System Of Faith

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.

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!

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.

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 grab a cup of coffee. You pay for the coffee and 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.

Now compare 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.