Is God talking to you too?

“I came into this project wanting to understand the question: How are rational, sensible, educated people able to sustain faith in an invisible being in an environment of skepticism?”

Tanya Luhrmann, an anthropologist spent about four years studying the rituals of evangelicals and came to the conclusion that prayer teaches them to hear the voice of God, presumably the Christian version of the supreme being. Luhrmann went on to write a book about it – When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God.

The obvious but crass reaction of many cynics and non-believers would be to retort that those who hear voices in their head are crazy or schizophrenic. Indeed in an essay on this story in The Week, one commenter observed “When you talk to your deity, you’re religious. When it talks to you, you’re a crazy sumbitch.”

Luhrmann on the other hand contends there’s more going on with evangelicals than we care to acknowledge. She believes they hear voices which they conclude is that of God for good reasons; the presumption yet again is that there is only one such being. However, while she went to great lengths to observe the evangelical behaviour and explain HOW these adherents come to believe that they’re talking to God, she does not attempt to explain WHY it happens. To be fair, as an anthropologist, perhaps it’s beyond her level of understanding; rationalizing an observation was all she was left with.

I would therefore like to indulge Luhrmann and other believers for a bit. Let’s suspend all credulity, and accept that a God does indeed talk to evangelicals, or anyone else for that matter, who from her observations at least, satisfy the following criteria:

1. God only talks to those who believe and accept without question that a God exists,
2. Adherents willingly want to “have a relationship” with said God, and
3. Adherents are both willing and able to participate in a ritual such as prayer, which presumably makes it possible for them to “open a communication channel” with said God.

Having satisfied the criteria, what does an adherent talk to God about, and exactly what does God reveal? According to Luhrmann:

Members told her about having coffee with God, seeing angel wings, and getting God’s advice on everything from job choice to what shampoo to buy.

Nothing of major significance or importance it seems; nothing world-changing. But that’s quite revealing actually. It seems that ordinary people talk to God about mundane things; things that don’t contribute a whole deal to the future of the planet, indeed the world.

If a supernatural entity does exist, and is talking to people, it would imply that other things we’re normally skeptical about, should also be possible. [Lest you’ve forgotten, we’ve suspended credulity].

Wouldn’t the secrets to solve both our constantly increasing energy requirements and global warming, be the most fundamentally essential revelation to mankind? Wouldn’t the solution of these issues lead to resolving poverty and other social problems? Off course there may be more pressing needs of which I am not thinking about right now.

So, in a world with a God, without doubt perpetual motion should also be possible. And a substance should exist which when diluted in water, be able to cure all diseases and render homeopathy all-powerful, right? So why hasn’t God revealed how to build that perpetual-motion machine and create the wonder homeopathic cure?

Either God doesn’t know, or the people he’s revealed such important information to, are keeping mum. Or, we need the people who can make the greatest impact to saving the world, such as scientists, to learn how to talk to God. Because they’re indubitably wasting valuable resources and money carrying out useless experiments in underground particle colliders and outer space.

Clearly then, the wrong people are talking to God. The planet’s going to hell in a handbasket at a dizzying pace. Surely those capable of talking to God should be asking Him how to sort out the mess we’re in. You have to question why we’re being made to suffer if divine information can make a difference to the way the world is unraveling.

But nada! Does God talk to us just so that we can feed his vanity? Is God then just “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully,” as Dawkins so eloquently pointed out in The God Delusion?

Isn’t it a much simpler and more reasonable explanation that any conversation with a God is one-way traffic…

Antimatter does matter

Antimatter used to be the stuff of science fiction; that’s the stuff that powered the starship Enterprise on Star Trek. These days however, our brilliant scientists have not only actually created antimatter, just recently they have achieved the stupendous feat of capturing it long enough to study it.

Scientists, led by Professor Jeffrey Hangst at the CERN laboratory in Europe announced that they have managed to capture 38 antihydrogen atoms for a tenth of a second, in a specially designed magnetic trap. To non-physicists that may not sound very impressive, but to these guys at CERN, 38 atoms is an astronomical figure, and a tenth of a second is an eternity.

While the scientists at CERN are jumping hoops, what does this latest breakthrough represent to the ordinary man in the street? Apparently not much to those who are religiously inclined, or just plain ignorant it seems. A quick browse through various websites announcing the news indicates the usual antipathy, incredulity and indifference one has come to expect of humans who are too absorbed in their own little worlds.

However, there are a good number of people who understand the importance of this research, and who are hopeful that it could lead us to understand the nature and origins of the universe. These people know and understand that such research enables scientists to uncover secrets that lead to complex technological creations that revolutionizes the way we live.

Others of course, will continue to question the vast expenditure and use of resources that are necessary for such endeavours. Yet others will feel threatened that man is venturing into areas that are best left to their vengeful, spiteful, domineering gods.

The latter do not matter; antimatter matters…

Science – otherwise known as miracles to religious nutters

We might as well be living in the year 1020, for all the knowledge we have acquired since then, fails to register with people who are fervently religious. Ignorance still rules, in the year 2010.

Just last week Stephen Hawking released a new book he co-authored with US physicist Leonard Mlodinow where he states that a god was not necessary for the creation of the universe. The furore that followed can only be described as fucking ridiculous. On the one hand he was denigrated by various critics as employing deceitful PR tactics to sell his book by re-igniting the god-science debate, and on the other he was castigated as usual by the rabidly religious [see comments for article] for daring to suggest that god was redundant.

While the critics may have a valid argument, the comments from the religious nutters reveals just how much ignorance still exists when it comes to the pursuit of science and the aims and objectives of true scientists. The experiments currently being conducted in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN came under attack as a waste of money, time and resources. The religious peanut gallery seriously think that the experiments to find the elusive Higgs Boson particle, humorously nicknamed the god particle, is an attempt by scientists to prove that a god does not exist. That is nothing short of being criminally naive at best, and dangerously ignorant at worst. It seems that none of them have considered that scientific experiments lead to the technologies that creates the everyday conveniences that they take for granted.

So, when you come across a claim from the church, that the medical science that led to the quick recovery of a heart attack patient is nothing but a miracle from god, you begin to realize that these fruitcakes think of science as a miracle. This week the Rhema Bible Church claimed that the recovery of their pastor, Ray McCauley was nothing but a miracle. They have deemed it fit to render medical science and doctors redundant. By their reasoning, all patients who survive heart attacks, do so because of miracles from a selective supernatural benefactor. The same benefactor who somehow cannot save helpless people, including children and the aged from natural or man-made disasters, and other illnesses.

As a matter of interest, the procedure that apparently saved Ray McCauley required his brain to be frozen for about 10 hours. Luckily those who follow his every word, and presumably that written by the gods, and continue to enrich the Rhema empire, won’t need this procedure – they have self-imposed it. Now if science could only find a cure for self-inflicted brain freezing, I would be tempted to concede that as a miracle.

Science is not against religion

While viewing some old videos posted on the thesciencenetwork website, about a discussion program, held at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in November 2006, I came across an interesting quote about science and religion.

Entitled Beyond Belief: Science, Reason, Religion & Survival, the program featured several well known scientists, skeptics, atheists and apologists alike. The quote I’m referring to was made by  prominent physicist and Nobel laureate, Steven Weinberg:

Science does not make it impossible to believe in God. It just makes it possible to NOT believe in God.

The connotations from this simple quote are really thought-provoking:

• Science does not advocate that one may not believe in a god
• Science in not concerned with proving or disproving the existence of a god
• Science provides one with the tools (through reasoning, logic and critical thinking among others) to deduce through lack of evidence, that a god may not exist
• Science compels one to arrive at the above conclusion, but does not compel one to believe through any form of coercion
• There is no imperative to choose one or the other

One other thing that stood out for me in Professor Weinberg’s presentation was the reference he made to influence in science: science does not have any authority figure or prophet, rather science has experts and heroes.