The Universe Within

Neuroscience is a burgeoning field. It is exploding with new knowledge and facts that are explaining things that have puzzled humans for centuries. It is also a field that in many ways seems to be charging headlong into conflict with religion, philosophy, and any number of other fields that had sought havens of safety beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. As is the tendency with most branches of knowledge, neuroscience is quickly being taken up ideologically to argue on behalf of whoever can manage to manipulate the data better than everyone else. And, like other branches of science, extremes are typically overblown in the public arena such that ethics slips quietly out of the purview of most. Yet, I find the interface of religion and neuroscience to be one of the most potent and interesting syntheses arising in our world.

The statistics of the human brain are staggering.
- Our brains contain up to 30 billion neurons.
- Each neuron can form up to 10,000 connections (synapses) with other neurons.
- This means that the average human brain can contain up to 300 trillion connections.

All the vastness of the universe that we can witness on a moonless, clear night is nothing in complexity compared with just one milliliter of brain tissue.

Typically, I have an aversion for math, but 300 trillion is a number that I'll listen to. The crazy thing is that these connections are plastic. They are constantly rearranging, repaving, and creatively engaging in new ways. Every experience we have rearranges hundreds of thousands of these synapses, creating memories and new patterns of energy within our heads.

This is what I think of now when I hear talk of the soul or spirit. Each of us represents a unique organization of matter in space, and this matter gives an infinitely unique, indeed unrepeatable, pattern of energy. At any given moment our brains are an energetic pattern that will never be repeated in the history of the universe. It's as though our minds are an electro-chemical fingerprint of unfathomable intricacy.

This is what I think of when the Christian/atheist animosity that rehashes old arguments over materialism vs. spirituality: Our brains are certainly matter, and science as the study of matter can come to understand them, explain them, and even manipulate them. But, this loses sight of the fact that matter is spiritual; unequivocally there is mystery that will remain. There are mental phenomena that will evade adequate scientific description, but that can still be experienced by human persons. They may be partially explainable, but only partially. Explanations are reductions. Yet, I find it to be unassailable to claim that we are material. To change a person's brain is to change the person, yet as we all change (often drastically) over the course of our lives, I find it hard to believe that there is some core essence to each of us that has eternal qualities.

I've stated previously that I don't think we are eternal. If we have a soul, then it is fleeting just as we are. Ultimately (as quasi-New Age as this will sound), I believe that God is the energy of the Universe: we are created in his image, in that we are energy too. When I think about it, I think what I just said is ridiculous, and perhaps that's why it's true. There is no way to talk about God. Mystics have said so for millennia, and I trust that they know better than me. Yet, I'll speak anyway. In some way I don't understand, God is present in the energy of the universe, much as my mind is present in the energy that enlivens my neurons. Faith tells me that he is eternal, and science tells me that I am not. So, I place my hope in him for grace: for an eternity that is not mine, and that the unique moment that "I" am, would be worthy of his memory.