our brains. Who knows? But, anyway, the point is, if there is no
“mind” beyond neurons, then of course the whole idea that there could be a
supernatural being – or even a “force” – influencing your thoughts is out of
the question.
But, as I’ve said before, that’s alocked door. If you are a convinced
materialist, then there is no reason to be trying these experiments as I’m
describing them. If no amount of
evidence will change your mind, then why waste time looking for evidence to the
contrary?
So, if you want to continue, you’re
going to have to open the door to what I’m about to tell you, and I think this
may be the hardest door to open.
Is it
remotely possible that God could put thoughts in our minds?
The next entry will
delve into that in more detail…but you’ll have to decide first whether the
answer to that last question is at least a tentative yes. If not, I don’t really see a way to continue
on with the experimental approach.
I thought I would end
this entry with an example from my own life – a case where I am convinced that
God controlled my brain for a brief instant.
This occurred during my first month of undergraduate study at the
University of Iowa. This would have been
the fall of 1979. I had been invited to
attend a meeting of Christian students that met every Tuesday evening in the student
lounge area (I remember calling the building the “Student Union”, but I see it
is officially called the “Iowa Memorial Union” building). On the evening of the first meeting, I really
wasn’t intending to go. I hated meeting
new people and I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to hang out with a bunch of
Christians. My nature would have been to
put it off forever. What I generally did
in the evenings was to take my trombone and go practice in the music building. That was much more fun.
The
first Tuesday evening after I had been invited to this meeting, I had grabbed
my trombone and I was headed off toward the music school. It was a bit of a walk and it was also in the
same direction as the Iowa Memorial Union where the Christian meeting was. I don’t remember if maybe I had forgotten
about the meeting and then remembered or if it was weighing on my mind as
something I should do. As I was walking
along the path, there was a point at which the path literally made a Y-branch
(for those of you who have been at U of Iowa, I was coming from Hillcrest Hall). One branch headed off in the direction of the
music school and the other branch headed off to the Union building. A true “fork in the road.” I remember that my feet just went toward the Union
building. I wasn’t making a decision to
go. It wasn’t really what I was
intending to do – I mean, I had my trombone with me! But my feet just took me there. I felt powerless to stop it. Ultimately, it was a critical life-changing
event for me that evening. I consider it
a supernatural intervention in my brain.
Of
course it is possible that a random neuron fired, causing a chain of events
that resulted in my going right instead of left on the path. And it is possible that that random neuron
just happened to fire at the right time as I approached that fork in the
path. I can’t argue that there could not
be a possible natural explanation for what happened. As I’ve mentioned before, I only present
these personal experiences as examples of what happened to me in hopes that it
will help you understand what I’m talking about. But you have to have your own personal
experience. If your answer to the
question above (in red) is a confident “no”, then you cannot have your own personal experience. Hopefully you are fine with that. All I can say is that you are missing out on an
exciting adventure.
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