By Sally Morem
Does God exist? This imposing question generated a stream of other questions in my mind. Is the world a made thing or did it just happen? Is our perception of Design in the world accurate or is it merely a reflection of our deepest hopes and fears? Could we ever perceive the true nature of reality or must we be content with approximations? Does the Designer live outside or within ourselves?
While in high school, I found myself pondering these questions from an unusual perspective. I came as close to ceasing to exist—to being unable to experience anything—as one can without being in any real danger of dying. I needed an eye operation because the muscles in my eyes wouldn’t work together properly.
A nurse began the process of prepping me by injecting my thigh with a light anesthetic to make me drowsy. After I was brought into the operating room, I received the strong anesthetic. Two seconds later, I was out. Yes, I counted. (One thousand one, one thousand two.) The surgeon needed to use a powerful anesthetic so that I would sleep deeply.
Why? So my eyeballs wouldn’t twitch at the wrong time. One false cut would have been disastrous. The next thing I knew, I was waking up, very groggily, but no worse for wear. But during those few hours, I the pattern-seeker sought nothing, experienced nothing—not even the passage of time—and thought nothing. When I realized later that nothing meant anything to me while I was under, I began to realize how important the human ability to perceive and interpret was and I wondered if this ability, not God, was the fount of all human meaning.
If so, then where did we come by this talent? Our brains are powerful pattern seekers. They are primed to seek out and find. They search for every meaningful pattern in the world as if our lives depend on it. They do. Our brains enable us to hunt for food and keep a wary eye out for predators, to seek friends to protect us and guard against enemies who may harm us. During our long history, friends and enemies were not limited to other humans, but were titles bestowed on anything appearing to be sufficiently humanlike to gain our fear and respect. We gave the sun, moon and stars, thunderstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes the names of spirits and gods and we worshipped them with fear and hope.
I lived in a house with a bathroom wallpapered with marvelous designs. Young winter trees graced the walls with trunks, branches and twigs. While I sat on the porcelain throne, I’d turn the fortuitous combinations of lines into faces and figures. Do you remember naming the shapes you saw in clouds? In both wallpaper and clouds, we are able to perceive patterns of our own devising. How can three pounds of gray matter perform such magical feats? Our visual cortex, for example, receives the most basic forms of stimuli from the eyes—lines, color, direction. Then, groups of neurons take the resulting information about the outside world and analyze it, giving more weight to some bits of it, while ignoring most perceptions in a manner directed by internal models of the world previously devised by the brain. Larger portions of the brain then push the analysis of what was perceived to greater and greater levels of abstraction. We “see” whatever we are looking at only after this process is done.
We never experience the world directly, only though these cerebral filters which protect us from the onslaught of sensation and the fuzziness of reality. We perceive reality through lenses of pattern perception which cull and code the vast assemblage of impressions and deductions to make them usable to us. As a result, we humans become makers.
Ever since the first Paleolithic flintknapper chipped his first handaxe, we have imparted design to the world. We naturally see design all around us, and where there is design, we believe there must a Designer, a greater Maker. We project humanlike qualities into our surroundings, imagining intentionality where none exists.
Reality exists. The outside world is demonstrably there and has its own pattern, its own organization. But the intelligence that we see manifested around us lies within our minds. God does not exist. It is we who string beads of light together, crafting the design of the world.