A DIFFERENT BRAND OF FAITH

I often marvel at the leaps of faith required to allow one to believe that the miracle of human life just spontaneously evolved from nothingness. I've always believed that it would take far more faith not to believe that God created man and the universe than to believe that he did.

Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias, in his book "Jesus Among Other Gods," gives us some idea, in mathematical terms, of the magnitude of faith necessary to believe that the material world resulted from some random process. Zacharias quotes Chandra Wickramasinghe, professor of applied mathematics at the University of Cardiff in Wales concerning the marvels of the human cell.

Wickramasinghe "reminded his readers that the statistical probability of forming even a single enzyme, the building block of the gene, which is in turn the building block of the cell, is 1 in 10 to the 40,000th power. The translation of that figure is that it would require more attempts for the formation of one enzyme than there are atoms in all the stars of all the galaxies in the entire known universe."

Nevertheless, today's popular culture seems wedded to the bias that a belief in God is born of irrationality. The conventional wisdom is that one must leave his reason at the door in order to believe in God. Says Zacharias, "Unfortunately, for reasons justifiable and unjustifiable, individuals hostile to belief in God often malign faith in him as the lure of emotion clinging to an idea with the mind disengaged."

I have remembered Zacharias's words as I have read the many articles written lately about the work of scientists who are researching the relationship between the brain and religious experiences. The scientists are attempting to understand the physiology of spiritual experiences, apparently believing that most religion is based on these experiences, which they consider to be illusory.

Even more interesting is the researchers' speculation that mystical experiences may be the result of "decreased activity in the brain's parietal lobe."

It is amazing to me how simplistic this "scientific" approach to religion is. Just for starters the researchers fall into two obvious errors. First, they lump all religions together, which is unwarranted. For example, the Hindu concept of transcendentalism and becoming one with the universe is foreign to Christianity, which holds to a belief in a personal God and the conviction that each individual retains his unique personality never merging into the absolute.

Second, the researchers seem to assume that one's faith is wholly dependent upon mystical experiences. To the contrary (regarding Christians, at least), many Christians will tell you that though their lives have been changed since becoming Christians, they have never had a mystical experience at all and, regardless, their faith is based on much more than mere feelings.

Like it or not, many of these researchers have an agenda, and that agenda is to discredit religion in general and Christianity in particular, which they believe are responsible for most of the ills in society, such as "religious wars, fanaticism and intolerance." How ironic is the degree to which some scientists are willing to discard their scientific methods in pursuit of conclusions that support beliefs based on their secular brand of faith.

~David Limbaugh of Cape Girardeau is a lawyer, author and syndicated columnist.