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Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.” Science and religion aren’t enemies. They are allies. In a sense, every ology is a branch of theology. One way to get to know the Creator is by studying creation. In fact, can you imagine studying about Pablo Picasso without looking at his paintings? Or what about studying Ludwig Von Beethoven without listening to his music? It seems absurd doesn’t it? About as absurd as studying the Creator without studying His creation! So every year we do a series that juxtaposes a branch of science with Scripture. This year we juxtapose neurology and theology.
Let me give a disclaimer up front. I’m neither a neurologist nor the son of a neurologist. I don’t claim expertise. I do claim fascination. I think the human mind is the magnum opus of God’s creative genius. And we are going to dive into the mystery and the miracle over the next six weeks.
Encore
Albert Einstein said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as if nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.”
I know lots of people who say they’ve never experienced a miracle, but the truth is that we all experience miracles all day every day.
Right now you have no sensation of motion, but you are sitting on a planet that is spinning around its axis at approximately 1,000 mph. Planet earth will make one full rotation in the next twenty-four hours. Not only that, you’re traveling through space at approximately 66,600 mph. Before the day is done, you will travel 1.3 million miles in your annual trek around the sun. And you didn’t have any big plans for today!
But here’s the thing. We don’t think about that or worry about that or celebrate that. When was the last time you thanked God for keeping us in orbit? Never! Dear God, I was concerned that we wouldn’t make the full rotation today but you did it again. Phew! What I want you to see is this: we ought to throw a party every day to celebrate what a huge accomplishment that is.
Keeping the planets in orbit is no small feat. We experience an astronomical miracle every single day, but we take it for granted.
Thomas Carlyle said imagine a man who had lived in a cave his entire life stepping outside for the first time to watch the sunrise. Carlyle said he would watch “with rapt astonishment the sight we daily witness with indifference.”
That’s so true isn’t it? We take the daily miracles for granted.
G.K. Chesterton said, “Grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. Is it possible God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon? The repetition in nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.”
Scripture hints at that in Psalm 29. The Message says, “Bravo, God, Bravo. All the angels shout encore!” It’s like the angels are so enthralled with what God does day in and day out that they ask Him to do it over and over again!
The Miracle of Sight
Part of spiritual growth is learning to recognize and appreciate the miracles that surround us.
Did you know that approximately six trillion reactions are taking place in every cell in your body every second? Your heart will pump about 100,000 times today without skipping a beat. You’ll inhale and exhale about 23,000 times. And a hundred things are happening in your body right now that you pay no attention to—digesting, reproducing new cells, purifying toxins, maintaining hormonal balance, converting stored energy from fat to blood sugar, and repairing damaged cells just to name a few.
That is absolutely astounding, but of all the miracles that happen all the time I think the mind is the magnum opus. It is hard for us to even conceive of how complicated even the simplest of mental functions is.
Take the visual cortex for example. Most of us take sight for granted, but that is because we have no idea how it works.
For what it’s worth, when a baby is born their visual resolution is one-fortieth that of a normal adult. They lack depth perception. And their visual range is about eight inches. By four months, a baby can perceive stereoscopic depth. By six months, visual acuity has improved fivefold. They develop color vision and volitional control of their eye movements. And by the time a baby celebrates its first birthday, the child sees the world almost as well as an adult.
When was the last time you stopped to thank God that you can perceive about ten million different colors? We probably owe God a thank you for each color. Have you ever stopped to contemplate how incredible it is that we can read fine print and see stars that are billions of miles away? Have you ever thanked God for depth perception or peripheral vision? Or what about motion vision? We take it for granted, but people who suffer from motion blindness cannot cross the street because they can’t judge the speed of cars. They have difficultly pouring coffee into a cup because the moving liquid appears to be solid. Without the motion-perception pathway you would have a tough time walking much less dancing or catching a Frisbee or hitting a fastball traveling 95 mph. And that is one minor function.
The retina conducts close to ten billion calculations every second and that is before an image even travels through the optic nerve to the visual cortex.
Byte magazine describes vision in computer terms.
To simulate 10 milliseconds of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require about 500 simultaneous non-linear differential equations one hundred times and would take at least several minutes of processing on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are more than 10 million cells interacting with each other in complex ways it would take a minimum of a hundred years of Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye every second.
I’ll be honest: I have no idea what that means. But that’s precisely my point. It’s miraculous and mysterious! And that is the tip of the cortex. There are a thousand processes like that happening all the time.
Proverbs 20:12 says, “Ears that hear and eyes that see—the Lord has made them both.”
We read a verse like that and it’s in one ear and out the other. But what I’m trying to say is that it would take a lifetime to really appreciate all the nuances of this one verse. We could devote an entire lifetime to studying the visual and auditory cortex and we wouldn’t even scratch the surface.
A few years ago I got an email from an NCCer who is a physician and I loved their perspective on the miracle we call the human body.
As a physician your message brought to light so many things that I have experienced: the wonder of the human body was one of the main reasons I entered the field of medicine at age twenty-one. I recently completed eight years of medical training and now have the privilege to care for some of the most important people in the country at the Pentagon. Honestly, each year of my medical education, my faith grew stronger and stronger simply because I was able to catch a glimpse of the amazing handiwork of God through my coursework. I also saw fellow students discover God in medical school largely as a result of their training. I sometimes wish every atheist could take Gross Anatomy or Physiology at a medical school level.
I will be honest, medical school is more about describing things in the human body, not explaining them. For example, even today we don’t understand how your ear and auditory system functions as an information processor, analyzer, and pattern recognizer, all from a set of chemical events set off from a few vibrations hitting your ear drum! Next time you recognize Martin Sheen’s voice in a commercial or IMAX film, make sure to appreciate it!
Embryology itself is nothing but describing how a fetus develops over time, little is known about how it occurs or how certain sets of cells know how to become a heart, how to form an eye, and how to form an ear, let alone wind up in the right spot. Yes, we understand the genetics, but not the specific reasons behind the process.
Anyway, I am just very privileged to have been able to study medicine but really also study theology at the same time. This may also explain why when I ask patients if I can pray for them this often means a lot more to them than anything else I could ever give them. I think deep down they know the wonder they walk around in too!
If this series accomplishes nothing else, my prayer is that it would increase our awareness of the miracles that are happens all around us all the time.
A Day in the Life of Your Brain
Just as you don’t do a thing without moving a muscle, you don’t do a thing without using your brain in some form or fashion. Even waking up to an alarm clock is a complex cognitive function involving your auditory cortex and reticular formation.
The moment you open your eyes the visual cortex starts processing stimuli. Using your motor cortex you get out of bed and stumble to the bathroom. If you sing in the shower you are utilizing your right temporal lobe.
Reading the newspaper is an amazing feat. The left temporal lobe processes nouns; the left frontal lobe handles verbs; and the left parietal lobe processes grammar.
You take a quick look at your schedule and to do list for the day and your prefrontal cortex tries to figure out how you can get it done by the end of the day.
You hop in your car and drive to work based on the mental maps stored in your posterior hippocampus.
You pop into an Ebenezers to grab a cup of coffee. You’re surprised by how good the coffee is and how reasonably priced it is. And as you marvel at the beautiful aesthetic environment and charming staff you count out change using the left parieto-temporal part of the brain.
You haven’t even started your work day yet. Just about everything you’ve done so far is absolutely routine yet absolutely miraculous.
Obviously, what I’ve just shared is a gross simplification of something that is divinely complex. I’ve only mentioned a few of the neurological actors and all of them have a supporting cast.
Mind Over Matter
Now juxtapose all of those neurological functions and features with the Great Commandment:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.
Loving God with half your mind doesn’t cut it. Half-minded is no better than half-hearted. Loving God with all of your mind involves every facet of your mind. And that is what this series of evotionals will explore over the next six weeks.
I honestly believe the spiritual battle is won or lost in the mind. Most of our problems are the byproduct of stinkin thinkin. It is poor management of our minds. The battle against pride or lust or anger isn’t won in the behavioral realm. It is won in the cognitive realm.
It is amazing how many verses of Scripture talk about the importance of the mind.
Do not conform to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.
Take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ.
Study to show yourself approved.
If anything is good or right or pure of just think about such things.
Fix your mind on things above.
Let this mind be in your which was also in Christ Jesus.
The battle is won or lost in the mind. Hopefully The Neurology of Faith will help us win a few more battles.
The end goal is the mind of Christ.
When we talk about stewardship we tend to think of time and talent and treasure. And we’ve got to manage those things. But I think the most important and most difficult task is managing your mind. You’ve got to manage your memories. You’ve got to manage your image your imagination. You’ve got to manage your amygdala and hippocampus and medial ventral prefrontal cortex.
Everything traces back to the mind.
Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I say, anyone who even looks at a woman with lust in his eye has already committed adultery with her in his heart. So if your eye—even if it is your good eye—causes you to lust, gouge it out and throw it away.”
This is obviously hyperbole. But Jesus makes a pretty important point. He is saying that you’ve got to guard your visual cortex. You’ve got to be very careful what you allow to pass through your optical nerve.
I know a lot of people struggle with pornography. It is their thorn in the flesh. Lust comes back to managing the visual cortex.
Take Captive every thought.
How do you do that? How do you manage your thought life?
We have a saying around NCC: don’t let what’s wrong with you keep you from worshipping what’s right with God. But that is easier said that done isn’t it? Here’s the challenge. Research studies suggest that we talk to ourselves 50,000 times a day. And studies have found that, on average, 80% of self-talk is negative. I’m not good enough. I’m not smart enough. And, doggone it, people don’t like me.
If you have 50,000 thoughts per day that totals about eighteen million per year and roughly 1.3 billion over the course of the average lifetime.
How do we take those thoughts captive? How do we renew our minds? How do we change our mind set? How do we focus on those things that are good and right and pure and just?
We’ll talk about that in this series.
Stewardship
Let me close with one groundbreaking study in the area of plasticity. It used to be thought that the mind stopped growing or changing at some point in our development. Neurologists used to believe that we develop no new neurons past a certain point. But studies are now showing that our minds keep growing and changing if we continue to exercise them.
The groundbreaking study actually involved taxi drivers. Researchers obtained the MRI scans of a group of London taxi drivers. They discovered that the posterior hippocampus was increased in volume. The posterior hippocampus is the part of the brain responsible for spatial memory. The taxi drivers with the longest tenures had the highest volume.
The bottom line is this: neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus persists in the adult human brain.
The significance of that is this. You can keep growing and changing. You can keep renewing your mind. And that is at the heart of what being a disciple is all about.
Subsequent studies have proved the same point. Those of you who are bilingual have a larger left angular gyrus. The musicians among us have a larger Heschl’s gyrus.
The Greek word for disciple is mathetes which literally means learner. By definition, a disciple is someone who never stops learning. And that doesn’t just mean accumulating information. I think it involves every function of the mind until we literally have the mind of Christ.
We don’t just think like Jesus thought. We feel like he felt—that is the amygdala. We see like he saw—the visual cortex. We discern the way he discerned. We develop our logical left-brain and creative right-brain. We develop our memory and imagination.
For what it’s worth, neurologists estimate that we have the capacity to learn something new every minute of every hour of every day for the next three hundred million years! You are designed by God to never stop learning. Learning is a stewardship issue.
This week I had a meeting with our summer intern. Part of his internship is going through a predetermined series of discussion questions. One of the questions that came up this week was: what is your philosophy of successful pastoring? We could discuss that for days on end, but I gave him my short-answer. I can sum up my philosophy of successful pastoring in two words: keep learning. Stop learning and you stop growing. Keep learning and you keep growing. Proverbs 18:15 says, "The intelligent man is always open to new ideas." I love the way Gandhi said it. "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
