Christian Viewpoint: John Dempster ponders the workings of the human brain and the implications of research on thinking about God
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“To be human,” writes Iain McGilchrist, “ is to feel a deep gravitational pull towards something ineffable” – something, that is, beyond the power of words to express.
This “ineffable” he continues, is present to us “through intuitions from a whole range of unfathomable experiences which we call spiritual”.
Iain McGilchrist, now living on the Isle of Skye is one of the foremost experts on the workings of the human brain – his findings have implications for our thinking about God.
A little science: our brains are comprised of several sections, including two hemispheres, left and right, the second slightly larger than the first. Each has a distinctive role; both work in tandem through constant communication between them.
The right hemisphere sees more profoundly than the left. It seeks to view the whole of things rather than their parts. It is comfortable with mystery and uncertainty, and encounters reality personally. Only poetry and myth can do justice to its insights.
The left hemisphere sees parts rather than the whole. It helpfully seeks to impose structure on what its right-hand partner reports, breaking things down into bullet points, striving to describe them in words. It knows things as pieces of information, but does not experience their reality.
McGilchrist suggests that the right hemisphere, with its deeper insights is meant to take the lead as “Master” while the left is the servant or “Emissary” as the brain strives for understanding.
But he believes that over the last 500 years society has focussed too much on left hemisphere thinking – defining, classifying, listing, trying to capture the inexplicable in words. The servant has become the master.
This certainly rings true of religions including Christianity, where there’s often a tendency to focus on lists of beliefs and rules, fundamentalism, the quest for certainty, black-and-white thinking, making gods of our holy books. And thus we obscure the right hemisphere’s intuitions of the ineffable, its insight that all things are connected, that the church is a united, living entity, flourishing in relationship with God.
Iain McGilchrist’s insights in his books (Master and Emissary and The Matter with Things) make us think about our relationship with God. How often we seek to become the “Master”, constructing our own deficient images of God and reality! As St Augustine said: “If you think you understand God, then it is not God you understand.”
Jesus himself – not words about him – reveals something of the ineffable, and invites us to revel in right hemisphere insights, to join in the glad dance of creation.
Speaking of that gravitational pull we feel towards the wondrous, McGilchrist suggests that we would not feel that irresistible yearning were it not that a great love was summoning us to itself.
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