NERVE ENDINGS OF THE SOUL

Combining neuroscience and Christian apology, a debut work hypothesizes scientific proof for the Holy Spirit’s interaction with the human mind.

Many believe that God exists and that he communicates with humanity, though most people are willing to concede that this phenomenon is impossible to verify with science. It is, like other aspects of religion, a matter of faith. But Lennard argues that science is capable of proving not only that such messages occur, but also that this evidence justifies the existence of the Holy Spirit and, by extension, God himself: “I will endeavor to give justification for the hypothesis that the Holy Spirit through the human spirit interacts in the transmission of specified information to the human mind through synaptic transmission in neural networks, a stochastic process.” In layperson’s terms, the Holy Spirit communicates with the human spirit (the intangible essence of a person, i.e. the soul) by manipulating the physical brain. Lennard seeks to demonstrate this using the contemporary understanding of quantum mechanics and synaptic transmission. Just as a radio receives radio waves and translates them into sound waves that audiences can hear, humans’ brains receive messages from the Holy Spirit and convert them into a language that they can understand. The reverse process (prayer) is also possible. Ambitiously mixing personal experience, research, and the work of previous thinkers (particularly the neurophysiologist, philosopher, and Nobel laureate John Carew Eccles), Lennard discusses this process and how it relates to Scripture, near-death experiences, and information theory. The author’s prose is highly specialized and will be mostly inaccessible for readers with no knowledge of neurophysiology: “Interaction between mental events and quantum probability amplitudes for exocytosis couples in coherent fashion a large number of individual amplitudes of hundreds of thousands of boutons.” The opacity of such an argument makes it difficult to evaluate. Lennard begins with the presumption that the Christian God exists and speaks to humans, and it is likely that those who share that belief will be the most persuaded by his findings. For readers who like a lot of science with their apology, the author displays a great deal of ingenuity in his thinking and offers an extensive and useful bibliography.

An inventive neurological argument for the existence of God.