Fingerprints of God

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

  Or consider spiritual “experience.” Materialists can say that our brains evolved so that we would experience profound numinous sensations. For no particular reason, during meditation or an emotional breakdown, on a walk in the mountains or on the cusp of death, some people feel a union with all things, an overpowering love, a light that eviscerates the fear of death. One explanation is that this is a quirk of evolution. But is it not just as plausible to posit that there is a Mind who wired us with the ability to access that Mind and tap into invisible realities?

  William James considered the dichotomy between “materialism” and “spiritualism” a hundred years ago. He argued that both are internally logical. He asserted that a material worldview that excludes a Creator and a spiritual worldview that includes one can both explain natural phenomena, such as the motion of the planets, or the evolution of the universe and life.You can believe either explanations for life and leave it at that. It is when you look toward the future that you see how differently the two views play out. As Professor Darren Staloff described it in his lecture on James’s pragmatism,7 materialism holds that eventually our sun will die, Earth will be destroyed, the universe will collapse on itself, and everything we hoped or dreamed or achieved or learned will be for naught. A spiritual worldview, however, leaves room for hope—that all we accomplish, all we are, will be preserved for eternity “if only in the mind of God.”

  The real distinction between a material and spiritual worldview, James wrote, does not rest “in hair-splitting abstractions about matter’s inner essence, or about the metaphysical attributes of God. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.”8

  Given the choice, I throw my lot in with hope.

  A century after William James wrote those words, I believe there is even more reason to bank on the existence of God. It seems to me that the instruments of brain science are picking up something beyond this material world. It seems plausible to me that we perceive the ineffable with spiritual senses, and when the spiritual experience ebbs, it leaves a residue in one’s brain or body.

  Science is showing that a spiritual experience leaves fingerprints, evidence that a spiritual transaction has occurred. This is hardly a surprising statement: science shows that any significant experience, especially an extraordinary one that lasts longer than thirty minutes, leaves an indelible mark on the brain. A near-death experience after a car crash, a spontaneous mystical experience, hours of prayer and meditation over the years, a seizure in which one hears the “voice of God”—of course these mental events sculpt the physical brain that mediates them.

  After the encounter, the brain is physiologically different. For adepts in Buddhist meditation, the brain waves sprint along in perfect synchrony. For experts in Christian prayer, the encounter may allow them to quiet certain spatial lobes of their brain so that they feel at one with the universe. A brush with death appears to slow one’s brain-wave activity and jump-start a profound spiritual life. Psychedelic drugs and the electrical storm of temporal lobe epilepsy may open the “reducing valve” that filters out information, and allow people to perceive another, nonmaterial, dimension.

  At first I was befuddled by these wildly divergent brain patterns and experiences, but then I began to perceive a theme. Simply put, when you bump against the spiritual, something changes. First, your brain begins to operate differently, even at resting state. Second, your interior life is transformed.Your priorities and loves, how you choose to spend your time and with whom you choose to spend it—all that changes in the blink of an eye. And for me at least, the catalyst for this upheaval is God.

  Nature and nurture, my DNA and my upbringing, all no doubt inclined me toward embracing this sort of spiritual science. What I did not expect in the course of my research, however, was a radical re-definition of God.

  The scientists I interviewed rarely spoke of a personal God, except for geneticist Francis Collins, who described a God who loves math, creates a universe, and hankers for intelligent beings who “wonder if there is more.” Usually, they recognized the stunning precision of the laws of the universe, laws that govern particles and galaxies alike. Einstein spoke of a “superior mind,” Stephen Hawking of something that “breathes fire into the equations” of the universe. Philosopher Aldous Huxley posited “Mind at Large,” Dean Radin suggested an “entangled” tapestry of information, and Larry Dossey spoke of “non-local mind.”

  These men found God in very large things and very small ones, the vast universe and the microscopic cell. As for me, I set out to test God writ small, but not too small. My subjects were human-sized, and I found evidence of the spiritual painted on the canvas of a person’s life. I came to define God by His handiwork: a craftsman who builds the hope of eternity into our genes, a master electrician and chemist who outfits our brains to access another dimension, a guru who rewards our spiritual efforts by allowing us to feel united with all things, an intelligence that pervades every atom and every nanosecond, all time and space, in the throes of death or the ecstasy of life.

  This view of God and spiritual reality offers an alternative to superstition. It allows you to steer through an all-or-nothing attitude—that either there is a God who intervenes, depending on His mood and whether you’ve been naughty or nice; or that “God” is the product of ignorance and we live in a cold, uncaring, random universe. It seems to me that advances in science, and particularly in quantum physics, are offering another description of reality in which all things are guided by and connected to an infinite Mind. This description, of course, echoes the words of mystics down the ages.

  As I absorbed the science, I found this was the “God” I could defend most easily—not so much a divine “father” as an infinite creator of law and life. Without realizing it at first, I had looped back to the faith of my childhood. I found myself staring squarely at Mary Baker Eddy’s definition of God: “Principle; Mind; Soul; Spirit; Life; Truth; Love; all substance; intelligence.”9 Perhaps Mrs. Eddy was onto something. Perhaps her view of reality presaged what quantum physicists and astrophysicists are finding today.

  A Second Look at Christian Science

  I remember precisely when I made the connection between my research and Christian Science, and its firm belief that coming in line with spiritual laws will bring about a human solution or healing. I was attending a near-death-experience conference at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, listening to Penny Sartori, the spunky intensive-care nurse from Wales. In her presentation, she described the case of Michael Richards, a sixty-year-old patient who suffered from cerebral palsy that left his right hand curled inward and useless. He had been that way since birth. One day while in the hospital, Richards’s heart stopped beating, his vital signs suddenly flatlined, and he remained unresponsive for half an hour. He later claimed to have left his body during those thirty minutes and watched the resuscitation from a place somewhere above his bed. He described in precise detail how the doctor had shined a light on his pupils, how Sartori had placed something “long and pink”—a sponge dipped in water—into his mouth to clean it, and how the physiotherapist had repeatedly poked her head around the curtain to see how he was faring.

  But there was a twist to Mr. Richards’s story that emerged later, as Sartori interviewed him about his near-death experience.

  “I said to him,‘While you were in your out-of-body state, was there something you could do that you couldn’t do in your body?’ ” she told the audience. Usually, she explained, patients recalled being able to see without their glasses, or being transported to another location.

  “But he misunderstood me and said, ‘Oh yeah, look at my hand. I can open my hand.’ ”

  She flashed a photograph onto the screen. The audience gasped. Michael Richards was holding up his right hand for the camera. No longer palsied, his fingers were now straight and he was splaying them
like a starfish. A wide grin beamed from his face.

  “I discussed this with the physiotherapists, the ones who looked after him, and also independent ones,” Sartori told me later. “And they all said this shouldn’t be possible, because his hand should be in a permanently contracted position. The tendons were shortened, so in order for him to open his hand, he would have to have an operation to release the tendons. And no such operation was performed. So it’s quite remarkable that this happened.”

  It seemed, at least to the puzzled doctors, that Mr. Richards’s contact with death somehow broke the physical laws that held him in bondage. But what if no laws of nature were in fact broken? What if he came in line with spiritual laws that we do not yet understand, in the same way that scientists a millennium ago did not understand the laws of aerodynamics even as they watched birds take flight?

  Michael Richards’s story persuaded me to open the box I had shelved for more than a decade and reexamine my original faith. It prompted me to reflect on the moment of my most dramatic “healing.” I was fourteen years old and suffering from scarlet fever. I remember lying on the bathroom floor, pressing my feverish forehead on the cool tiles. Suddenly, my perspective shifted, and I seemed to be outside my body, viewing it as separate from my conscious identity. (Now I realize it was an out-of-body experience.) I marveled that “I” could be teased apart from that miserable being on the bathroom floor. For a few seconds, I felt no pain and no fever. Then I returned to the prison of my body. But a few minutes later, the fever left me for good and the rash on my face disappeared.

  By the end of my year of research about God and science, I was persuaded that these recoveries were not mere coincidence. I was a little closer to understanding the mechanics of how these perplexing healings might work: psychoneuroimmunology, for example, or the power of thought to affect my body, was probably at work. It struck me that these events occur when people who are hurtling along in life suddenly ricochet off of some kind of spiritual truth, and their condition suddenly changes. Not always because of their prayers and theology—Michael Richards was not deep in prayer before his heart stopped; he was chatting with his nurse—but because of, well, location. They walked into grace, like wandering into a patch of sunshine on a gloomy winter day, and were changed by the encounter. Christian Scientists are more deliberate. They don’t wander about aimlessly; they set out to find that spiritual law, like a New Yorker who marches out to Broadway to hail a cab. Somehow, it seems, the daily mental practice of Christian Science prayer places a person in the path of spiritual power.

  Maybe that is what happened to Michael Richards. Maybe that is what happened to me on the cold tile floor.

  Rethinking My Beliefs

  When I began my search to understand the spiritual, I was figuratively and literally on a dark mountain in Tennessee, blindly feeling my way along and expecting to stumble with each footfall. I had, by choice, wandered far from the comfortable terrain of the valley, with its paved roads and dinner at eight o’clock sharp. I consciously put my faith to the test. I was frankly worried about the outcome. For the faith I had acquired and polished over the previous decade was a lovely thing. At its center shined a personal God, one who would sit down with me at a wedding reception and share a glass of wine.

  As I delved into the science, I realized I need not discard my faith. Rather, I must distinguish it from spiritual experience. A yawning distinction separates the two. Unlike spiritual experience, religious belief can never be tested by a brain scanner or even by historical record. No one can prove that Jesus is the Son of God.What religious belief does is attempt to explain in a compelling narrative the unseen reality that lies at the heart of spiritual experience.

  I remember once pondering, if God wanted to speak to us, what would He say? For Jews and Christians and Muslims, who believe that the Torah, Bible, and Koran were inspired by God, the answer is simple: God tells stories. He tells stories so we can relate to Him, because each of us is, after all, a story that unfolds minute by minute, day by day. He writes about a hundred-year-old nomad named Abraham who fathered two great tribes. He writes about a shepherd boy named David who felled a giant and became a king. He writes about a prostitute who was forgiven, a blind man who gained his sight, an epileptic boy whose seizures were stilled. For Christians, the greatest story of all tells of a Son who was nailed to a cross, a story of sacrifice and redemption and, most of all, love. And so I fell in love with a story, that of a Christian God who is intensely interested in our lives.

  As I studied spirituality, however, it became clear to me that there were elements of my religious beliefs that I would have to discard, or at least view with a skeptical eye. First, I simply cannot read the Bible literally. For one thing, its internal contradictions (witness the two versions of Jesus healing the Centurion’s servant in two Gospels) show that the Bible was written by flawed human beings. I believe Scripture is inspired. But when the literal reading of the text conflicts with tested and established science—six-day creation versus evolution, for example—I believe science wins. That does not mean that Scripture is wrong. Any Christian theologian will argue that Genesis is sound theology. But Genesis is not, and never was intended to be, a peer-reviewed article in a scientific journal. Scripture is metaphorical, explaining the world in a way that humans could understand at the time it was written, thousands of years ago. I do not think it was meant to be freeze-framed for all eternity.

  That one was easy, since I never did subscribe to the literal inerrancy of the Bible. More problematic was the central tenet of Christianity—that there is only one way to God. When it comes to spiritual experience, there is not one story, and it certainly is not Jesus, not for everyone, not by a long shot. This became blindingly evident as I listened hour after hour to people with radically different story lines—ones that may or may not include God or religion but that involve a transforming encounter with another type of reality that is every bit as powerful to them as the Christian story is to me. These people are as “born again”—with a new outlook, dreams, behaviors, and beliefs—as any evangelical I have met.What story they selected, or what religion they followed, is their own best shot at making sense of something unexplainable—the ache for the eternal, the gnawing suspicion that Earth is not our home.

  Embracing a particular faith, I came to believe, is a little like hopping in a car.You can drive wherever you like: some head to Rome, others to Mecca or the Western Wall. Still others exit the highways to find the winding roads called “spiritual but not religious.” But what makes the car run is not the color, or the leather upholstery, or even the destination. What makes it run is under the hood—the complex and wondrous mix of physical wiring, chemical reactions, and electrical charges, all of which are the handiwork of a mechanic. Spiritual experience is the engine that transports you from one place to another—and I believe that ability to perceive and engage God is written in each person’s genetic code and brain wiring. Religion is the overlay that allows people to navigate the world, and I came to believe that no one religion has an exclusive franchise on God, or truth.

  This, I know, puts me outside the circle of much of modern (certainly evangelical) Christianity. I was forced once again to wrestle with the trump card flung in the face of every Christian believer who begins to question that premise: the statement in which Jesus Himself said He was the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to God but by Him. I could not reconcile the literal statement with my reporting.

  But it seems to me that Jesus’ words suggest what we do, and not what we proclaim. When Jesus says that the way to eternal life is to follow Him, that means trying to live as He did—feeding the poor, helping those who cannot benefit you, loving your enemies, sacrificing rather than promoting yourself, living as if every moment on earth counts for eternity. Can I prove that Jesus is the Son of God? Of course not. Does my instinct tell me that He is the Son of God, and that I should try to emulate Him? It does, and that instinct makes me better.


  You do not have to wear a gold cross around your neck to have that kind of heart. Anyone can follow Jesus’ example. I have always felt that, but the science persuaded me. Buddhist and Christian meditators reach a very similar spiritual state through the same neurological pathways. The specific content of their beliefs differs, but the underlying spirituality does not. My reporting shows that anyone who has encountered the spiritual—through a brush with death or an unexpected epiphany or even a psychedelic trip—is transformed emotionally and often neurologically. Who am I to start proclaiming one type of experience as real and another as false?

  And if I’m wrong? Well, if I’m wrong, I can only hope that the central character in my story, who included a skeptic named Thomas among His closest friends, would see in my questions an honest search for the truth. And, perhaps, He would approve.

  In the end, nothing I have learned in the past year undercuts the fundamentals of my Christian faith. I did not lose the young man on the cross, although the old man with a beard can no longer encompass the grandeur and genius of the God I embrace today. I can still believe because my faith rests not on quantum physics or mathematical equations but on an internal witness: a whisper that the story I have chosen is true, that it explains the world. It tells me that the universe is stitched together not just by infinite intelligence but also by love and justice and beauty. These qualities emerge from an elegant Being who revels in things above and beyond the orbit of the planets and the consciousness of man.

  My story tells me that we are guided by moral laws, laws that are written in our hearts and genes. It tells me that some behaviors are better than others, some ways to live are more enduring and purposeful. I cannot prove a moral law but I do know instinctively that diving into a rushing river to save a drowning man is nobler than running off to find a rope. There is a hierarchy in morality that is universal—self-sacrifice is everywhere feted and murder is everywhere condemned—but the hierarchy is not derived from physics. It arises from an internal place, a “God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man,” as Blaise Pascal had it, and while that may testify to a moral universe, it is the job of faith to explain the mystery in words that an ordinary person can comprehend. The God who loves math also loves stories, because in the story of faith, the created finds the heart of the Creator.