{"id":60714,"date":"2025-04-17T20:52:26","date_gmt":"2025-04-18T00:52:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=60714"},"modified":"2025-04-17T20:54:55","modified_gmt":"2025-04-18T00:54:55","slug":"just-a-mind-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2025\/04\/just-a-mind-game\/","title":{"rendered":"Just a Mind Game?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Bible skeptic Michael, whom we have been engaged with for many weeks, asks a very important question: \u201cIsn\u2019t all religion just a mind game?\u201d After all, the German philosopher Karl Marx famously said religion is the opium of the people. It is the sign of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, and the soul of the soulless condition.\u201d No doubt, critics of religion have long argued that it is a mind game we play with ourselves to soothe a fearful soul in a hostile world. Survival of the fittest selects those with the best coping mechanisms, right? No doubt, as soon as prehistoric man evolved enough to realize that everyone dies, his mind evolved to find a resolution. Just so happened that religion fit the bill. Darwin himself considered there to be \u201can evolutionary derivation of mind and morality\u201d as a product of natural selection. In other words, Darwin thought belief in God was just a mind game. Very well then, let us begin once again from the common ground<\/em> of modern science (twenty-first-century science, that is).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two neuro-physicians, Andrew Newburg and Eugene D\u2019Aquili, conducted extensive research studying the relationship between human consciousness and \u201cthe persistent, particularly human longing to connect with something larger than ourselves.\u201d It seems Newburg and D\u2019Aquili were asking the same question our Bible skeptic, Michael, had asked: \u201cIs belief in God just a mind game?\u201d The studies involved observing subjects steeped in the art of religious meditation and prayer, from Tibetan monks to Franciscan nuns. When the subjects would reach a maximum level of spiritual consciousness, they would be injected through an IV line with a radioactive solution. Then, their brain was scanned using a SPECT camera. The resulting images showed \u201cunusual activity\u201d in a highly specialized portion of the brain responsible for sorting out what is you from everything that is not you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Newburg and D\u2019Aquili, it became evident that the altered mental states of their subjects brought about by intense religious meditation or prayer were not the result of \u201cemotional mistakes or simply wishful thinking, but were instead associated with observable neurological events.\u201d And while this brain activity was unusual, it was not<\/em> outside normal brain function. Newburg writes: \u201cIn other words, mystical experience is biologically, observably, and scientifically real.\u201d In fact, Newburg and D\u2019Aquili are convinced that spiritual experience at its foundational level is \u201cintimately interwoven with human biology.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One could argue that this is precisely what Darwin predicted: the human mind has evolved the capacity to create a mythical, spiritual reality for itself. That is, \u201cit is all just a mind game.\u201d However, Newburg points out how the brain and mind experience reality, suggesting \u201ca very different view.\u201d Simply, if God is not dead, then how else would human beings perceive Him except as a neurologically generated image of reality? Newburg writes, \u201cThere is no other way for God to get into your head except through the brain\u2019s neural pathways. This is true whether one experiences God through meditation, prayer, or reading Scripture. Quite simply, the reality of God as Spirit cannot exist in any other place but in the human mind. All experiences are \u201cmade real\u201d to the mind similarly through natural cognitive function. And that holds for all<\/em> men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is said that myth-making is also a \u201cnormal cognitive function\u201d of the mind. Remember, Darwin believes that the existence of God is just a mind game\u2014that the mind, as a coping mechanism, has created the myth of a dying hero rising to the heavens to save mankind. \u201cFair enough,\u201d I say. But why are the \u201cmyths\u201d (religious beliefs) from all the world\u2019s cultures so consistently and spectacularly similar? Scholars are quite clear: \u201cIn every human culture, across the span of time, the same mythological motifs are consistently repeated: virgin births, world-cleansing floods, lands of the dead, expulsion from paradise, men swallowed into the bellies of whales, dead and resurrected heroes . . .\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The psychologist Carl Jung, indeed not a Christian himself, thought all religious myths expressed a singular basic form modified through time and by cultures. A great example can be seen in The Tower of Babel, the Samarian ziggurats, Mayan pyramids, and step-shaped Buddhist temples. Sure enough, according to Newburg, evidence suggests that the deepest origins of religion are based upon spiritual experiences and that religion endures because the functioning of the brain continues to provide consistent experiences that believers interpret \u201cas assurances that God exists.\u201d But this assurance goes deeper than that. \u201cIt anchors religious belief in something more potent than intellect or reason: it makes God a reality that ideas can\u2019t undo, and that never grows obsolete.\u201d In a spiritual sense, it would seem that we humans are all of one mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From a Christian worldview, this makes complete and perfect sense. If man has a common origin, and there was a primordial pair\u2014our first parents<\/em>\u2014everything began in a central location. At some point in the very distant past, there was only one language, only one race, only one family, and only \u201cone God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all\u201d (Eph 4:6). Why wouldn\u2019t all people\u2019s religious beliefs share a very similar core? Even still, is it all just a mind game? Join us next week as we conclude our look at Why God Won\u2019t Go Away.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gloria in excelsis Deo!<\/em>Ty B. Kerley,<\/strong>DMin.<\/strong>, is an ordained minister who teaches Christian apologetics and relief preaches in Southern Oklahoma. Dr. Kerley and his wife, Vicki, are members of the Waurika church of Christ and live in Ardmore, OK<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Bible skeptic Michael, whom we have been engaged with for many weeks, asks a very important question: \u201cIsn\u2019t all religion just a mind game?\u201d After all, the German philosopher… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":60372,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[3028],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60714"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60714"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60715,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60714\/revisions\/60715"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}