What about . . . ?
While Jared bathed in his good feelings and before they could start their prayer, Tegan spoke up. Tegan had faithfully come to every Bible study, but always remained quiet and disengaged, only breaking her frozen face of skepticism when Martin made an irreverent sarcastic statement. She cleared her throat tentatively, and said, with her head shaking, “Wait . . . wait . . .”
“What is it, Tegan?,” Jared asked, having no idea what she could possibly be thinking. Tegan had opted out of really saying anything for the last six weeks.
“But do you . . .” Tegan said with a slight hesitation, “ever think that what we believe is just a trick of our brains?”
“What do you mean?” Aaron asked, confused.
“It’s something I’ve read on the Internet,” Tegan answered.
“What is?” Jared asked.
Tegan explained: “Well, imagine that your mind is like a computer and maybe what, like, all religion is, is a programed work-around, imposed by evolution. Like, we have this amazing consciousness to think about thinking, but that means we can think about death, and that thought could crash the whole program of our mind, so we make up gods and spirits as a patch program that keeps the operating system of the brain flowing. So, like, people still today believe in heaven and stuff, because it is left over from our more childish minds that couldn’t face death. But now, like, we can be brave enough to face it. I guess I just feel like evolution made the brain like a computer program.”
“That’s interesting,” Jared returned. “But besides the fear of death, how does that answer our experiences of forgiveness, hope, mercy, belonging, and ultimately love? Even people who don’t believe in heaven seem to need those.”
“Sure,” Tegan said. “But maybe they’re not all that special as we think they are. I mean, think about artificial intelligence; I mean, at some point they’re going to create programs that allow a machine to hope and love. Will it really be love? Or will that even matter, because we’ll experience these machines as loving us, and that will be enough? I wonder if ‘God’ is a made-up thing not that different than machines with artificial intelligence.”
Christine, Aaron’s mom who so generously helped lead the night, said, “Oh, yeah! That’s cognitive science, Tegan! My closest friend from college is a cognitive scientist and she says things just like that.” Christine looked at Jared and said, “What do we do with that, Jared?”
Jared could only smile. This was the first time he’d ever heard of cognitive science, but he was sure that delving into Tegan’s questions would take them on a journey. These kinds of questions had already taken him into thinking about how the claims of faith meet the findings and theories of evolution, cognitive ethology, physics, Big Bang cosmology, and more. Jared wasn’t sure he’d done all these thoughts justice, but he was sure that as an act of ministry he’d joined his young people in wrestling with a complicated world and a big God who meets us in it. He was sure that on this journey Tegan’s questions would lead them into a place where again and again, the ministering action of God echoes across the universe. Jared looked forward to where Tegan’s questions would lead them . . .