Hearing God’s Voices
a sermon by Peter Pease
given on Sunday, March 25
at The First Parish in Lincoln
All of our raptures and our drynesses, our longings
and pantings, our questions and beliefs . . .
are equally organically founded.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Readings
Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”
But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.” But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’“
Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion”, at p. 31
For our second reading, let’s listen to the atheist, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who has so energetically attacked the proposition that God exists. Here, he describes his target.
The God Hypothesis should not stand or fall with its most unlovely instantiation, Yahweh, nor his insipidly opposite Christian face, ‘Gentle Jesus meek and mild’. . . I am not attacking the particular qualities of Yahweh, or Jesus, or Allah, or any other specific god such as Baal, Zeus or Wotan. Instead I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly; there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution.
Why do so many believe in God? Anthropologists tell us that nearly every culture on earth has had a religion based on belief in a God or gods, life after death, and the power of prayer or ritual to change the course of events. Since direct, probative evidence of the existence of God is sorely lacking, and belief is primarily a matter of faith, why is belief so strong among so many? Is there a natural tendency to believe in a higher power simply because we are human?
Last Fall my friends in my small group and I shared our beliefs. Many of us said we believe there is something greater than what meets the eye - a mysterious presence, creative energy, life force, impossibly awe-inspiring Green Man of nature, self-regulating earth consciousness Gaia, mathematical genius Lord of the Universe. We felt that God has many names, and easily embraced each others’ descriptions.
A few of us believe that Jesus is God in human form, and the rest of us are admirers and followers of his teachings. Those of us who believe Jesus is not divine see him as a prophet, perhaps first among many, and appreciate the power and importance of conceiving of divine qualities resplendent in human form.
At a minimum, we are with Einstein, who described himself as a “deeply religious nonbeliever,” writing -
What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
Many of us are closest to our own Ralph Waldo Emerson, heretical Unitarian Minister and transcendentalist, who believed in God, but not in the divinity of Jesus, and went so much deeper than Einstein in his essay “The Over-Soul.”
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.
Carl Sagan has commented that Einstein’s God, if it is the set of physical laws that govern the universe, clearly exists. But, “this God is emotionally unsatisfying . . . it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”
Roger had much the same reaction when I mentioned all of this to him. He said, “But when you are praying, who is listening?” That is a question that needs an answer, and I’ll give you mine, in time. But first, I want to share with you what I’ve learned along the way.
For all his bluster, Dawkins is not bothering to attack the God many of us believe in, particularly in the UU community. He is primarily after the God of the creationist-theists who have been taking over school boards to get equal time for their man in science class.
Quick review – Theists believe in a supernatural god that created all things and remains present, attending and active to this day. Deists believe in a god that created the universe, but take no particular interest in what happens next. Pantheists (many of us) see God in every rock, tree and living thing. Agnostics can’t be bothered to take a position, and atheists, like Dawkins, make the case that God does not exist.
In the past ten years the scientific discussion has become intense. Where previously the high priests of science and religion have scrupulously avoided each others’ territory, the political power gained by the religious right on local school boards and in Washington has prompted scientists to bring their skills to bear on the question of God’s existence. If evolution and creationism are going to be presented to our children as equally possible theories, then the gloves are off! Where is the evidence that God exists? There are mountains of evidence supporting Darwin’s theory of evolution. Surely such a powerful, omniscient, omnipotent God could do something to prove its existence! Carl Sagan does a pretty good job, in calmer fashion than Dawkins, of detailing the absence of evidence in his book, “The Varieties of Scientific Experience.”
An atheist uprising is underway. There’s some pretty wild stuff posted on the internet by the usual bad boys. Former evangelical Christian turned atheist Brian Flemming has started the Blasphemy Challenge. In one video on the site, a teenage girl says, “I know that the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ, God, the flying spaghetti monster, pink unicorns - all of these made-up entities do not exist.”
Baptist police officer Mike Mickey has countered by creating RaptureAlert.com, ominously warning that Jesus Christ and Judgment Day are coming soon!
Dawkins thinks belief in I AM or any god is causing all manner of evil in this world (who can argue with that!), and urges us towards courageous atheism. Indeed, the title of his most recent book, “The God Delusion” suggests that belief is akin to mental illness. While he is being deliberately provocative, this title strikes close to home. I suggest to you that our capacities to perceive God and to hear voices when we are in the throes of mental illness are related; they both flow from dramatic evolutionary advancements in the size and architecture of our brains.
For quite a long time, some have believed that there is a biological explanation for humanity’s susceptibility to belief in God. As William James (whose godfather was none other than Ralph Waldo Emerson) wrote a hundred years ago, in “The Varieties of Religious Experience” –
All of our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs . . . are equally organically founded.
When homo sapiens came forth with its large and gifted brain, it was blessed with the ability to do a number of new things really well – avoid predators by being very sensitive to their actual or potential presence, even if hidden; to create stories that explained things and taught useful lessons; and to understand that other humans had separate and different beliefs, desires and intentions.
We are all familiar with the “sixth sense” – the power of intuition – the way we can feel another being’s attention upon us. Researchers have proven that they can induce ghostly hallucinations by applying electrical energy to our brains. Countless religious practices are specifically designed to induce hallucinations, and our brains readily comply.
We instinctively turn things over and over in our minds, seeking meaning. It leads us to great discoveries, and torments us, sending us to the yoga instructor to help us turn off our minds and simply “be.”
We’ve all learned much, both true and false, from the tales told to us by our parents, teachers and others. All cultures have their own particular myths, told and retold, and the members of the culture measure themselves against them and act them out, over and over. Jung believed that we are even born with our specific cultural mythology already imprinted in our brains, as a matter of genetics.
Our fear of death and our inability to conceive of our non-existence are particularly powerful factors leading us to believe in an afterlife and in God.
Inborn, or told as lessons, we as a species create, tell and retell stories to explain everything we can, and perhaps especially what we cannot.
As far as the scientists are concerned, there are two ways to look at humankind’s religious tendencies. It could be a byproduct of our evolved, wonderful brain, or it could be a valuable trait we have because of its advantages to us as a species.
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin have termed traits which have no adaptive value of their own “spandrels”, borrowing architects’ term for parts of a structure that have no purpose, but naturally occur as a result of other deliberately conceived parts of the design, like the space under the stairs. In their words -
Natural selection made the brain big, but most of our mental properties and potentials may be spandrels – that is, non-adaptive side consequences of building a device with such structural complexity.
Other biologists do see an evolutionary advantage in religiosity, in that it encourages group identity, enabling a culture to survive hard times, and to aggressively expand and act against outsiders.
There’s a two-edged sword. Encouraging unity and sacrifice for the benefit of the group is great, but increasing the capacity to label outsiders as “other” and destroy them is obviously terrible, and may be the death of us all. How often are our greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses one and the same!
Consider this - our brains are powered by electricity. Your brain continually generates about 12 watts of energy. Properly wired up, you could each run your own headlamp.
In a recent issue of Nature, Swiss neuroscientist Olaf Blanke reported that he had induced the sensation of being haunted by a shadowy figure by stimulating a subject’s brain with electricity. An electrode was implanted in the angular gyrus area of the brain. While they had been attempting to research effects on language processing, the subject reported sensing another ghostly person in bed with her. The shadowy figure came and went with the ebb and flow of the electrical current. The same effects were first discovered long ago in the 1880’s by psychical researchers including physicist and wireless radio pioneer Sir Oliver Lodge.
And so, we have objective evidence of the electrical means by which we function, and malfunction, and perceive supernatural beings. Perhaps it means perceptions of God and paranormal events are naturally occurring electrically induced experiences, and perhaps it shows the means through which a spirit can make itself known.
We know that some people with mental illness commonly hear voices. I heard a voice startle me awake this morning – “ARE YOU READY?” I know many who suffer from mental illness, hear voices, and have fixed delusions about events that never took place. Researchers are hard at work trying to discover how and why this happens. There seems to be a strong genetic component, but even with familial concentrations schizophrenia afflicts one of every hundred humans everywhere in the world. It is a universal disease of humanity. These poor people often have fears that threatening others are after them through powerful but invisible means.
One man about my age gets on a bus from time to time to travel from Port Arthur, New York to my office in Boston. He is convinced that a cosmetic surgeon who operated on him in 1999 implanted devices in his brain which have ruined his life ever since. His whole life is consumed with trying to convince doctors and lawyers to remove the device and prosecute the wrongdoers. He’s very smart, and carries stacks of newspaper articles and information he’s collected that he believes prove that peoples’ brain function can be and has been subverted by evildoers.
I think our wonderful and complex brains have given us the ability to puzzle out the laws of physics that govern the universe and the evolution of life, to form ourselves into advanced, cooperative civilizations, to conceive and perceive God and higher power and purpose than ourselves, and to misfire and become beleaguered by imagined tormentors.
It’s all of a piece, the essence of our beings, our potential and pitfalls. Our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness. Mental illness is intimately related to the blessings of religious experience we enjoy.
Family members of persons with mental illness often wonder why it happened to my brother, and not to me? We were there together, and then something invaded his consciousness. It is my hope and prayer that a better understanding of the workings of our brain can lead us all to be more compassionate towards those who are ill, and someday, healing.
But who or what do I pray to? Is it the law of gravity? No – for me there is more than that. While I don’t believe there is a God in human form listening to our prayers, I do believe there is a consciousness greater than my own. Perhaps it is only us, together. Perhaps it is a collective unconscious, or an Over-Soul. In praying, we enter into conversation with the spirit of what we believe, in search of guidance, comfort, unity.
I can tell you that composing a prayer to be spoken from this place is a deep and meaningful act. It will take you to places you have not been before. If you are asked to become a deacon or a lay leader, accept immediately.You will be required to discover what you most care about, and what is most needed by everyone here, and in this world of ours. You will go to a place you may have never visited before, confront the largest issues of this life and death we share, and speak to your God for all of us. You will never be the same again. You will not fail. As we Quakers say, “A way will open.”
To me, the ground of being is that we are perceiving beings of extraordinary gifts and sensibilities. I believe that our task in this life, on this earth, is to explore and experience the fullness of our beings. This is a matter of applying intellect, labor, compassion and love. It means shedding armature and fear and opening ourselves to perceive. It means being willing to give up control and to wade in and lose ourselves in the river of a greater consciousness and purpose, a divine blessing and will. It means coming forward in trust and in hope that we will be received in community, in this church and in the endless circles of communities in our lives, around this world. It means welcoming each other into these circles, finding joy and common cause where we can. It means thinking beyond our own skin and four walls to comprehend what must be done for others, for the cause of justice, and to preserve our Mother Earth.
I find God there. I find God’s presence vital and vibrant. This God is not the least bit insubstantial or emotionally unsatisfying. I don’t care if it flows from spandrels in my brain or all of our spandrels dancing together. I know it is real, it is strong, it is good, and it is our best hope for ending the hatred and war and selfishness that blight our planet.
We find God in each other, but perhaps first in nature. Who can say it better than Emerson?
Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
Amen.