In her book, Touching a Nerve”, Patricia Smith Churchland, professor emerita, Philosophy Department, University of California in San Diego, states,” Not surprisingly, when people believe something to be absolutely certain and basic, it is profoundly shocking to find that the central “truth” of their universe may be falling apart. It is unnerving”.
As G.M. Woerlee (Why do people believe in religion?) states, people cannot see, touch, smell, or detect the reality of this immaterial God, or gods, or souls, demons, devils, angels, or eternal life after death, but they still continue to believe. He states that it is futile to try to get people to abandon their beliefs because these come from such a fundamental level. And since it is not possible to erase religion from the human mind, let us imagine that a supreme being does in fact exist. Why would humans be willing to worship a powerful deity as I have described, who has no interest in them? Why not? They have been doing this since human time began with no hard evidence that their prayers were ever answered by supernatural beings.
Very little would change, except for discarding all the excess baggage. Saints, far-fetched religious fairy tales, outlandishly expensive places of worship, concepts of heaven and hell as earth-like dwellings, and the ongoing need to butter up God would all bite the dust.
A fresh look at how God functions will inspire a new generation of scholars, space explorers, and scientists to frantically push back the frontiers of knowledge to learn more about Galaxy MACSO67-JD, 14 billion light years away, the eternal home of God. Souls, however, if indeed they exist, must be prepared to journey 14,000 million light years at 186,000 miles per second in order to reach this heavenly home. But Professor Smith Churchland throws a monkey wrench into the whole concept of “souls” when she states, “Non-physical souls may be like fairies- there may be such, but on the accumulating evidence, it is not at all plausible”.
No doubt an alert Pope Francis will loudly condemn and repudiate the professor’s sacrilege because the Christian church is founded on the belief in eternal life. He will stomp, rage, and rally all Christians, convene a Council of Rome in 2014. And he will reluctantly issue a formal declaration to adopt the newly-minted concept of a non-intrusive God, but with the addendum that human souls are indeed real and able to exit dead bodies. The pope does realize that compromise is sometimes vital while there is still time to save the store.
People will still fervently believe in this one supreme, more easily-understood supernatural being, but with only the faintest hope of living forever- that is, if their souls miraculously escape, sane and intact, from their dead brains and survive the journey to Galaxy MACSO67-JD. It goes without saying, that once this declaration is adopted, all hold-outs will be declared heretics.
