Matthew Alper, author of The God Part of the Brain, argues religion is a genetically inherited trait tied to human awareness of mortality, backed by neurophysiology and brain scans. Callers like Brian from Indiana dismiss his claims as "full of crap," citing perceived divine evidence, while Alper counters with temporal lobe epilepsy studies and the lack of empirical proof for souls or afterlife. A caller from Wisconsin warns atheism leaves no purpose, but Alper insists mortality awareness fosters cooperation without eternal repercussions. Unknown 17040 insists human intelligence and ethics prove a divine creator, yet Alper frames them as biological survival mechanisms. The debate reveals whether spirituality stems from brain chemistry or transcends materialism, leaving listeners to weigh science against faith. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening and or good morning wherever you may be across this great land of ours.
Starting in the west, commercially from the Tahitian and Hawaiian Islands, exotic thoughts come to mind eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, equally exotic.
South into many exotic parts of South America.
North all the way to the frigid but thawing Pole.
And worldwide on the internet, this is posted post AM and I'm Art Bell.
He is actually the deputy administrator for the National Institute for Discovery Science in Las Vegas, sponsored by a guy with a whole lot of money, Bob Bigelow.
And this group, complimentary to what Peter Davenport does, Peter, of course, on yesterday, you know, they've got the resources, and if something big happens in ufology or the world of the paranormal, they can put PhDs on airplanes and they can be on the spot.
And in fact, thanks to many of you out there and the tips, that's exactly what they have done.
So in a moment, we're going to get an update on what NIDS has done, is doing, and will do.
Colin Colorher coming up shortly.
Sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for.
And I was wishing yesterday for a song called Black Velvet, which has been haunting me, and somebody who emailed me as well.
And so I asked on the air, all of you, to please help me out.
Well, my email account at mindspring.com almost caused a denial of service attack on MindSpring because so many people answered the question.
Oh my God, I got a lot of email.
Thank you all.
I've got the song.
We'll get to it later this morning.
Right now, here is the Deputy Administrator for the Institute, National Institute for Discovery Science in Las Vegas, Nevada, the man who runs all the day-to-day operations at NIDS.
We were really impressed with the way the guys got on your show, and they were very articulate and exact in their descriptions of this very large crowd.
Yeah, we sent two people out there for several days and interviewed a bunch of eyewitnesses.
And we think we've been able to construct a flight path for this very large, low-flying black triangle that came in off Lake Michigan, just north of Chicago, traveling in a southwesterly direction.
It was first picked up about 10 p.m. on the night of the 4th.
Picked up by an eyewitness just north of Chicago, just on the border of Lake Michigan.
And it was traveling in a southwesterly direction, heading southwest.
The next eyewitness that has it was just north of Highland, Illinois, which is a couple of hundred miles southwest.
But it was picked up northeast of Highland, traveling at exactly the same altitude in the same direction at about 4 a.m.
So it was traveling very, very slowly.
Now, this thing was festooned with bright and even blinding lights, traveling at approximately 1,000 feet.
It was then picked up by the first police officer in Lebanon, again traveling southwest, coming from the northeast.
The dispatch is very, very interesting because essentially we have, not only do we have four different police officers as eyewitnesses, but we have police officers who are waiting to see something.
In other words, they were in observe mode.
They didn't walk into something and have a total surprise.
So because of that, we think it's a high-quality eyewitness event.
So the thing was traveling in a southwesterly direction.
Well, there is some discrepancy between the eyewitnesses about the size, but if you take the broad spectrum or the consensus, the size was somewhere around 200 to 300 feet long.
One of the police officers actually shut off his lights, shut off his vehicle engine, and shut everything down so that he could actually get out of his vehicle and listen to it.
And he said that there was no sound and that the closest the object came to him was about 1,000 feet in his estimation.
Now, one of the interesting things about it was the ability apparently to accelerate to extremely high speeds, which it did from Lebanon to about Shiloh.
And apparently it covered that gap in a very, very short time.
We're talking seconds, several miles in a few seconds.
And there was no discernible increase or decrease in the lights.
No afterburn, no sound, nothing.
It just, according to the police officer, it appeared to be right beside him at one stage, and then the next time, next seconds, as he was talking on the walkie-talkie, it was right across the sky.
So he was just in mid-conversation when they picked it up at the next side.
The other thing that seems to be puzzling if we're talking about a secret stealth black military program that is flying at Blimp is that the craft was literally festooned with blinding lights.
According to at least two of the police officers, the lights were extremely bright.
It was traveling at about 1,000 feet, so that's very, very low.
I mean, if it's a stealth aircraft and you're flying over populated areas of the U.S., albeit some of them sparsely, you wouldn't put blinding lights on the craft, would you?
Well, we think that the delusional episode is probably not tenable at all because of the quality of the eyewitnesses.
What really became apparent when we went through the transcripts and we listened to the officers talking was that these guys were waiting for something to show up.
It was like they were sitting there in observer mode.
Now, Peter Gerston is in court down in California, and he did an FOIA request asking the government to come back and give any information it had on triangular craft.
And the government came back, and first the box, you could actually see was checked.
Yes, we have information.
Then it was crossed out, and no was put there.
And so Peter Gerston is in court in California arguing a case saying our government is being non-responsive, exhibiting bad faith.
They've got.
Look, in my opinion, and Aiden, you can echo in if you want, this thing is absolutely in our skies.
I've seen it.
Millions have seen it.
Policemen, airline pilots have seen it.
It's in our skies.
So either it's our own government's craft or it's a craft from elsewhere and our government knows about it.
Well, we think from the numbers of calls that we've got in the last couple of weeks regarding this sighting, there's been a lot of activity in that area, even before the night of January 5th and subsequent to the night of January 5th.
Now, you mentioned the court case, but one of the recent calls that we got was from a lady who is very, very articulate in how she described this thing, and she said that it was literally just over the treetops.
She put it at about 200 to 300 feet long, and it was literally just over the treetops.
She actually started running because she thought it was going to crash.
It was that low.
And this thing did a perfect swivel right over her head.
In other words, it did a flat bank.
It didn't bank like a 747 does by going on its side.
It didn't seem to need any airlift whatsoever.
It seemed to make the turn and then head over Lake Michigan.
It was, according to her, an extraordinary maneuver without any sound whatsoever.
But this thing was so low, she said that there were radio towers, smokestacks, you know, chimneys in the area that were about 100 feet tall.
She said this thing was a hazard, a safety hazard, and it was flying so low the slightest mistake could have caused it to crash.
Would it be your view, Colum, that I understand that we have secret programs?
We all live near Area 51 here, where they do a lot of the secret stuff.
So I understand that.
I mean, we have reasons to have ongoing black budget programs, I'm sure.
I'm comfortable with that.
If the government would come back and say, yes, we understand the sightings of these objects, but it's a matter of national security, that might be all right.
But they're saying, oh, no, we have never seen or do we know anything about or have any object of this sort in our arsenal.
Well, it it there does seem to be an inconsistency there with the way this the numbers of reports that we've got for the last several weeks seems to mitigate against a military program in that the the craft is taking these enormous risks in crashing.
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 10, 2000.
The Lord that we just found and the reasoning of his latest spring.
Thank you.
He talked and talked, and I heard him say that she had all this fucking pair, the prettiest green stars anywhere.
and reasoning of his latest fame.
Though I smiled the tears inside were burning I wished him luck and been satisfied.
He was gone but still his words kept returning What else was there for me to do to cry?
Would you believe that yesterday go on sword to me?
She smiled.
And breathe the man of the latest way.
No one smiled.
I wish to walk in the city goodbye.
Nothing but a heart is never a day.
It's been a heart and a skin that follows away.
It's been a day of the night.
But nothing is awake.
I got a lot of those hearties I got a lot of those Kees up, hearties Kees up, all the way Nothing but a
heartache, everything Nothing but a heartache, everything Nothing but a heartache, tears up, all the way I got a lot of tears over here It's just too slam, yeah He's got me all, why should I get him?
I got a lot of those hearties I got a lot of those tears over here You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time, tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 10th, 2000.
Column Cullaher is here from NIDS, and they went and investigated what happened in Illinois.
Began over the Great Lakes.
This incredible threat, the one I saw, the one my wife saw, the one so many of you have seen out there, the one that Peter Gerston is fighting to get a line on from our government right now.
But undeniably, you've got to consider what Colum has just said, and that is, if it's our government's plane, I think it was actually me.
He put it politely, I said they're flying it like idiots if it's a black program.
And you've got to think that one over a little bit, because if they had something like that, they wouldn't fly it over populated areas.
Well, on the night of the 6th, we have four separate eyewitnesses who talked about very large, low-flying, extremely brightly lit craft on the night of the 6th and early morning of the 7th.
Well, see, now that's dumb and dumber because, again, if it was our government, assuming they were dumb enough to fly at once in front of witnesses, then you get the mainstream press running stories on it because cops saw it.
You certainly wouldn't come back in successive days and do it again.
And these eyewitnesses, we've tracked a few of them and their high credibility.
People who work at NASDAQ and Stock Exchange, that kind of thing.
And by and large, a lot of them are saying exactly the same thing.
This thing was moving just over the treetops.
And we verified that they were talking about the night of the 7th and the 6th rather than the 5th, which is the same night that the police officers saw it.
So we think we have a very similar looking craft in roughly the same area within a 50-mile radius of the same area traveling on three subsequent nights.
And that is fairly consistent in terms of multiple eyewitnesses.
Well, we had a really, going from the very, very large to the very, very small, we had another interesting case that we came up with recently, and it was in Utah, in that same area where the infamous ranch is.
But this was not actually on the ranch, it was in the same area.
Because the ranch is located in an area that has probably, for the last 50 years, has had literally hundreds and possibly thousands of different sightings.
But this one happened in the morning in November, 11 a.m. in the morning, when the rancher was just beside a water trough.
He was just filling it with his hose when he noticed something brightly lit in the sky.
It was moving pretty quickly down towards where he was sitting right on the auto.
Okay, well then it's reasonable to conclude that the anomalous occurrences at the ranch would not necessarily stop at this specific ranch's property line.
Well, it's very reasonable to conclude that, especially because there's a very well-documented history going actually right back to the 1940s of a lot of phenomena in that area within a 30-mile radius of that particular property.
So the general area in northern eastern Utah has been host to very intense phenomena.
So this event was the rancher spotted something very bright in the sky.
It came down to within 50 feet of his head.
It was about six inches long, four inches wide, and about one inch high.
it was shaped almost exactly according to the rancher, like a sardine can.
And it hovered about 50 feet from his head initially.
He was looking at it as he sat there on the water trough.
It then began to move in front of him back and forth, slowly back and forth.
He had a couple of dogs and a couple of horses and some cattle in his vicinity, and he noticed that the dogs were holding this thing right in their eyes.
In other words, that they were transfixed by it.
The other animals were very restless, very nervous.
The cattle and the horses, especially were very nervous.
But the object continued slowly going back and forth, about 30 to 40 feet, and then it would turn and go back the same way.
The rancher decided to contact his wife so that he could get another opinion.
So he stood up to go into the house to yell at her.
Instantly, the thing shot right up into the air, almost quicker than his eye could follow it.
It was just, it went vertically right up above him.
It reacted to his movement almost instantaneously, and it was gone within less than a second.
It had moved out of his view.
Now, the reason I'm talking about this is because one of the people at the SETI, in the SETI group, a professor called Alan Tuff, has proposed that if there was ever a civilization that was monitoring us, they would use what he would call small smart probes.
And this object, in our opinion, It acted exactly like something that seemed to be scanning the rancher or scanning the area around the rancher, and it reacted instantly to his movement.
So it seemed to be either remote-controlled or intelligently guided.
And one of the things that we would be interested in if any of your listeners have come across this kind of very small object that is obviously intelligently guided.
We've had a lot of experience with our investigators with interacting with balls of light of different colors.
There's white balls of light and blue and red and orange, but we have not had too much experience with these kinds of very, very small compact objects.
Now, this sardine can-like thing did not have any protuberances.
It didn't have anything obvious sticking out from it.
It made no noise whatsoever, and it was as reflective as aluminum foil.
Has NIDS done any hard thinking, and I'm sure they have, about why the ranch, why that specific area, or for that matter, why any specific area, for an abundance of this kind of phenomena?
Well, one of the things we've, we focused our first two or three years of our existence on an area in Utah and an area in New Mexico that we knew had been host to a lot of activity.
And what those areas and other areas have in common is that they're way off the beaten track.
They're very isolated communities.
They're not people who are really interested in going forth into the media.
They're not interested in publicity.
And by and large, they're completely away from the cities and away from the main highways.
So that may be a reason.
It may be a lack of interest in publicity where multiple generations are experiencing these interactions with UFOs.
Well, we've got pretty reliable testimony, as I mentioned, going back to the 1940s and 50s.
And the kinds of performances we're talking about that go back that far would probably be inconsistent with military technology.
There is definitely, you can make a strong argument in the late 1990s that the military would have very advanced technology, but the 1950s and the 1940s and that these kinds of performances of hovering and these massive G-forces that would kill a human being are probably not viable in the 1940s and 50s.
Well, one of the things that we've noticed on the ranch is that there's been a preponderance of events that are completely irreproducible.
In other words, they happen only once.
And that could be construed as a form of entrainment or even communication.
So we have been grappling with the brainstorming essentially on the interpretation of a lot of these things.
And one of the interpretations is if there's a group of people in observer mode and they're kept completely on their toes and they're always exposed to something new, that does constitute a form of entrainment or communication.
Yes.
But in terms of formal communication that you've just talked about with CSATI, no, we haven't.
This calls for speculation on your part, Colin, but I'd really like to know, since you're so in the middle of this and a lot of Americans want to know too, are we headed toward, in your opinion, in the relatively near future, some sort of disclosure, some sort of announcement, or perhaps revelation or landing or event that will suddenly be apparent to all?
Well, we are definitely seeing an escalation in the reports that we're getting.
Certainly since this 24-hour hotline started, we're getting a real escalation in the number of reports.
And it has to be beyond random, a random event, a series of random events.
So I can only speculate that if these intensify and intensify, there's going to be a critical mass of people who have had direct experience with these objects.
So it seems to me that it's almost like these objects are interacting with people at the individual level.
Most of the events that are being reported to us are happening outside population centers rather than in the big cities where critical masses would be reached more quickly.
So therefore, if there is some kind of a contact occurring, it seems to be at the individual level.
But maybe, from a long-term perspective, it's a critical mass of individuals rather than a group in a city, so to speak, that are necessary.
Well, if people out there want to help out, and increasingly now with the professionals coming forth, like the pilots in Texas and the police officers in Illinois and so many others, then certainly the average person, I think, could be ready to step forward and help us.
NIDS has a 24-hour hotline.
You all have the resources to send qualified people into the field to do serious investigations.
Put it there like your 911 number and just let it sit there until you need it because these are the people who can get the job done.
They've got the resources, they've got the talent, the scientific credentials, all of it.
All right, Column, we will have you back on a regular basis to let us know what's going on.
Those people that do report to you and become part of a big investigation, do they get special treatment in terms of when you found something out, going back to them and letting them know what you found?
We publish, if we can stand behind it, we publish it on our website, but we always send one to the eyewitnesses because we do keep their names confidential.
And we send them a complete report of what we do, including all of the lab analysis, if it's actually done.
And again, I want to thank everybody out there who helped me find that.
And you were literally in the thousands.
It's still coming in.
Please stop sending me email on that.
And thank you all again.
I said earlier that, you know, there's this big thing going on with denial of service, and they're attacking all these e-commerce sites and so forth.
Well, Mindspring almost had a denial of service trying to handle all of my email messages on this one song.
But I wanted it.
It's just that you've got to be careful what you wish for.
Coming up in a moment is Matthew Alper, who was born and raised in New York City.
Educated at Bassar, Stony Brook University, a North London Polytechnic in England.
pretty good background where he finished with a degree in philosophy since that time he's worked on everything from a photographer's assistant fifth grade in high school history teacher in the projects of Brooklyn a He was a truck smuggler in Africa.
Where's the background for that one?
A personal bodyguard in the Philippines and a screenwriter in Germany all the while working on his magnum opus, it's called the God Part of the Brain.
A scientific interpretation of human spirituality and God.
And I'll tell you something.
I've interviewed Matthew a number of times now, and I cannot shake him.
And so that must mean that I really think there's something to what he's saying.
And you're going to hear what he's saying in a few moments.
We're going to get to Matthew.
I've got a couple of things I've got to get done first, including the bills.
Let's pay the bills and then do a couple of things.
and we'll get to Matthew Alper, and I think you'll see what I know.
Well, you know, that's worth a little comment all by itself.
That was a commercial for Jacobs Electronics and their ignition system, which is a good one.
But have you noticed the price of gas lately?
Now, we live out here in the middle of the desert.
I'll grant you that.
But know this.
As close as down the street from me and around town, the price for premium gasoline is about a buck 76.9.
$1.76.9.
Now, what in the hell is going on that would have the gas prices that high around here, I'd like to know.
It's not even summertime when we all know they artificially jack up the price of gas.
Most of it comes from the Middle East, as you well know, and as far as I know, other than Iraq, which is smuggling gas out, oil, you know, the gas lines are open.
So why is our gasoline costing so much?
Maybe we should take a page from the book of the Saudis, and every time we find some gasoline executive who's hiked it up just for the fun of it, or, you know, whatever reasons, why we chop off his arm.
And after a few arms, why, you'd probably see the price of gas coming right down.
Of course, maybe I'm wrong.
But I'm pretty angry about it.
There's no reason for the price to be up that high.
The government is requiring airlines, as they should, to inspect the tails of all MD series jetliners, all of them, and that's a lot, about 1,100 across the U.S., the whole series.
MD-80s, 90s, DC-9s, Boeing 717s.
It looks like they're suspecting this, I don't know what you call it, screw.
The thing that would take the horizontal stabilizer up and down.
It's a screwjack.
And it looks like they're suspecting that may well be the problem.
And of course, it may well be.
There were two Alaska Airlines planes that, to their credit, Alaska Airlines, as soon as they saw a problem, they called the FAA and they said quarantine planes right away.
And then they ordered a nationwide inspection of all of them, good.
So they may be onto it, and that's good if you're thinking of flying somewhere.
Now, another item I wanted to cover tonight is a really weird one.
My wife and I are really big fans of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
I think that's a great show.
I mean, we're really stuck on it.
Regis Philbin is great.
A little caustic, but great.
And in fact, he'd be a fun guy to interview.
I'd love to interview you, Regis.
But we're big fans.
And there's a story out tonight about Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
About 30 million Americans watch it every time it's on.
We're two of them.
Here.
Anyway, here's the story, in part by the Associated Press.
The company that insures ABC's hit game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, is suing them to get out of its contract because it's claiming the questions are too easy and they're at risk of paying out too much prize money.
I don't get any of this story.
I don't get any of it.
ABC says viewers should not worry about the legal fight.
They're planning no changes to the show.
Good for you, ABC.
The London-based insurance underwriters Gaush Hawk, that's GOS HAWK Syndicate, filed suit in Britain's High Court of Justice on the 24th of January against Buena Vista Entertainment Inc., the show's producers, to end its contract.
In essence, the insurance company said it needed assurances that who wants to be a millionaire, get this folks, would ask harder questions and select dumber contestants.
Now, what is it that I don't...
Maybe okay.
Although I think they're hard enough.
People who have done it.
But selecting dumber contestants, now I think that's an insult to everybody concerned with the production of the show.
And I'm proud of ABC that they told him to stick it.
Where the sun rarely shines, I'm sure.
So good for them.
But dumber contestants, dumber contestants.
So what do they do?
They change the curve of the testing they do.
Because, you know, you've got to call up and qualify for that show.
So what do they begin to do?
Assign points when you miss?
Oh, we'll take him.
Look at that.
He missed three.
I don't think so.
And then there's one more thing I don't get about this.
It's such a popular show with 30 million viewers that the commercials alone must yield millions of dollars for every show they run so they could pay the million.
Even if they get a millionaire, they could pay it from their own coffers.
What do they need an insurance company for?
Self-insure.
Long as a show is this popular, you could afford to do it the hell with an insurance company.
So in case you're a fan of that show as we are, that's a pretty interesting controversy going on right now.
If you were in San Diego earlier, you may have felt a big boom because from the Mexican border to up in Orange County, about 100 miles north, something went kaboom.
Residents around San Diego County reported hearing loud booms Thursday afternoon, but of course, as usual, no explanation for the source of the sounds.
They're thinking now the hackers are using big university mainframes to do their dirty work.
And that's quite logical, of course.
They're probably not as protected as well as they might be.
And so that's probably what's going on.
Here's a little commentary on in some newspaper, Chicago Sun, not just some newspaper Chicago Sun-Times and it's talking about MTBE which 60 minutes did the program on and they say whether it's global warming or MTBE a chemical added to gasoline to improve air quality we're learning about the law of unintended consequences unintended
consequences.
Now that would seem to apply in a lot of areas, you know, like if you're trying to bring back dinosaurs, unintended consequences.
If you're sending all kinds of things into the air, unintended consequences.
If you're trying to create mini black holes and you're ready to push the button, imagine what unintended consequences might be.
Wind knew it was a microburst on the ground, an exceptionally strong wind that hit a two-block area in west Seattle on Tuesday afternoon was a weather phenomena.
They say rare in the area known as a microburst.
And the winds caused major property damage along, get this, a short stretch of one street shortly before four o'clock in the afternoon on Tuesday.
Now we had our own little phenomena earlier tonight, just about three hours ago here in the desert.
All of a sudden, out of nowhere, you've got to remember now, this is February, right?
February?
It is.
Out of nowhere came the crash of thunder and lightning everywhere and we had one hell of a storm.
Now we had very hard driving rain rain and maybe some hail at night in the desert in February.
I'm telling you, our weather is really, really, really getting weird all right now on to the other matter at hand we're going to have quite a bit of time tonight with Matthew Alper Matthew welcome back to the program thank you Art nice to be back it's great to have you you know Matthew my wife,
Ramona, just recorded a movie for me that I just finished playing, watching earlier today.
And it revolved around, without giving away the plot.
It involved around a contact with a never-before-contacted group of Indians deep in the Amazon and the consequences of that contact and their belief systems,
what they believed, and of course why the story involves some, I think, a Catholic, a missionary and a couple of other missionary zealots who went down there and decided they were going to convert these savages into good Christians.
It does seem to be a reasonably common occurrence, but it goes to the very center of what you have talked about in your book, The God Part of the Brain.
Oh, hey, by the way, I understand your book is now on Amazon.com.
so it began as a self-published little book and now you're in still a self-published little book it's just available in more stores well Amazon.com is getting right on up there and Barnes & Noble that's no schlock either.
Get that movie and watch it at Play in the Fields of the Lord.
It's very instructive.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 10th, 2000.
If you love her, then you must send her somewhere where she's never been before.
Morning praises and morning gazes won't get you where you want to go.
Birth of love, something tender won't win.
You wanna know by now.
God and Tender won't win.
If I had told her that I loved you, she would have stayed till who knows when.
But I guess she couldn't understand it when I said I wanna be your friend.
Because a friend would never doubt you, or ever put you up in time.
And now I wonder what you do tonight.
Oh, yes, I wonder what you're doing tonight.
Oh, I wonder what she's doing to die Ah, ah, ah You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks tonight and onto our presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 10th, 2000.
We're going to be talking a lot about our brains and God and whether our brains are actually wired to believe in God or a God or a creator or a higher power.
Whether we are literally demanded, it is demanded by our brains that we have such a belief to protect ourselves against the greatest fear that man has.
You know, as I consider Matthew Alber, strange as he may be, he's got a spectacular background, a very good education.
And just before launching into what we really want to talk about tonight, you know, I really would like to know how he got to be smuggling trucks in Africa.
Now, that strikes me as a really dangerous occupation, smuggling trucks in Africa.
They pretty much shoot you when they catch you for that, don't they?
No, I was a fifth-grade teacher at the time, and I decided that I needed to get away.
I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life, so I actually was able to convince a friend into coming along with me on an overland trip that would cross the continent of Africa with about 12 other people who were much more organized and responsible than we were.
And about three months, four months into the trip, A, I decided I wanted my independence because I felt that they were just rushing through the continent and there were more things I wanted to see.
Yeah, so and I had had a So you had to finance it, right?
Well, I had a chance experience with these Dutch students who were selling a truck that they crossed the Sahara in hoping that they were going to sell for a large profit and they couldn't sell it and they ran out of time.
I gave them $100 for this truck.
Me and my friend left the Overland group, drove around on our own in this 1952 German fire engine, and the next thing we knew, we're selling the fire engine to these Nigerians, and that's how things started.
Just to give a basic overview, what I'm hypothesizing is that essentially that spirituality is a genetically inherited trait, that the human animal is wired to be spiritual, and that this represents the consequence of an evolutionary adaptation that emerged in our species as a coping mechanism that enabled us to survive our unique aware of our own deaths.
So that basically, all religion is the consequence of an impulse that we're born with to make us believe in some kind of higher being.
And through the existence of this higher being, of this spiritual realm, something that every culture from the beginning of our species has believed in, which again I'm suggesting is more than just a coincidence, that it has to do with our essential wiring.
And again, we're wired to believe in, well, there are three universal components to this inherent belief system.
One is a belief in a higher force or power, which most often referred to as a god or gods.
The other is a spiritual or transcendental component that exists within ourselves, we as humans, and what we call a soul.
And the other universal is the preservation of that spiritual component or soul in some form of an afterlife.
Well, what I'm suggesting is that we really have no verifiable evidence to believe in anything other than the fact that our brains are compelling us, and there is now hard evidence, which I will discuss as the show goes on, that there are parts of our brain,
parts of our physiology, that do compel us to feel these sensations that we refer to as spiritual, this sense of bliss, of peace, of tranquility, often combined with, complemented by another sensation we define as sort of a dissolution of our ego boundaries, a sense of losing ourselves to a cosmic self, a sense of what we call cosmic or God consciousness.
And so it's a combination of these belief systems, which actually they find is located in one part of the brain, and these sensations that are located in another part of the brain.
No, I didn't mean anything, although that's an idea.
What I meant was, can they wire the brain so that they can actually identify the specific part of the brain that begins to get active as you consider spiritual things?
And what it does is, let's say you went into the spec scan and they played you music.
They would be locating the musical parts of the brain, the parts being neurally activated.
And they'd be able to, if they took 10 people from 10 cultures, stuck them in a spec scan, and played them music, the same part of their brain would be lit up.
For every cognitive function that we have, whether it's our language functions, and we also know this because we know that there are parts of the brain that, for instance, they're called aphasias.
If they're damaged, then what it does is it affects that part of your consciousness.
So for instance, you can have a language aphasia.
It can happen whether a tumor might erupt in that region of the brain, any kind of damage during surgery, a gunshot.
And if you suffer damage to this part of the brain, you'll lose, for instance, your ability to comprehend certain words or the manner in which you can comprehend words.
So for instance, certain linguistic aphasias, you might suffer a brain trauma and be able to read words, understand words that you read, but not understand the same words that you have spoken.
Can you cite even one case in which somebody had head trauma of any kind and was a deep believer, a very spiritual person who suddenly lost it when they hit their head?
It's just that it's not the kind of thing it's not as evident.
It's not something like a doctor would notice.
There probably aren't too many people who've had someone who was really religious in the house who got banged in the head and then ran to the doctor and said, my son, he doesn't pray anymore.
But there are cases of someone who gets knocked in the head and they have a religious conversion.
And a friend of mine just wrote me an email, my friend Tanya, saying how her son was in a car accident.
And after the fact, he went through this fit for like a week where he was obsessively praying.
And she would tell people, my son, he's changed.
There's something weird about him.
He's not the same person.
And they'd all say, well, it's good that he's praying.
It's a miracle that he lived.
So because of the way the majority of society thinks, we don't take note of the other extreme.
But there are examples of, yes, where head trauma can trigger the spiritual function, can activate it.
First law of thermodynamics, the foundation of all physics.
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
And again, and I've addressed you on this, does it really matter if our energy is preserved in the form of a combination of soil and nitrogen and cosmic dust?
That will exist, yes, in many variations throughout all eternity, but it won't be Art Bell.
Consciousness, your lights will be out.
So, I mean, do you really get that much consolation out of the fact that you'll know that, well, one day I'm going to be dirt.
So for those of you who have the old edition, I recommend that you go out and buy the new edition because it's full of all kinds of new and fun chapters.
But there's I break down the experience into its neurophysiology, which includes the out-of-body experience, which has been a universal symptom of the near-death experience.
And most interestingly enough, I didn't know that this information was out there, but I started researching medical journals, and I found that they've been doing a lot of research on near-death experiences.
And one of the more interesting facets of the research is the fact that there are drugs which can induce a near-death experience, including the out-of-body experience, or what's considered the out-of-body sensation, because it can be reduced to a neurotransmitter.
If that neurotransmitter is flowing in your brain, you will have a near-death experience.
And it's a combination of endorphin flow and glutamate, which is the neurotransmitter, which is naturally activated in the times of low oxygen levels and low blood sugar.
And usually during something like a near-death experience, that's one of the things we're suffering, like low oxygen levels in the brain.
The reason I bring him back is because what he says is so damn logical that, I don't know, if you're not challenged by it, then you're just, you're not thinking.
And I would think anybody who would want to be secure in their faith would consider something like you're hearing tonight.
At the very least, consider what you're hearing tonight.
And then reject it on equally solid grounds.
At the very least, Brian, I am disappointed in you.
Well, hey, Brian in Fort Wayne, if you're sitting out there seething and have changed your mind, send me a fax.
In the meantime, a doctor in Denver, Colorado has done what Brian has not in a fax.
And so, Matthew, I have a question for you posed by this doctor.
The human animal has given a name to the way we perceive, the way that that wavelength of light falls on our retinas, we've defined it in a certain way we call red.
These can both be elicited by electrical stimulation of the brain in the absence of the actual color or sound.
That doesn't mean they don't exist.
Neurological activity in a part of the brain that maybe can perceive or fabricate the existence of other realities neither proves nor disproves the existence of those realities.
When we're talking about sensory information, we're talking about the way we receive data from the external world.
But what I'm suggesting is aren't concepts of a God.
Like when we say, I feel like the spirit of the deceased in the room.
You know, let's say someone passes away and everybody's, you know, at the funeral parlor and we say we feel his spirit.
It's not that we're actually feeling like a sensation on our skin.
All of our perception, it's not the way we're translating information, which is called transduction, the way the brain interprets information that falls on our sensory perceptors, but rather the way when we say we feel like the sense of God, we feel the spirit of the dead, it's not touch, it's not hot or it's not cold.
It's actually coming from within.
So it's not based on an external perceptor.
And that's why, though you and I both see the fire truck as red, yourself and someone from another culture will not see God as the same thing.
Because you're not seeing God as like everyone's looking up at the throne in the sky and saying, yeah, I see him.
He's got a long beard.
We're all seeing him in a different way because we're really only just wired to perceive a greater force.
This man was one of the first diagnosed cases of AIDS in the U.S. He's still alive.
His partner died.
He has now written a book called Signals.
And one of the most provocative things that he said at the beginning of the program was that he and his partner, knowing what they might be facing, went to Mexico and they bought the suicide medicines that they would require at the right time.
His friend jumped the gun, took the medicines for a sec.
He had no motive.
He just committed suicide.
He was the first to discover his friend's body.
He was holding the body and shaking the body in anger at his friend for having done this when his friend told him if he would go out into the backyard and jump the fence and look in the trash can at the house next door, he would find a suicide note.
The police were there.
He did it.
They tried to stop him, but they couldn't stop him.
He jumped the fence.
He opened the can, and there was the suicide note.
Argument on your side, again, by the way, you better go out and everybody else in the audience, as soon as you can, go rent a movie called At Play in the Fields of the Lord.
In the meantime, have we ever come upon in the deep Amazon or in the Philippines or in some remote part of Africa, any group or tribe of people who do not believe in something beyond the physical?
that's a terribly strong argument and if god were the same god why then the people down in the deep amazon should be talking about jesus and If there's one God, why would he create a race of beings that perceive him in so many different ways that it compels them to constantly propel themselves into wars to kill one another, proving that theirs is the right one?
Because not until we can recognize this as an inherent impulse in us, will we be able to contain the more negative aspects of that influence?
And that seems to be rampant discrimination and hatred among peoples and leading to eventually what we see time and time again, acts of genocide and war.
And until we understand this impulse as exactly just that and look at it from a rationalistic perspective, we're going to be an animal that continues to barbarize one another.
You know, I went out looking for this stuff as like a hopeful magician.
I hoped to be the one who'd be able to find the laws that would allow me to shoot fireballs from my fingers and hover and fly and do telekinesis and all of those neat things.
I was hoping to have a conversation with God.
I mean, I went looking for this stuff, looking for transcendence.
Well, it was one of the most provocative experiments done that sort of led to even the, I mean, I had written my book before that experiment was done, but now the main body of neurophysiologists believe what they call that there is a God module in the brain.
That's their word for it.
And this research was triggered by a series of experiments done by a Dr. Ramachandran, who came out with a book last year called Phantoms in the Brain.
And he was at UC San Diego, and he found that there were, while studying epileptics, that there was a group, a population of epileptics whose epilepsy, whereas like some people, the epilepsy was triggered by like a flashing light.
In others, it was triggered by a sequence of certain musical notes or chords.
And in others, it was triggered by religious icons or language.
And he found that in these people, that when their brains were studied, that the neural activity was based in their temporal lobes.
And not only was it religious language or icons that could trigger, that could affect an epileptic seizure in them, but furthermore, these were people who tended to be highly religious in general in their normal life and during their seizure came out of it professing that they had had like a religious experience, that they felt a union with God during their seizure.
And it was found that there was this neuroactivity in the temporal lobe, which seems to be the part of the brain from which our perceptions of some kind of higher being are located.
This study was further supported by research done by a doctor, Michael Persinger, who created a, he's a neurophysiologist who created a helmet called a transcranial magnetic stimulator.
He had his first religious experience, his first contact with God.
He felt the first presence of God in his life.
And it's probably as much as it might be dormant in my own brain or by the fact that my logical centers have overwhelmed it, if I put on the same helmet and pointed it at that same place, I would have that same experience.
And I've even had experiences in my life during times of crisis or anxiety where I actually felt that draw of believing in something.
And I felt it like a drug, like an opiate coming over me.
And it was like, wow, what a sensation.
And I thought to myself, wow, should I let myself go with this?
And given what I had known, I said, you know, I don't think I should because I don't want to go there.
that's what i was about say are are you sure since i i mean wouldn't science demand that you go ahead and cross that threshold so that you can logically uh...
It has another important, this is kind of on the sidetrack, but it's a very important aspect.
It has a societal function.
In other words, if people believe there is a Creator and that there is a life following this one in which you will be accountable for things you have done in this life, then you are to some degree, your actions and the way you interact with society is to some degree controlled, correct?
Yeah, it has its multi-purpose, as are most of our cognitive traits.
I think the predominant reason that we possess a spiritual function is to allow our species to cope with our awareness of death.
We're the only self-conscious animal, and through that self-conscious awareness, we became the only animal aware of our own mortalities.
That's why I believe was the strongest reason that prompted natural selection to modify our brains in such a way, but it also is utilized to play a role in our social organization.
Okay, but if Matthew Albert's book suddenly went to number one on the New York Times bestseller list, it was embraced suddenly by millions of people, wouldn't we have a Mad Max society on our hands?
Well, there's a chapter in the book which I think is fairly instrumental to the philosophy I'm trying to offer, and it's called The Guilt and Morality Function.
Quote, I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.
No longer will a man teach his neighbor, because they will all know me.
End quote.
Now, why is it not possible to imagine, in the scheme of things at play here in the fields of the Lord, that God put the God part of the brain in the brain?
Well, I mean, that would bring one back to the point I brought up, you know, we discussed earlier, which is what kind of God would implant a concept in the heads of his creatures, programming them to believe in many different translations of what he is, so much so that they go to killing one another to prove that their version is the right one.
I asked, so I received, it says, you were asked if there was any documentation of individuals who hit their head or whatever, and then perhaps became less religious.
Well, I've got a Friend in Ohio who was very religious.
He went to church all the time, church events, prayed a lot, read religious books, wore religious t-shirts, went out evangelizing, you know, the whole works.
He was a stagehand, and he was in Tennessee doing a gig where he was 30 feet up on a scaffold.
He fell that 30 feet down and basically hit his head.
He has not been the same since.
He now does not go to church, does not pray, does not act the same, does not do the same religious things he did before.
He now cusses, which is something he would never have done before.
He's always telling everyone he is not the same person now as before.
He even emailed the other day telling me he has doubts.
He's even a Christian now.
So, as your guest said, that's you, perhaps there are cases out there, but they're just not reported.
I know my friend Mark is not at all willing to come out and tell individuals about his new self, as he's somewhat, I think, ashamed of how he's acting now.
It's probably, see, the reason, I mean, the majority of the science is because they haven't really speculated on a God part of the brain, and also because one of the battles that I have to contend with, or that this science that I call bio-theology has to contend with, the fact that what would have been most of its proponents, the scientists, are religious as well to a large degree.
I think the majority of them will because they still possess a spiritual function.
They might, because of their training in logic, they might have abandoned their conventional religions, but most of them will still tell you.
If you ask people, if you want to get to the heart of someone's beliefs, even if they deny a God, say, do you believe that your conscious experience, that your actions are just the stirrings of an organic machine that you have no control over?
Or do you believe in free will?
Do you believe that there's a force in you that gives you the right and ability to make choices?
Most people will be very reluctant to forfeit their soul.
To say, nope, I'm just a chance combination of atoms being thrust through the whirlwind of time.
Consciousness is a hallucination that has no bearing on the infinite and eternal world, and I am not immortal.
Okay, well, first of all, if the apparition did appear and I had tested it and questioned my sanity and it all seemed to be real, well, then I would say, well, I guess I've been wrong, and I guess there is a God, and I guess there is a soul, and gee, do I want to sign my soul over for fame and fortune?
Would I sign if I was told, you know, if I got the book of a soul and I got to look into it and it said, you know, the soul is something that will last for eternity and you will get to keep it for all eternity, et cetera, et cetera, or I could forfeit it for the next 20 or 30 odd years of fame and fortune.
And first of all, when you say the Bible, it's a very presumptuous statement because it's presuming there's only one.
And there's hundreds, there's thousands, and they've been around before the New Testament.
I mean, there were people believing in a number of gods.
There were civilizations created where they went to temple every day and prayed to a number of gods before there was a belief in A, a monotheistic God and B, a holy trinity with Jesus as its Messiah.
So when we speak of the Bible, that's really just coming from the mindset of somebody who was raised in a Christian household and is convinced that the New Testament is the Bible and there is no other way.
However, had that same person who wrote you that email or faxed you that letter been switched at birth and inadvertently raised as a Muslim, he'd send you that same fax except he'd be preaching you the prophets of Muhammad and Allah.
And he'd be telling you, how can this person not accept the doctrine of Allah?
And at one point, I had a serious moral dilemma over whether it would be the right thing to write a book like this because what might be the damage I could be doing to those people who need, who rely on their beliefs, even people like me, you've done me damage in a way.
Well, I believe that what could be done is that we could maximize on this impulse's more productive aspects, like a sense of brotherhood, a sense of actually even just the euphoria.
Well, I wasn't really saying it as if, like, you know, there's any meaning behind it, but really just that if you hurt another, not because it's fated, not because you're being punished, but just because the way we are made as a social organism, we have to operate as a whole.
Well, you know, I have to think about these things.
They're very good questions.
So I think, like anybody, you know, I've had fantasies like, you know, that son of a gun, I could have killed him, you know, when you think of blowing someone up.
And it wasn't because I felt like, well, hey, you know, there's no God, so why not blow him up?
And I guess, A, because I've decided that it brings me the most joy as an individual to spread the least harm, I suppose.
So, you know, you deal with your frustration and you try and adopt the philosophy, you know, thou shalt not blow up thy neighbor.
And it's not because you think you'll be punished in the eternal afterlife, but just because it makes for a nicer place to live in when everyone's not blowing everyone up.
And that's basically it.
You could call it even selfish.
But I know that if I acted on my primitive impulses and so did my neighbors, none of us would survive.
And it would be a wicked and painful and insufferable world.
I tell you what, after the top of the hour here, why don't we open the telephone lines and see what we get?
Remember, nobody quotes the Bible here but me.
That's art's law.
Hold on, Matthew, and we'll continue with this.
You've got to admit, this is very challenging.
It's called The God Part of the Brain, Amazon.com and nationwide now in bookstores by Matthew Alper.
I'm Art Bell, and this is a provocative Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 10th, 2000.
Strange words, desire, make foolish people I I never dreamed that I'd need somebody like you.
I never dreamed that I'd need somebody like you.
No, I don't want to fall in love.
No, I don't want to fall in love with you.
With you.
Living life in peace, you too.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be
now we're all It's mad and all I wonder if you can No need to breathe A brother,
a man Imagine all the people carrying all the world You're listening to Arch Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks, tonight an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 10th, 2000.
maybe he was just a little ahead of his time and So, actually, I think it's back a little bit.
I guess it was part of his paradise, a place with no religion, another reason for people to discriminate against one another, to kill one another, etc.
Here's Arthur from Cambridge, Massachusetts, who asks, before we go to the volunteer, does Mr. Albert believe that because a part of the brain affects our perception of space and time, that space and time does not exist?
I mean, I would say that's something that if one asked me, I would speculate that it will never happen.
And if humankind is even around for another 100,000 years with technology advancing at the rate that it is, I don't believe that we will ever achieve time travel.
But they, you know, I'm the skeptic.
Show me.
And I've yet to see formulas or acknowledged scientists who've produced formulas and or machines that are indicative of it as a possibility.
And Matthew, I own your book, and I respect your intellect.
It was a very good book.
My question to you is, did you ever consider what would happen if we all started to prescribe to this view of reality, which it seems to be, in my opinion?
I am an atheist, and I just wondered if we didn't use the God part of the mind, it would diminish.
This capacity in our brain would diminish.
And would that cause, what kind of ramifications, psychologically, could that cause?
Well, I mean, again, this is what Art and I were discussing before, which is what are the ramifications of offering a theory like this, of putting a bug like this in people's heads.
What is its destructive potential?
I open the book.
The opening quote in the book is, great is the truth and mighty above all things.
And it's actually a quote.
It's a scripture.
It's a scripture from the Apocrypha, which were the books of the New Testament that were banished.
They were basically taken out of the Bible, and they're therefore called apocryphal, meaning false, but they were once part of the Bible.
And I borrowed that for the reason that it was stricken from the Bible.
I thought that that was sort of poetic.
As well as that's the philosophy I've decided to ascribe to, that if it's true that there is no God, if it's true there's no spiritual reality, that it's the way we've been wired by natural selection, by nature, what I call nature's white lie, my feeling is that the truth is more powerful than anything, and we have to embrace the truth.
And just like as much as we can say with any white lie, like would we rather live in ignorant bliss or would we rather be knowing creatures?
And again, I subscribe to the philosophy, know thyself.
The greatest power is in knowledge and wisdom.
And in knowing, even if it's a painful truth, it's to our best advantage to know nonetheless.
And then to decide, what do we want to do with this?
unidentified
Yes, I agree.
Know where we stand, know the reality of our own situation.
There are so many scientists out there whose ideas are adulterated by their spiritual function.
As a matter of fact, while we took the last commercial break, a friend of mine faxed me a letter showing me an article from Scientific American which said that of 90% of scientists that were polled, 90% were shown to believe in a higher power, 10% were atheists.
Which in the article it said reflected basically the standard of any human population.
unidentified
Well, that's true, but I asked you do you believe that Michael Behe wrote that book on religious grounds?
That's an argument of faith that the world is so complex that it can't be reduced.
No, that's not it.
unidentified
That's not it.
Certain functions of a biological entity need certain, like two or three at least, or maybe a thousand functioning things at one time to function, and therefore they could not have evolved.
Each one of those things could not have evolved separately.
That's the concept.
Please, anybody on the air who wants to really get into this, read Darwin's black box.
And I, for one, don't reject the concept that the thing that we regard as a miracle of complexity all about us and within us, in fact, is not a product of evolution.
Well, I wanted to kind of shoot a little story here.
One of our astronauts had a friend who was an atheist, and he had him over one day, and he was in one of his dens, and this guy had made a mock-up model of the universe in his den.
And the guy said, oh, hey, that's pretty good.
I like that.
Did you make that?
The astronaut says, no, I didn't make that.
And he says, well, who made it?
He says, well, nobody did.
He says, well, no, wait a minute.
I can see it right here.
What do you mean nobody did?
Well, nobody did.
It's just there.
And so the guy says, well, no, this doesn't make any sense to me.
He says, well, hey, you choose to not believe in God's universe and God created it.
So it's the same thing.
Essentially.
And God gave everybody the freedom of choice to find him.
And that's why we have so many different religions.
It's because you have the choice.
Whether you don't or whether you do or whether you believe in a stick or whatever it is.
And when it comes down to the end, then that's when it really matters.
And remember, think about that great big-breasted woman with glowing red eyes.
I like eyes.
Temptation eyes.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks, tonight and encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 10th, 2000.
She'll go on with me.
She'll be so inviting.
I want her all for myself.
Oh, temptation eyes.
You're feeling through my mind, my mind.
Oh, temptation eyes.
You gotta love me.
You gotta love me tonight.
You love me, baby, yeah.
You gotta love me.
Oh, I'm about to just the game, but just the same.
My head is spinning.
I'm afraid to keep me on her side.
Just a fight.
Never ending tonight with me She'll be so exciting I want to be here You'd think that people would have had it up a silly love song.
So look around me and I see it song.
Some people wanna fill the world with silly love songs.
But what's wrong with that?
I'd like to know.
Cause here I go again.
I love you.
I love you.
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time tonight, featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 10th, 2000.
Matthew Alper is here, and he has a book that you really should read.
It's called The God Part of the Brain.
And no matter what your faith or lack of it or strength of it, it should not be challenged by logic, should it?
Or is it?
I think that anybody out there who would shy away from this book, who would shy away from this concept intellectually, I don't know.
They need to grow a little.
That's just my opinion, and it's probably going to get me in a lot of trouble, but that's all right, too.
There was, just before I go to the break, and I do have to go to the break, but there was a very important caller I thought on the line before the break who asked Matthew if there was something that had happened in his life, something really terrible that made him suddenly deny God.
And there was a pause long enough to drive a smuggled African truck through.
And so let me come back to you, Matthew, and ask you about that now.
Well, to be honest, I actually led a very cushy and privileged childhood and adolescence and was very fortunate in that I had a good family and a supportive family and good parents and a good younger sister.
And really nothing tragic happened to me.
I would say the most tragic thing for me was the realization that I'm mortal, that the party will one day end was devastating to me.
And I said, I'm getting to the bottom of this.
I want to find out, is there transcendence in the world?
Is there a spiritual reality?
Is there a God or isn't there?
Am I mortal or am I immortal?
That to me became the ultimate question.
I mean, I figured, why should I concern myself with the next 40, 50, 60 odd years with my eternity left unanswered before me?
From my perspective, I would propose that we are wired to worship.
Whether it is God, an entertainment celebrity, a sports figure, an idol, and so forth, our neurophysiology predicates and potentiates this process of adoration.
In other words, atheists still engage in this, but it is generally expressed in a secular manner.
The global dominance of the concept of God, in quotes, I believe, reflects in part the commonly shared human need for answers to questions for which we can find no other explanation.
However, this in no way negates the existence of the soul, of God, of ETs, or anything else that we cannot measure with our three-dimensional yardstick.
You know, plus, I had a doctor on the other night, the leading longevity physician in the world, Dr. Klatz.
And he said, look, you manage to live for another 30 or 40 years, and there is some great possibility that we will stop, even reverse, the aging process.
It's curious, though, that when we're speaking about theists here, that we're looking at them as presumptive and as imposing assumptions upon the universe.
But the reality is that everybody does that.
And your guest this evening also has a metaphysical naturalism that he's presuming and casting upon all of the evidences and casting upon all of his research and casting upon all of the conversations that are going on right now.
He has no way to prove his metaphysical positions and distinctives.
He might talk about the inferential method.
He might talk about the empirical method.
But the fact is that even if you look at the empirical method itself, the empirical method itself is not able to prove itself because it's a metaphysical construct.
The fact is we all approach life, we approach relationships, we approach our research and our studies presupposing things about the universe.
And I would argue that the reality of God is rational knowledge and that all human beings possess that rational knowledge.
Now the problem comes when we think about human sin.
And the biblical view of this is that human beings, in their ambition and in their autonomy in paradise, sought to arrest something from the Creator that wasn't theirs.
They sought knowledge outside of the Creator and began to transpose that onto their own beings.
When they did that, they began to think outside of the laws and outside of the ethics that God had given them.
And so what has happened now is that we have an arrogant and sinful and repressive nature.
We don't want to fess up to the fact that we're sinners.
We live this doctrine of autonomy.
We cast contempt upon the Creator and upon God when deep down in our heart we know he exists.
But in our bitterness and in our anguish of heart and in our anger over death and our anger over broken relationships, we tend to squash him and to put him under our feet because we don't want to look at him.
And another thing, too, is it's really interesting.
I mean, we're so finite and so small, just particles in the grand scheme of things.
And to impose a naturalistic metaphysic upon the entire universe when we can't even see behind us when we're walking, when we lay down at night and we fall asleep and we're unconscious and we have to lock our doors, we're so limited and we have to understand those limitations.
Well, let me tell you, it's that naturalistic metaphysics you speak of, which provided us with these telephones that are allowing us to communicate, and the light that's lighting your home right now and heating it, and the science that provides you with health care, and all of these things that you're calling this metaphysic is actually not even a metaphysic.
It's a very tangible thing.
And if you want to know what I have faith in, I have faith that when I flip my light switch that the lights are going to go on.
It's not a metaphysic.
It's a physical reality.
And the fact that the same methodology that brought me electricity and computers and space shuttles, et cetera, has provided me with brain scans that are showing that there are parts of the brain receptive to religious language and that there are parts of the brain that have stimulated, which will fill us with a sense of the presence of God.
It's that same methodology, and it's not a metaphysic.
Well, the fact of the matter is that personality does not flow from impersonality, and creative ability does not flow from uncreative ability.
That the fact that we can plumb the depths of what exists is a direct byproduct of the fact that we've been made very intelligent creatures by an intelligent creator.
It almost seems to fly in the face of what you're saying.
And the fact is every human being has a presupposition about the universe.
We all presuppose it.
And you do that as well.
And I can make sense for every one of your arguments that there, oh, we can talk about science and we can talk about technology and we can talk about the development of whatever, of electricity and this and that and the other thing.
The fact is that we can do these things because we're creative.
We can do these things because we have a personality.
We have intelligence because we've been given personality by the person who is God.
We've been given intelligence by intelligent creator, and we can do these things because he blesses us with the ability to pursue to advance.
Why is it not possible, Caller, that all of the things that you just named, we are able to do because we have evolved from the original muck and now have the creative brains that you're articulating so well?
unidentified
Well, you know, then I would argue then that if evolution is true, if biological evolution is true, then epistemological evolution is also true.
That is, that our knowledge is constantly changing.
Now, if that is the case, we have no metaphysical basis for making any value judgments on anything because our intellectual content is constantly morphing.
How can we possibly make sense of anything?
A hundred years down the road, this whole conversation is irrelevant.
Truth is laid waste in the whole process of things.
He's good at saying it, but I don't know what he's saying.
unidentified
Well, the fact is, it's very simple.
If the doctrine of evolution is true and it impacts my intelligence and it impacts ethics and it impacts reason, then the fact is that the stuff that we're discussing in this very moment is going to be irrelevant and outdated and relative to this particular time.
How does an ethic of value like don't kill your neighbor and don't steal from your neighbor and don't commit adultery with your neighbor's wife, how do you ground that in chemical surges and firing synapses?
Well, it hasn't made any sense yet to you because you have not read the guilt and morality function in my book, in which I discussed how, as a social organism, it became necessary for our species to be able to identify those actions which were destructive to the group as a whole, as well as to be able to identify and discern those actions which are destructive to the whole.
In my view, in my paradigm, we're wired for that too.
We're a biological animal.
We're made in our physiology.
And our physiology, fortunately for us, is programmed in order, not anarchy.
We cooperate with one another.
And what you're calling good and evil, these absolutes that come from a God, I'm suggesting are just the ways we discern one another's behavior.
We promote that which we call good, and we condemn that which we call bad.
Every culture from the beginning of our species has broken all action into what they call either good or bad behavior, and in a spiritual context, what we call good or evil.