Brown Symposium

When I first heard about the Brown Symposium topic for this year I was thrilled. On a very basic level, the topic was in my area of study and naturally interested me. More specifically however, I have always been fascinated by the obvious clash of science and religion. However, upon departure to the lectures, my dear friend David informed me that they would be taking place in the Fine Arts building. I stopped dead in my tracks and simply said, more to myself than to anyone else, “Oh shit.” The cause for such an odd statement is simple: Until I went to these lectures, I had not stepped foot inside the Fine Arts building. How I have made it a year and a half without entering such an important building is a mystery to me, however, I had decided to try to avoid the building until the last day of my college career. I understood that the goal was not a very worthy one by any standard, but I felt it appropriate to continue due to the sheer wonder behind managing such a feat. Therefore, as I walked into the Fine Arts building I was feeling a mixture of hesitation, knowing I would be breaking my long-standing tradition, and excitement for the lectures I was about to hear.
Looking back, I almost feel that it would have been more worthwhile for me to have kept my goal up and running and unbroken. While I only went to the first two lectures, I thought both could have been much better. The first lecture, done by Christopher Bader and Paul Froese, was titled “Images of God.” The authors had conducted a survey, “The Baylor Religion Survey,” in which they asked a rather large number of questions on peoples’ beliefs in God. Showing various images of common perceptions of the guy upstairs, the speakers addressed the fact that even the question of “what is God” is difficult to agree upon. They went through the results of their survey and came up with the rather staggering statistic that 88% of Americans believe in some kind of God. I knew the statistic was high, certainly over 50%, however I have trouble believing such a huge number. I enjoyed taking a sample of the survey and seeing the type of questions asked, but apart from that it was a fairly standard lecture on the matter. It was interesting to realize that my view of God was fairly similar to the majority of views in the audience. My God, like many others, is fairly laid-back, compassionate, and merciful, and really does not play a huge role in my day to day life. Obviously however, our audience was quite skewed. What was beneficial for me then, was the link between education and socialization and belief in God. I also enjoyed the speaker’s portrayal of the Baptists, in which he constantly was giving them shit. I already knew that most Americans believed in God and that those beliefs were rarely the same, so I wasn’t so interested. Perhaps the worst part of the lecture, to no fault of the speakers, was the questions asked. It was the same question over and over again: Is this specific aspect addressed in your study, whether it is a specific religion or a twist on the study such as gender. Obviously these specifics were of some significance to the person asking, however all they could say was: “No, we didn’t go into that specific aspect in our study.” Overall, while I gained some knowledge on my own, I found the main focus of the lecture to be too broad and too simple.
I also went to the second lecture, given by Andrew Newberg, entitled “How God Can Change Your Brain.” I enjoyed this lecture slightly more than the first, simply because it dove into a subject that I knew nothing about. I have always wanted to take a psychology course and this lecture assured me that I will before college is over. After taking a crash course in neuroscience, Newberg led us through various experiments that had been conducted. The speaker came at us with an onslaught of diagrams of the human brain mid-prayer, which was hard to follow to say the least. “After the individual was told to think about God, the frontal lobes lit up significantly more than before,” he would say. He would then provide possible meanings behind such a finding. However, I found it difficult to believe that such a command can be done on the spot, particularly with an IV in your arm and God only knows what other types of machinery were on in the background. It is safe to say that the lecture left me with more questions than answers. What is it that makes people believe in God? Are we as a species automatically programmed to do so? All in all, although the lectures were somewhat disappointing, my fascination with the subject remains.