How God becomes real

This post has been in draft for several months. The problem is that I do not want to misrepresent others or myself or, if you like, I am not yet 100% convinced, and there does not even seem the possibility of ever becoming fully sure, about my subject. Which is: how and when and whether God speaks to us.

Since my previous post Hearing God speak I have been somewhat surprised to find serious investigation into this phenomenon. My title comes from the book by Tanya M. Luhrmann. You can listen to her 2015 TEDx talk. I challenge you to read her books and judge for yourself. In her Preface, and, as a taster, she writes: People don't (easily) have faith in gods and spirits. People do not, in fact, behave as if gods and spirits are real in the way that everyday objects are real... To have a sustained commitment to the reality of invisible agents... [e.g. God] someone must interpret the world through a special way of thinking, expecting, and remembering. I will call this a faith frame. That faith frame coexists alongside the ordinary ways people make sense of the world, and sometimes contradicts them. The priest says: this is my body, but it looks like a dry cracker. The sermon insists: my God can do anything, but God didn't stop the divorce. And so faith is hard - particularly when an invisible other is supposed to love you, care for you, and keep you safe. 

She goes on with six further points which form a roadmap to the following chapters, and then assures us that Nothing I say here speaks for or against the genuine reality of gods and spirits.

Luhrmann has done her homework. In her prequel "When God talks back" she writes: I found the church in my own backyard, a few blocks from where I lived in Chicago... I went in looking for a nondenominational church that taught people to hear God speak back, but I didn't go back for months after my first visit because nobody did anything to suggest they were much different from the people in the liberal mainstream churches I'd known as a child. Nobody spoke in tongues or fell over in spiritual bliss. The pastor... explained a book of the Bible chapter by chapter, as if he were lecturing to an undergraduate class... People were taking notes. Many of them had their Bibles out, and they were staring at the text as if they were trying to analyze a difficult poem. 

I finally went back for a second visit because I had done enough reading to figure out that this was in fact exactly the kind of church in which God was not a distant, abstract, principle but a person among persons. I stayed for two years. On a Sunday, the service in this church begins with music... at a church like the Vineyard, music is prayer. The church sets aside a full thirty minutes for the music at the beginning of the service, and they call this section of the service "worship?' There are no hymnals, just PowerPoint-projected lyrics of songs people know so well that many sing them with their eyes shut... The techies dim the lights. Some people stand, eyes closed, palms out and upward, swaying slightly, their cheeks sometimes wet with tears. Some sit and rest their foreheads on clasped hands. Some kneel in prayer. Occasionally someone lies prostrate or dances in the open space to the side of the seating area...

All this seems very familiar to me. Luhrmann goes on to say that what some claim as God speaking is in fact an artefact of the human brain - voices in the head or "self-talk" as described in Kahneman's book "Thinking Fast and Slow". But so saying she does not rule out the existence of God.

And neither do I. I am not an atheist. Yet. Indeed, how dare you or I question out of hand (as some do), and on not much more than a whim, the experience of others or even the Biblical record? But I do question the evidence I see (or fail to see) in myself; my lack of the calibre of faith that says "All things are possible for one who believes".  For I too have in the past reckoned that I have heard God speak only to become disillusioned by lack of corresponding action. Or maybe it is that action is on its way but I am just not patient enough.

I realise that I am repeating things I have alluded to in previous posts, like Orual's belligerent mantra: Did you ever remember whose the girl was? She was mine. Mine. Do you not know what the word means? Mine! You're thieves, seducers. That's my wrong. I'll not complain (not now) that you're blood-drinkers and man-eaters. I'm past that..."

"Enough," said the judge. 

There was utter silence all round me. And now for the first time I knew what I had been doing. While I was reading, it had, once and again, seemed strange to me that the reading took so long; for the book was a small one. Now I knew that I had been reading it over and over — perhaps a dozen times. I would have read it forever, quick as I could, starting the first word again almost before the last was out of my mouth, if the judge had not stopped me. And the voice I read it in was strange to my ears. There was given to me a certainty that this, at last, was my real voice. There was silence in the dark assembly long enough for me to have read my book out yet again. At last the judge spoke. 

"Are you answered?" he said. 

"Yes," said I.  [Lewis "Till we have faces"]

My own mantra is relevant because (as I once intimated) upon it hangs, to a large degree, my ability to hear from God.  In that instance, looking back, I thought I had heard God; now I find that my judgment has shifted, that I am more inclined to admit that I may have deluded myself. And, oh, what freedom, what release comes with such acknowledgment!  And yet, and yet... there definitely was a need that my deluded self had cared so much about. Any freedom I gained was entirely selfish. The whole episode remains one of my most intense and poignant personal battles and contributes to my views expressed in this post. Perhaps one day in looking back it will all make more sense.

---oOo---

You'll find plenty of other material on the internet dealing with "how to hear God" from slushy evangelical advice-columnists to die-hard atheist denial. I prefer to try to analyse what goes on inside me and what I reckon goes in inside those I interact with. Or to check out the Biblical record (for examples see here) where I find the Voice was often external to the subject. Whilst undeniably miraculous, it is hard to explain such accounts solely in terms of imagination. In some accounts the Voice was in a dream which, I grant, could be imagination. Even when the channel was not specified like "the word of the LORD came to the prophet Zechariah...", in this case what follows is 14 chapters of verbiage plus a few visions which do not sound to me like self-talk. So I reckon that, should God actually speak to you, you ought not to be in any doubt. Gideon doubted his ability to fulfill what the angel said, but there is no suggestion that he doubted that he had heard.

The prevalence in evangelical or charismatic folk to expect God to speak inside their heads colours their concept of a "personal relationship" with God or Jesus. I can, if I choose, carry out a dialogue in my head. If I then associate one side with God speaking, my perceived relationship with God becomes more pally. Which sucks. For if God exists at all, He surely is all powerful, all knowing, far above anything my puny mind can imagine. Whereas inside my head I can dictate what this perceived "other" should say. If you don't believe me, try it!

I've already noted that Google and God not only start with the same letter. What if, when AI has reached maturity and has become ubiquitous, God is supplanted by something akin to Jane (who speaks to Ender via a jewel in his ear) who first found herself between the stars, her thoughts playing among the vibrations of the philotic strands of the ansible net. The computers of the Hundred Worlds were hands and feet, eyes and ears to her. She spoke every language that had ever been committed to computers and read every book in every library on every world [Orson Scott Card: Speaker for the Dead]?

Here's another web-identity "thoughtcontrol777" who questions how God is perceived to speak and writes: ...I began “searching” and became a born again Christian shortly thereafter. I remained in the church for twenty years, and it dramatically shaped who I was. There were many times as a Christian that I did not feel that I was myself, but rather just a poor version of trying to be someone else. But I was a fully committed and indoctrinated Christian: I was baptised in water, I spoke in tongues and I performed what I considered at the time to be the gifts of the spirit... I studied the Bible... Since leaving the church I have not missed it. I feel like I am me again and can attest that there is freedom outside of Christ Jesus. I am regretful of how much of my life was wasted in pointless church services, prayer meetings and administrative meetings for the church. 

And in their web page "The Voice of God" writes:

One of the most confusing aspects about living as a modern day Evangelical/Charismatic Christian is dealing with the issue of the voice of God. Many Evangelicals and basically all Pentecostals or Charismatics believe that God actually speaks to people personally. However, God does not typically speak in an audible voice but rather as a “still small voice” that a person hears only inside themselves. Literally, it is a voice inside their head. Many Christians claim to hear this voice, indeed I myself believed that I was hearing it for a number of years during my Christian life. But likewise other Christians, perhaps more discerning, acknowledge that they do not hear the voice of God.

During the latter part of my Christian experience I noticed that whenever I would ask God for advice on something important I would never get an answer. But I would hear “what I thought was” the voice of God in regards to other random unimportant things. This was baffling... So I began to put the voice to the test asking God to reveal certain things to me so that I knew that it was him who was actually speaking. Or, to show me signs. There were no occurrences in which the still small voice was able to accurately tell me anything about the future. And the signs were a no-show. This process took a number of years but at the end of it I stopped listening. If God was not going to accurately talk to me then why should I listen?

A sad conclusion. 

So, whilst I am done with the voice in my head being divine, I hope to remain open minded and unbiased enough to acknowledge God should He manifest, cognisant of those religious leaders who failed to recognise Jesus despite the miracles.

Three little bones

Shortly after Elizabeth's ascension to the throne, and paralleling the development of the transistor as I have outlined before, a boy was born, a boy who loved mud, dirt and making things.

Aided by a trip to Woolworths where his father purchased battery, flashlight bulb, switch and wire, he became infatuated with all things electricity. Meanwhile, out in the world, Moore's law was making its interminable progress

As a boy he loved to take things apart to "see how they worked". Regrettably he was not equally good at reassembling them, so in consequence he amassed (and probably still does) a vast stock of bits and pieces. On one, well-remembered occasion he attempted to build a radio using these parts. The chassis was made of Meccano and there was an ear phone and a volume control somewhere in the mix, but these and many other pieces he joined together without much understanding and somewhat randomly. He reasoned that the stuff had once constituted a working radio so why not again? To his upmost disappointment it did not work. He got better at this sort of thing over time although probably still reveres the age old method of trial and error mixed with a good portion of hope which gave Edison the light bulb.

Later he was taken to an amateur showing  see the Moody Science Institute Faith and Faith film "Dust or Destiny" which explored the wonders of the human body. He was, of course, fascinated, hooked, even infatuated. Then it was in 16mm acetate medium and the projector interested him almost as much as the content. Now-a-days you can watch these films on Youtube. 

At that time in school biology he happened to be studying the five senses and recalls handing in some homework in which he had reproduced material from the film in graphic detail: he got full marks but also a caution about keeping to the question...

But the workings of the ear (to take one example) are indeed amazing. Here's a picture of the three bones of the inner ear, which carry out impedance matching to maximise the transfer of energy from airborne sound to vibrations in the inner ear fluid.  Striking a tuning fork and then pressing its foot onto a wooden surface amplifies the sound in a similar way. All fine and dandy in theory, but if I were to design a microphone with inner workings that looked this messy I can be pretty sure it would fall on deaf ears so to speak.

Three tiny bones in the middle ear

Quote: The malleus and incus are suspended by two ligaments that provide an axis of rotation so that the middle ear bones pivot when the tympanic membrane vibrates. The footplate of the stapes inserts into the oval window of the inner ear whence nerve endings detect what we perceive as sound.

And then there's the cochlea or organ of Corti, the inner ear which transfers these vibrations into nerve impulses. All told, the ear surpasses most if not all man-made microphones in terms of sensitivity (quote the sensitivity of the ear is close to the ultimate limit at which it would begin to detect the noise fluctuations in the air) and dynamic range (around 120dB).

Quote: The inner ear is divided into two fluid filled chambers... The fluid in the two chambers differs on the basis of the kind of salt that each contains. The fluid in the outer or bony chamber is filled with a sodium salt solution (called perilymph) that resembles the salt composition in the blood or the fluids found in the brain. The inner or membranous chamber is filled with a potassium salt solution (endolymph) that resembles the fluid that is normally found inside the cells of the body. Specialized cells that line parts of the membranous chamber and “pump” potassium into the membranous chamber maintain the difference in concentration between the two chambers. The difference in the chemical composition of these two fluids provides chemical energy (like a battery) that powers the activities of the sensory cells. 

The inner ear organs must be small because any increase in their size would increase their mass... [which would] decrease the sensitivity... The mass of the cochlear sensory epithelium is further reduced because it has only a small number of blood vessels... reduced by a unique system for converting the metabolic energy from sugar and oxygen in the blood into an electrical potential... the auditory system is sensitive enough to “hear” the vibrations associated with blood moving through blood vessels. It is fortunate they are located away from the organ of Corti.

There's much more detail freely available on the internet. You can find papers that purport to explain such workings of the human body and the implied evolutionary process but they often seem to me to use highly specialised terms only to obfuscate, for example (my emphasis):

All reptiles and birds have only one middle ear ossicle [bone], the stapes or columella. How these two additional ossicles came to reside and function in the middle ear of mammals has been studied for the last 200 years and represents one of the classic example of how structures can change during evolution to function in new and novel ways. From fossil data, comparative anatomy and developmental biology it is now clear that the two new bones in the mammalian middle ear, the malleus and incus, are homologous to the quadrate and articular, which form the articulation for the upper and lower jaws in non-mammalian jawed vertebrates. The incorporation of the primary jaw joint into the mammalian middle ear was only possible due to the evolution of a new way to articulate the upper and lower jaws, with the formation of the dentary-squamosal joint, or TMJ in humans. The evolution of the three-ossicle ear in mammals is thus intricately connected with the evolution of a novel jaw joint, the two structures evolving together to create the distinctive mammalian skull. 

Suffice it to say the design of the human ear is remarkable. Some would see this as evidence for an Intelligent Creator but then what or who designed the creator? By introducing God the need for intelligent design has simply been shifted. That all reptiles and birds have only one middle ear bone whilst we have three implies an evolutionary step which creationists contest. I am not endorsing either view (frankly I do not know) but I do marvel at how a bunch of bones, tissues, blood and gore could possibly detect sound with a sensitivity sensitivity close to the theoretical limit and enable us to communicate and to enjoy the emotional depths and artistry of music. Could a random assembly of electronic components ever become a first class radio receiver?