An unseen God

"This notion of the unseen is an essential component in the vast majority of religious traditions. When you can grasp something - like God - with your everyday senses, you cannot dissect it in any ordinary way. Thus you cannot quantify God or reduce God into separate parts. Nor can God, at least according to the ancient Hebrew texts, be named. But to refrain from naming God interferes with the abstractive function that is designed to label every object in the world. If you can't perceive something, then how can it exist? A young child might say "It just does", and a priest might say "You need faith."

But the brain will still strive to solve such paradoxical thoughts by creating rational explanations of how such realms can exist. The Vatican library, for example, contains thousands of treatises that have attempted to categorise, label, and reduce the mysteries of the spiritual realm to fit our everyday understanding of the world. We introduce dualistic and oppositional notions such as heaven and hell, or good and evil, and we attempt to impose causal reasoning on how they will affect our lives. For example, some people come to believe that if you pray with sincerity, God will listen and respond to your concern. But if God works in mysterious ways, as most religious texts imply, how can we ever know? And so we search for miracles, or other evidence or proof, because it is far more difficult, at least as far as the normal functioning of the brain is concerned, to simply have faith in the unknown.

As long as God remains a mysterious concept, seekers will be drawn to what they do not understand, questioning and imagining what the reality or truth might be. In this sense, religious believers struggle with God in much the same way that physicists struggle with quantum mechanics, or a teenager struggles with love. Unfortunately, every attempt to grasp the totality of life from a cognitive perspective is bound to fall short, because the brain is limited in how it perceives the world. We may try to fill in the gaps with intricate beleifs, but ambiguities and uncertainties remain, and these are the very things that pull us deeper into our biological quest for knowledge, meaning and truth. Around and around we go, for whereever there is a mystery, our brains are destined to explore."

Ref: Newberg, A., Waldman, M.R. Born to Believe, New York: Free Press, 2006. pg. 98-99