[CORRECTION] Pat, a commenter at traditionalist biog TitusOneNine, responding to some things I’d written there, recounted a heart-wrenching story of finally finding peace, after the death of his her daughter and other searing experiences, by accepting Jesus and giving his her life to God. I grieve with Pat for her loss, and I’m glad she has found peace. But I’m not able to share her leap of faith about cause and effect.
Not Just a Christian Phenomenon, Nor Always a Beneficial One
The phenomenon of finding peace is by no means unique to Christians. Adherents of other religious- and spiritual traditions have reported similar experiences — and sometimes, the achievement of complete clarity, of absolute and utter certainty, about How Things Are (supposedly) — attributing these effects to their particular beliefs or practices.
Sometimes this feeling of peace-and-clarity can be beneficial. It often manifests itself in things like charitable acts.
At other times, however, the feeling can lead to bad things: To bigotry. To ethnic cleansing. To suicide, e.g., by the Heaven’s Gate cult. Even to mass murder, e.g., by suicide bombers.
Brain Mysteries
Whatever else Pat’s finding-peace experience might have been, it was at least in part a psychological phenomenon, mediated by physiological structures and processes in her brain. Unfortunately, we know very little about how the brain works in this regard.
Moreover, we know from experience that the human body and mind are incredibly complicated, and we can easily misunderstand cause and effect in them. Doctors know this all too well; the TV series House, M.D. is built around precisely this premise. Last year, two Aussie physicians received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for demonstrating that one bit of conventional cause-and-effect thinking was wrong: common peptic ulcers are caused, not by diet or stress (although those things can exacerbate the problem), but by a bacterium.
So when believers offer explanations of their finding-peace experiences, we shouldn’t feel bad if we’re reluctant to accept their explanations at face value. Quite the contrary.
Obeying the Commandment to Love God With Our Whole Minds
In his preaching, Jesus stressed the Great Commandment, which notably includes the injunction to love God with our whole minds. Presumably we want to follow that injunction in analyzing the facts alluded to above.
Traditionalists offer us one possible explanation of the finding-peace experience: that one Yeshua of Nazareth, a Galilean Jew crucified 2,000 years ago, was in fact God incarnate and the Risen Lord of the Universe. I have no quarrel with folks who simply feel in their hearts that this explanation is correct (although I think they’re wrong). But it seems to me that, in these circumstances, the Great Commandment imposes a duty on us: We must gather more data about the phenomena we’ve observed, and we must consider other possible explanations for those phenomena, before we proclaim this explanation to be the Ultimate Truth of Creation.
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