Fingerprints of God Read Free Page B

reality of the unseen,” as psychologist William James had it. After talking to countless scientists far more knowledgeable and insightful than I, I have concluded that science cannot prove God—but science is entirely consistent with God. It all depends on how you define “God.” If you are trying to locate deity in a thirty-three-year-old carpenter or the unseen divider of the Red Sea, science will offer no help. But if you look for God in the math of the universe, if you perceive God as the Mind that rigged existence to create life, then science can indeed accommodate. If you see God in the breathtaking complexity of our brains, as the architect of our bodies and our minds who planted the question Is there more?— well, science has room for that kind of God.
    This is the God I am pursuing in this book. If I were to draw a road map for this journey, I would say the first part is driven by personal questions about my own spiritual experiences. Chapter 2 explores spontaneous spiritual experiences that come unbidden, like the one that washed over me as I sat talking with Kathy Younge. It turns out I was not alone: half of Americans have been overcome and radically transformed by a sudden encounter with the spiritual. Science is only now catching up with the ideas of William James, ideas that it has discarded for a century but can no longer ignore.
    In chapter 3, I raise the question at the foundation of my own religious upbringing: Is there a God who hears prayer and heals? When you look at massive prayer studies involving hundreds of people, the evidence for prayer’s efficacy is mixed at best. But go beyond the blunt instrument of strangers praying for strangers, look for the power of thought to stop the HIV virus in its tracks, for example, and suddenly the picture changes. What was once superstition is now accepted science: our thoughts affect us on a cellular level, unfolding the biology of belief.
    Chapter 4 looks at the triggers for spiritual experiences. Is there a certain set of circumstances, a certain personality type, a certain cocktail of internal and external stress, that erupts in a spiritual experience? I believe there is, and I believe this explains why alcoholics so often become spiritual people. While an encounter with God can happen anywhere, anytime, my research and my own life story tell me that brokenness is the best predictor of spiritual experience.
    Next, I investigate the hard, arid, materialist science that tries to explain (away) spirituality. In the process, I stumble on a new definition of deity .
    In chapter 5, I ask the question Why me? Why are some people inclined to pursue and experience God while others couldn’t care less? Is there a “God gene” that predisposes a person to Spirit? It seems to me that one way to define God is as a master craftsman who organizes our genetic code so human beings have a capacity and yearning to know Him.
    But God has other talents, and other roles. Chapter 6 explores God as chemist, who adjusts the chemicals in our brains so that we can gain access to the spiritual. To find this God, I traveled to a peyote ceremony in Arizona, and to Johns Hopkins University, where a prominent neuroscientist has found that psychedelic drugs hold a key to understanding our connection with the spiritual.
    Chapter 7 reveals God as electrician, who wires our brain to allow us to tune in to an unseen reality. For this I visited an epilepsy clinic in Detroit. Scientists have long believed that the ancient mystics like Saint Paul and Saint Teresa of Ávila did not experience God but only the electrical storms of temporal lobe epilepsy. Recently, however, some neurologists have begun to speculate that those neurological events may not spark mere delusions—but actually allow people to hear and see a spiritual dimension that normal consciousness cannot grasp.
    In spontaneous mystical experiences, people stumble into the ineffable; but knowing God is also a muscle that one can