On 7/5/05 6:09 AM, Nina Stoyan-Rosenzweig's electrons arrived as:

> For some people there
> is nothing wrong with that- Richard Dawkins for instance doesn't have a
> problem with that being the total of human existence.  For many, though,
> there is a deeper spiritual need and a belief in higher spiritual
> purpose.  

Nina, thank you for continuing this thread -- as others have indicated I
also agree it is of relevance to musuem personnel who must ultimately decide
how to present such sensitive and important topics to their audiences.

To some degree, your points can be summed up by the oft-heard and rather
exasperated plea offered by theists when confronted with atheism:  "Do you
mean to say THIS is all there is?" i.e., no heaven, no life-after-death, no
human-centrism to the universe, just (apparently) random chance.

But I would respond, keep in mind that the secular and non-supernatural
"THIS" includes all the deepest mysteries, the entire unknown, the sublime,
the beautiful and poignant, the thrill of existence, and I would strongly
disagree that Dawkins and other atheists do not acquire a deep "spiritual"
and emotionally fulfilling satisfaction from comprehending the world through
science and reason.

The "need" you are describing differs, I think, for theists and atheists
only to the extent that they confront the finality of death.  At its core,
religious belief is about avoiding death and the apparent lack of
meaning/purpose death casts over the whole of human existence.  It's all
about death, and although their rhetoric might give it a positive spin, I
don't know of any believers who in practice do not as gingerly avoid death
as do their non-believing counterparts.  Death sucks.

An interesting aside, though, is that while it for eons attributed certain
feats to the realm of the supernatural, the human species has been quietly
going  about achieving those same feats in the natural world.  We now
perform miraculous cures of the sick, even to the point of "resurrecting"
people who have died; we travel to the planets and romp in the playgrounds
of the gods themselves; we fly like birds; we speak across oceans.  Perhaps,
someday, we will also conquer death, halt aging, and achieve through natural
means the age-old quest for immortality.

> By the same token, findings that during prayer, the
> moment when people say they experience a connection with a supreme
> being, there are physiological changes in the brain that some
> neurologists say shows religious feelings are physical.

We would want to see a set of replicable double-blind controlled experiments
including other forms of mental concentration, meditation, listening to
music, or bio-feedback techniques, to see if the anecdotal findings you cite
are unique to prayer and therefore meaningful as evidence of a connection
with God.

One thing I've never really understood, though, about the subject: if God is
omniscient, he already has a plan and knows the outcome of all human events
in the future.  Then isn't praying for one outcome over another a form of
blasphemy -- a presumption that God might change the (already planned)
future according to the sincerity, frequency, or sheer volume (or worse,
good reasoning) of mortal prayers being offered?  By praying, isn't a person
implying that their desire for a certain outcome is more important than the
alternative which may be God's plan -- aren't they presuming to change God's
mind -- to persuade him that one outcome is better than another?

It seems to me to be a sort of "prayeradox" (forgive the pun) -- if God
truly answers prayer, then he's not omniscient; but if he's God, he has to
be omniscient.

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