I think neuroscience is going to play a huge part in reshaping our understanding of what it means to be human.

One of the central arguments I make in Discovering the God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity is where we locate the problem.  Historically we’ve cast the problem outward onto Satan or God.  I make the argument that the problem is located in the mind. I use the story of Scripture to show that the problem arises when humanity “realizes” a perspective of reality that is different from God’s.  This dissonance creates the distinction of “sin” which is a disorientation of reality, a lie if you will.

But recently I was reading a very important book that seems to provide further evidence supporting this idea.  Its called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Human Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  I’ve mentioned it before in regards to how we see community.  Mihaly (his first name, because you can even say his last name) explores the idea that the brain operates in a state of chaos.

“Contrary to what we tend to assume, the normal state of the mind is chaos. Without training, and without an object in the external world that demands our attention, people are unable to focus their thoughts for more than a few minutes.

The social roles culture prescribes then take care of shaping our minds for us, and we generally place ourselves on automatic pilot till the end of the day, when it is time again to lose consciousness in sleep. But when we are left alone the basic disorder of the mind reveals itself.”

The mind begins in a state of chaos.  I argue that this disorder of the mind does two things.  One it locates the problem for us.  It gives us a constant physical experience of where the problem actually is.  Its not in God.  It is in us.  Two, it invites us into the God imagination, a way of seeing reality, and to mimic God by bringing order to the chaos.  This act of bringing order to the chaos is only possible through love, which is the judgment of good.  It begins when we align our logic system to how God sees us.

Mihaly then suggests something startling, which I also touch on in my book.  The problem is designed to hide by our own distraction.  We in essence participate in our own oppression by avoiding the problem because it is located in the self.

“To avoid this condition, people are naturally eager to fill their minds with whatever information is readily available, as long as it distracts attention from turning inward and dwelling on negative feelings.”

Unless we listen to the problem we can’t solve it.

This is a very interesting video of Jon Stewart interviewing Marilynne Robinson.  She explores the tension between science and religion and suggests that scientists are not being honest about their own science.  For the sake of good atheism they need to admit their limitations.

Stewart is a great interviewer here asking who is more afraid.  He suggests, “the more you delve into science the more it relies on faith.”

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A Spanish mathematician crunches the numbers on successful relationships:

The results of the mathematical analysis showed when both members of union are similar emotionally they have an “optimal effort policy,” which results in a happy, long-lasting relationship. The policy can break down if there is a tendency to reduce the effort because maintaining it causes discomfort, or because a lower degree of effort results in instability. Paradoxically, according to the second law model, a union everyone hopes will last forever is likely break up, a feature Rey calls the “failure paradox”.

According to the model, successful long-term relationships are those with the most tolerable gap between the amount of effort that would be regarded by the couple as optimal and the effort actually required to keep the relationship happy. The mathematical model also implies that when no effort is put in the relationship can easily deteriorate.

I have to chalk this one up to, “As if we didn’t already know that.” But it helps to have a little scientific research to validate the idea.

Ryan Sager offers up a neat little experiment from a guy named Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago.  Ryan describes the experiment below.

Epley asked different groups of volunteers to rate their own beliefs about important issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, affirmative action, the death penalty, the Iraq War, and the legalisation of marijuana. The volunteers also had to speculate about God’s take on these issues, as well as the stances of an “average American”, Bill Gates (a celebrity with relatively unknown beliefs) and George Bush (a celebrity whose positions are well-known).

Epley surveyed commuters at a Boston train station, university undergraduates, and 1,000 adults from a nationally representative database. In every case, he found that people’s own attitudes and beliefs matched those they suggested for God more precisely than those they suggested for the other humans

Of course, correlation doesn’t imply causation – rather than people imprinting their beliefs onto God, it could be that people were using God’s beliefs as a guide to their own. Epley tried to control for that by asking his recruits to talk about their own beliefs first, and then presenting God and the others in a random order. And as better evidence of causality, Epley showed that he could change people’s views on God’s will by manipulating their own beliefs.

He showed some 145 volunteers a strong argument in favour of affirmative action (it counters workplace biases) and a weak argument opposing it (it raises uncomfortable issues). Others heard a strong argument against (reverse discrimination) and a weak argument for (Britney and Paris agree!). The recruits did concur that the allegedly stronger argument was indeed stronger. Those who read the overall positive propaganda were not only more supportive of affirmative action but more likely to think that God would be in the pro-camp too.

Ryan breaks it down for us.

In another experiment, Epley had people change their own opinions, by writing an essay in favor of or opposed to their own view on a subject. Needless to say, God’s opinion once again moved along with the the subjects’ (and the subjects’ views moved in line with whatever they wrote — another little cognitive bias we have).

Finally, Epley found that when people contemplated God’s opinions, their brains activated similarly to when they were contemplating their own opinions — the same was not true when they contemplated the opinions of other people.

So, what does it mean? Well, as they say: “God created man in his own image and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.”

All I can say is, “Doooooooooh!”  I’ve said it before that I think neuroscience is going to go a long way towards breaking down our traditional notions of religion, so that we can get back to what it means to be human.

This is an interesting video for all the wrong reasons.  It’s a response of a group of people (Campus Crusade for Christ, Alliance Defense Fund, and Answers In Genesis) attempting to defend against the celebration the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.

At 3:00 into the video, Kirk says:

“We’re working…to get (50,000) copies of Darwin’s Origin of Species into the hands of this generation.  And all we want to do is present the opposing and CORRECT view, rather than being censored, which is exactly the case at present.”

And then he offers what is essentially a ruse:

“These students aren’t stupid.  They should be given both sides of the argument and allowed to make up their own minds, right?  We think that’s healthy.”

Okay I have to say it.  That’s bullshit. By his own admission he predetermined the outcome for the students by claiming its the correct version.  He’s defined the acceptable answer for them before the dialog begins.  That’s no longer a dialog.

And if the corresponding bodies involved actually believed student could make up their own minds, they’d be leading the way in terms of presenting both theories in their own houses by actually allowing people to make up their own minds.  But they don’t.  They do exactly the same thing they are criticizing their adversaries for. Only when the playing field is controlled by the adversary do they make such demands.  If they wanted to be honest, they would have been leading the way in churches.  They would have been creating dialogs to learn and understand rather that defend and destroy.

I think one of the interesting quandaries for me is why the theory of evolution is so hard for people to understand as a generative concept in creation.  But the reality is that it doesn’t fit within a framework of a God who controls everything.  Evolution doesn’t allow for predetermination.  It suggest that God allows us to be involved in the process.  Evolution doesn’t negate the story of Genesis, or creationism.  It invites us to participate with God in what He is doing.

PS: Matt Kelley found the original video, so you can blame him. ;-P I love what he says in his post.

“The issue for these people isn’t about faith in God or even the authority of the Bible, really. It’s about the authority of their interpretation of the Bible. In other words, the authority of them. And that’s scary.”

There is also a very subversive counter argument to the above video that made me laugh…again for all the wrong reasons.  Oh well.

[See Embedded Video - It's hilarious]

What is our fascination with emotion?

In this seven minute prank video, two friends engage in the second part of a prank war.  The set up is amazingly elaborate and the payoff was perfect.  It elicited exactly the emotional response the prankster was looking for.

Watching it seemed to confirm something that I’ve been noticing for a long time.  As broken human beings, we seek out emotionally resonate experiences that remind us of what is missing in our lives. The event in the video is entirely manufactured.  But it still resonates, regardless.   We still buy it.  This specific video was Digged 7985 times and had 3771 thumbs-up approvals as of writing this.  And you can watch it over and over again and largely produce the same result.

I would suggest that this same motivation lies behind watching and playing sports, competing in events, attending parties.  These experiences provide us with emotionally resonate experiences.

What do you think?

Are you adding your “bit” of value to the Kingdom, or are you letting the expert do it for you?

I’m in the process of listening to the audiobook Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe.  It’s one of those rare books that offers a compelling look at a phenomenon as it is happening.  Crowdsourcing looks at how ideas are developed through the wisdom and energy of the crowd.  Think Linux and open source and mobs.  Wikipedia is perhaps the best known example of crowdsourcing, but it has also impacted patents, scientific development, entertainment, and photography as well.

One of the fundamental tensions in crowdsourcing is the idea that the supposed “amateur” can add as much value as the “expert.”  Crowdsourcing is proving that collective intelligence can add as much, if not more, essential value than the expert.  But the idea is predicated on each person adding a “bit” of value instead of having to produce the whole.  The expert model on the other hand contends that one person can add large amounts of value.  The downside is that it takes the expert a long time, where the collective can reduce that time by magnitudes. The expert is also limited to the frame of the person’s expertise, where the crowd likely included that missing knowledge.  Or it just needed to simply expand a “bit” to add the missing value.

The real power of crowds is in its diverse knowledge.  Research determined that diverse crowds competing against experts produced a better result…every time.  How references the work of Scott E. Page, who documented his findings in The Difference.  Page said,

“Given certain conditions a randomly selected collection of problem solvers outperforms a collection of the best individual problem solvers.”

Think about that for a second when applied to orthodoxy, or some other important matter.  The prevailing notion in history has been that smart white guys will get the job done if we just let them lead.  But research proves the crowd consistently outperforms them.

Page’s reasoning was that the experts were trained at the same institutions and would thus think the same way about certain things.  In other words, their background predisposed them to a certain way of solving the problem, which severely limited them when facing a problem they had not been trained to solve.  The crowd on the other hand usually included someone who had some background in a different way.

This tension of crowdsourcing is that it potentially puts people out of a job.  It doesn’t take a scholar to realize that collective intelligence that can figure out the answer in one tenth of the time is a better option than one person figured it out over a long period of time.

I would suggest that this tension between amateur and expert is also beginning to work itself out in the world of “church”.  No longer are people settling for the traditional banking model of education where the expert painstakingly figures it all out for us and then downloads it into our brains on Sunday mornings.  We’re wired.  We’re connected.  We’re smart.  And we don’t have to figure it all out.  We just have to figure out a “bit” of it.  And then collective we can begin to learn together, sharing ideas.  The Internet provided the means of connectivity.  Blogs provided the means of conversation.  Twitter even provides the means of thinking out loud.

The common concern with crowdsourcing is that the collective intelligence will quickly turn into anarchy.  But the wikipedia model has revealed the remarkable willingness of the crowd to police themselves.  Given the permission to figure it out, we will.  And we’ll protect it diligently for the sake of the collective concern.  In other words, permission didn’t produce the worst case scenario.  It produced the best.  What the critics didn’t realize is that the root of the word amateur comes from the word “lover”.  In other words, the amateur is drawn to the subject because of a love for it.  There is then a built in mechanism to add and protect value.

In many ways, crowdsourcing is Emergence on display.  The scientific process of Emergence is essentially the idea that in chaos, the crowd will self organize in ways that at some point brings value to the system that were not present before the problem started.  I think we’re seeing this happen in the church.  We’re wrestling with questions of atonement, sexuality, discipleship, Kingdom, and some of the fundamental problems between the amateurs and the experts.  And it’s causing a lot of tension.

What’s interesting to me is that Jesus seemed to prefer the amateur crowdsourcing model of leadership.  He empowered the little guy to take responsibility for his own restoration.  He called him to a non-banking model of education and instead called him to follow.  Each added a bit of value to the larger Kingdom.  Some would argue that Jesus’ declaration to Peter could be construed as a commission of ultimate leadership, but I would argue that it’s a flimsy grasp for power.  Jesus released the disciples to “go and make more disciples”.  He empowered them ALL.

Which brings us back to the original question.  Are we adding our “bit” of value to the kingdom, or are we letting the expert do it for us?  Because if we continue simply trusting the experts, we’re going to be missing out.

PS: A couple of days agao I ran into this short post by Tony Steward who asks are we willing to embrace the humility necessary to foster a larger vision for Kingdom.  Experts tend to build small domains that must be protected, where amateurs and the crowd are contributing to a larger Kingdom that no one gets to control.  In other words, it broadens the barriers in a way that is inclusive.  And it looks like remarkably like what Jesus set up.