How Can We Know There is a God?
After experimenting with mescaline and LSD writer Aldous Huxley wrote a book called The Doors of Perception, and in relation to the experiences he had encountered he said:
Like the earth of a hundred years ago, our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins. In relation to the fauna of these regions we are not yet zoologists, we are mere naturalists and collectors of specimens. The fact is unfortunate; but we have to accept it, we have to make the best of it. However lowly, the work of the collector must be done, before we can proceed to the higher scientific tasks of classification, analysis, experiment and theory making. (1)
Huxley is describing the idea that phenomenology is as significant a tool in understanding the mind as any material science of the brain itself, that to consider what the mind is requires us to consider the depth of our possibility for experience in order that we can understand what we are.
This might seem obvious, physical science can tell us we have 100 trillion synaptic connections and 86 billion neurons, but no amount of brain scanning or neurological mapping can ‘find’ experience in the brain. Naturally some materialist scientists aren’t fond of this problem, Daniel Dennett for example was eager to…
