Living Faith with Both Sides of the Brain (Jim Paul, L’Abri Worker)

This presentation was recorded at English Library, where regular public lectures are held to explore questions about the reality and relevance of Christianity. For more lectures, head to www.liberiideerslibrary.org, where more than 2,000 lectures and discussions are available to explore. Let me just pray first and then I'll be good to pray. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you we can gather in this room and think about things which are important and we pray that we do well, do so well and learn and grow and most of all encounter you more truly and more really. Amen. Okay, so living faith with both sides of the brain, I'm going to start with a couple of questions and my first one is this, why did God give us a Bible? Why didn't He give us a systematic theology? This is a famous systematic theology that we have in our library. But why did God give us this weird book of imprecise stories and poetry, prayers, parables, and prophets? Why didn't God give us a clear cut theology? For example, here's the doctrine of God, da, da, da, da, da, here's the doctrine of incarnation, et cetera, et cetera. Wouldn't that be a lot easier? Wouldn't it solve a lot of theological disputes and divisions? On baptism, for example, if God had laid out exactly in a systematic theology what baptism was or what communion was and what happened at those moments and when they should be done et cetera, et cetera. What would we lose if the Bible was a systematic theology? It would be rather boring, yeah. What's his name? AC Grayling wrote a book called The Good Book which he wrote, he's an atheist as an alternative Bible and it's exceedingly boring, actually. Here's another question. Why is it that when many people become Christians, their faith seems very alive? But as they study more theology or doctrine, faith can easily ossify into something that's abstract and revitalized, their faith becomes less real and less alive and more abstracted and God seems more absent. Or when many people study theology at college or seminary, do they lose their faith entirely? Or here's another question. Why, from a friend of mine, who was visiting England and attended about five or six Sunday services at Good Bible Believing Conservative Evangelical churches, mostly in university cities? And he said this to me, he said, "Everything I heard in the sermons was theologically correct. Nothing was unbiblical. I disagreed with nothing, but nothing moved me." Why was that? Now I hope to find answers to all these questions from an usual source, a philosopher, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Ian McGill-Christ and his ideas on brain asymmetry. And along the way, I hope we can discover pointers that will help us find the living faith, a faith lived with both sides of the brain. So let me start by telling you a bit a little bit about Ian McGill-Christ. This is him. Born in 1953, he was a scholar at Winchester College, not so far away, and then read English at New College Oxford. He then went on to teach English literature and research philosophy at All Souls Oxford, before deciding to pursue medicine and train in psychiatry. He practices the consulting psychiatrist at the Mordsley in Bethlehem Hospital, one of the most famous psychiatric hospitals in London, and developed an area of interest in brain asymmetry in the morphological and functional differences between the right and the left hemispheres of the brain, and the significance of this asymmetry for the way that we see the world, not just as individuals, but as cultures. And this is the subject, this brain asymmetry and the way that affects the way we see the world, is the subject of four books that he's written. But I'm going to focus on, well, two or three of them, if any, had to abide up. One is the master and his emissary, which is published in 2009, and the other one is called the Matter with Things, which is actually two volumes, as you can see, pretty weighty pages which was published in 2021. And this is basically his thesis in these books. My thesis is that for us as human beings, there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience, that each has of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognisably human world, and that their difference is rooted in the bi-hemospheric structure of the brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to cooperate, but I believe that they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture. So this is basically, yeah, the thesis that he sets out at the beginning of the master and his emissary. As to his personal beliefs, he is Imigil Chris as a pan-entheist. We can talk more later about what that means. He's a pan-psychist, I would say. He believes that consciousness is primary and prior to matter, but he also says that he's been deeply impacted by the Christian story, which he calls the most powerful mythos he has encountered. And many of his ideas, I would say, are Christian adjacent and eco-classical, Christian theological and philosophy. So that's a bit about Ian McGilcus. So let's get into his, yeah, what he's written about brain asymmetry, okay. So the first parts of both the matter with things and the master's emissary describe the differences, the first parts of the book describe the differences between the two hemispheres of the brain, the left and the right, and they are extensively researched and referenced in the books. And so his reflections on brain asymmetry are not conjecture, but the best knowledge that we have available on the significance of brain asymmetry. As Ian McGilcus sees it, the brain doesn't create consciousness, but it does give structure to the mind. And the task of the brain, I think this is very good the way he puts the task of the brain, is to put us in touch with the world out there, with whatever exists apart from ourselves. So the brain enables us to engage with reality. But the brain has two hemispheres which enable this task, a right hemisphere and a left hemisphere as you can see in the diagram in the slide. And they're joined in the middle by about 300 to 800 million fibres which pass between the right and the left called the corpus callosum, which join kind of similar areas in the right and the left hemisphere, at least sort of similar topologically in shape. And the corpus callosum mainly has an inhibitory function, so that it basically says no to one hemisphere affecting the other, mostly says no. So these two, we have two hemispheres, but they're asymmetrical, they're not the same in structure or function. For example, the left hemisphere, I don't know if it shows it well in this diagram, but the left hemisphere is larger. The production and comprehension of speech are located in the left hemisphere and the parts that are involved in speech are larger than in the right. The posterior part of the left hemisphere is larger as well. But the right frontal lobe is expanded and extends a little under the left. And actually in humans, the whole brain is actually a little twisted on its axis. So he asked the question, why, I mean you could say, why do we have two hemispheres in the first place? We could just have one hemisphere, that would be a lot easier. Why do we have two? Why are they different and what is the significance of that difference? Now the typical pop psychology explains the difference being a bit like this. So the left hemisphere is the dominant hemisphere. It is thought to be in pop psychology the most important of the two hemispheres. It is to do with logic, facts and reason, it's very detail-oriented, it processes words and language, it's particularly associated with maths and science, and it is practical and realistic and often associated with being male. There's a male traits. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, is seen in pop psychology to be subservient. It deals with feelings and emotions, visual spatial and symbols, art and creativity, imagination and fantasy. It is illogical and impetuous to do with philosophy and religion and associated with the female. So McGill Chris points out that this is almost entirely wrong. Using evidence, say from stroke or brain tumor patients, where either the right or the left hemisphere or various bits of it have been affected, destroyed damage by that, or patients in which the corpus callosum, so that's a bit joining the right and left as being cut, which they used to do in the past as a way of treating intractable epilepsy. There are some people who had their corpus callosum cuts, so the two hemispheres are entirely separated. Fortunately, or unfortunately, you could say that provides an amazing study area for neuroscientists to do. But you can also anesthetize one hemisphere of the brain, so it stops functioning or reduces functioning and the other. So anyway, this is the evidence that he looks at of all these neuroscientific conditions or pathological conditions. And what these show is that actually both hemispheres are involved in almost all that the brain does. In language, reason, creativity, imagination, memory, emotions, visual spatial, etc., both hemispheres are involved in all these things. It's not that the right does one and the left does the other. And in fact, the right, in fact, as opposed to this, is the more important hemisphere. And if you have a left-sided stroke, you are more disabled, let's say, in your view of reality. Sorry, if you have a right-sided stroke, sorry, and your right hemisphere is damaged, you're more disabled in your total kind of global view of reality than the left. So the right is actually probably the more the more important hemisphere. And the differences between the hemispheres, that McGill Chris says, he says they're all involved in everything. So the difference between the hemispheres is not the what-ness, not the what they do, but the how they do it. And the particular thing that he focuses on is the difference is the attention, the attention that they bring to bear on the world. And in fact, the two hemispheres see the world in two quite different ways. They attend to the world or give a different attention to the world. So that each hemisphere gives a different version of the world. And they are meant to work together, both a vital, but also in some senses, incompatible and not equal. McGill Chris points out that attention is vital because the attention we give the world changes the nature of the world we experience. For example, Marin and I have been on a pilgrimage walk several summers in a row. And we like to walk slowly. We stop and we take time. We give our attention to things. So once when we were passing a sign, it was off the route we were going, but it said waterfall, we went off and we sat by the waterfall, took off our shoes, put our feet in the water. And at that moment an otter appeared right next to us out of the water and climbed up onto the bank, then saw us and ran away. That evening I was talking with another man who had done exactly the same walk we had done, but his experience was totally different because he said he just focused on getting to the end. His attention was given with getting to the end of the walk at a certain time, but our attention was given to the things around us. So we had a very different experience of the same walk. Also the attention we give changes who we are, it changes us. For example, think of the difference between someone who gives their attention to great literature and poetry versus someone who gives their attention only to TikTok. What you give your attention to affects what you see, but also who you become. So McGilchrist writes, "The detention is a moral act. It has consequences. It brings into being a world and with it a set of values." Now he points out in his book that this is not a relativistic position. He says, "There is truth out there to be encountered, but whether we encounter the truth or not may be dependent on the kind of attention we give the world." I hope that makes sense. Does that make sense? So there is truth, but the attention you give affects whether you encounter it or not. So let's explore more the howness of the attention that both each of the hemispheres gives the world. I'll start with the left hemisphere. So the kind of attention that the left hemisphere gives the world is a narrow, focused, highly selective attention. I think McGilchrist likens it to a torch beam, but I wonder whether looking down a microscope might be a better analogy for the kind of attention of the left brain. It narrows your focus down and actually it misses everything else that's going on around, doesn't it? When you're looking down a microscope, you're not aware of anything else. Whereas the right hemisphere has a wide open attention, very broad, a vigilant attention. It's flexible. McGilchrist likens it to a flood light, but I think maybe more like a radar in a sense because a radar gives you this 360 vision and also it detects things as they're moving in time and space. So the right hemisphere sees the whole and the connectedness of things. The left hemisphere to go back to that is therefore reductionistic like the microscope. It sees things in isolation abstracted out of their context. So you think to look down a microscope, you make a slide, don't you, of whatever you're looking at. It's something that's abstracted. It's broken into parts and frozen in space and time. The microscope things are not usually moving. They're frozen on the slide. And it likes to see things in categories to put them into groups. Whereas the right hemisphere, the more radar-like, sees things in their context, in the flux and movement of space and time, in their relationships and not just as isolated instances. It sees things as individual things but related together. So the knowledge then that the left hemisphere has is a bit, is derived really from the parts that make up the whole. It likes to see, you know, what are the, what is the most reduced part? And that makes the whole. Whereas the right hemisphere, its understanding is derived from the whole that makes the parts what they are. So they work the other way down. You might liken this to going bird watching. I like it to going bird watching. Okay, I recently went bird watching in Norfolk and I got up early in the morning. Sun was rising and walked to the bird hide. And this was a very right brain experience. All my senses were alert. It was sunrise. I could feel the wind on my face. I could hear the sound of a warbler somewhere in the Bramble bushes. I noticed a tiny toad on the path. A sudden flight of waders as a marsheria was on the horizon. It's that kind of experience where you're just, you're, you're in the flow of all the things that are happening around you. Once we got to the hide, we got out the spotting scope, which is like the very powerful binocular. You look in monocular. And then you might focus down on one bird and discuss what is that bird? What is, do you know what the bird is? Oh, birdwatch. Almost. That's pretty close actually. Yeah. Yeah. You might say like what is this? I can see the wind color and the pattern and the ice stripe. It's not. It's not a knot. But that's good. It's a curly sandpiper. Okay. Which we did actually see. Okay. But when you do that, you look down this scope. You're not aware of anything else that's going on around you. You're just totally focused in on that thing. It's not like the experience of walking to the hide where you have this kind of 360 vision. Okay. So the superior power then of the left hemisphere is to make a map of the world. Then what the left hemisphere does is it represents a version of our experience, a map of reality that's broken down into understandable parts. It just like a map, reality has been reduced to static separable bounded fragmented entities like symbols on a map. So this is a map of, if you said, well, I want to walk from from Gretem to Selborn. Okay. You could have this, this is a map, right? The right hemisphere, its superpower is to give us the experience of a lived embodied world of individual unique things deeply connected to one another. It experiences the relationship of the flux and the things becoming. It gives us knowledge of the world where as the left hemisphere gives us knowledge about the world. So the map could you give you knowledge of how to walk to Selborn, which passed the follow, but it wouldn't give you knowledge of the walk to Selborn. But the right hemisphere, this is a picture from Noah Hill. I found on a website, beautiful sun, sun on Noah Hill, which is on the way to Selborn from here. But the right hemisphere gives you knowledge of the world, what it is to be a subject embedded in the world of space and time and motion. So the value of the left brain is principally utility, in other words, usefulness. And of course, if you know your neuroscience, you'll know that the left brain controls the right hand. Yeah, and the right hand is the thing with which we grasp things and pick them up and turn them around and pull them apart and see what they are. The left hemisphere is superpar, in one sense, is usefulness, seeing what something is and how it might be used. And in one way, it's also about power. How can I use this in the world? Whereas the right hemisphere, sorry, the right hemisphere, its values are more awe and wonder, aliveness, participating in the world and engagement with the world. So just to tease us out a little bit more, I use the example of language. So the left hemisphere, as I said, is very good at breaking things down into their component parts. So the left hemisphere knows syntax and the vocabulary of language. It is good at grammar, but what it doesn't see is words in their context. So the left hemisphere could analyze a joke, but it wouldn't find it funny. And that's why one of the effects that can result from a right hemisphere stroke or tumor when your right hemisphere is damaged is that you lose your sense of humor. Your left is intact, but it can't see. Because when you think about it, context and relationship is critical to humor, isn't it? Humor is not the words themselves with the context in which they're placed. That's what makes something funny. So that's a good example. The right hemisphere is also responsible for understanding the emotional significance of what's said, because that's again context. Irony, metaphor, nonverbal communication, music, the pitch of one's voice, as opposed to the actual words. Those are all context things. Okay, so that's the difference. Are you getting a picture of the difference between the two hemispheres, the attention they give the world now. The problem comes here when, oh maybe I'm going on a bit, sorry, I'm going on a bit too much. The problem comes here is that the left hemisphere gives us a virtual world. See a map, that's not really walking to cell born, is it? That is the map of walking to cell born. So it gives you a copy in a way a conceptual form of the world in language usually. It gives you an idea of the thing, but not the experience, an idea of the walk, but not the experience of the walk. The left hemisphere is reductionistic. It demands precision and clarity and fixation, and it doesn't like uncertainty. It actually, it works very much in either all categories. It doesn't like uncertainty, and it works in rules, either this or that. And the danger here is that in its hyper focus, the left hemisphere, on the parts, the world becomes dead, inert, frozen, conceptualized rather than experience. And in fact, the left hemisphere prioritises its conceptual version of the world over the real world. It says, in effect, my map is better than your reality. And in fact, it will ignore things that do not fit the map, even though it has come across them, because the map is so important. So we can get a bit like this, can't you? When you go outside, you say it can't be raining right now, because my weather app doesn't say it should be. But it is, okay, that's when we get caught in our map. Where is the right hemisphere has a very open stance to reality. It allows it to cope with uncertainty and live in a both-and reality. It can cope with nuance. So, yeah, so that's, yeah, so it can be very open. Where is the left hemisphere? Tens to get stuck in its own closed system. It has the advantage of precision, but precision at the price of emptiness and self-referentialness. It doesn't refer to anything. So the knowledge of the left hemisphere can become very circular and kind of trapped in that. The left hemisphere is also blind to unexpected change. So it would be a bit like if your left hemisphere is guiding you to cell-borne. It would be like walking to cell-borne and then refusing to go into the coffee shop, because it isn't shown on the map, okay. It doesn't like unexpected change. In fact, it will ignore things that don't not represent it in its map. And this means McGilchrist says that it doesn't know what it doesn't know, which is the most dangerous thing. If you don't know what you don't know, much more dangerous than knowing what you don't know, which is the right hemisphere knows what it doesn't know. So the left hemisphere often becomes very overconfident about what it knows and the prediction it makes and is more likely to jump to conclusions. It tends to fixate on a single solution to a problem that best fits what it already knows. And this is shown again in people with stroke that the left hemisphere will even confabulate and fabricate what it doesn't know to solve uncertainty. So that most delusional states are associated with right brain dysfunction when the left brain is taking over, but it becomes delusional. It's also the left brain finds it very difficult to let go of its way of thinking. It doesn't basically like the new, whereas the right brain, the right hemisphere, is open to the new. It's open to inconsistencies. And what it's good at doing is updating its theories according to the reality that it encounters. So it will change its view according to a new reality, a new reality encounters, a new thing it encounters. So the right hemisphere brings us other than what we know, whereas the left hemisphere can only really bring us what we already know. The left, the right hemisphere is open to an array of solutions to a problem and related meanings, and it can recognize complex patterns. And the right hemisphere actually will be is totally truthful, McGill Chris says. It places a high, the right hemisphere, places a high premium on truth, whereas I said the left hemisphere will actually fabricate answers to things, if it doesn't know. The left hemisphere lacks imagination. It's rigid and it applies isolated reason. It can't really enter into the experience of what is there, and it lacks emotional depth, whereas the right hemisphere is sympathetic, other centered, and can put itself in another person's shoes. So these two hemispheres give rise basically to two different views of the world, and you could look at them like this. The worldview of the left hemisphere is like a machine, and its thinking is algorithmic, with a slavish following of internal logic, even if it contravenes experience. It constructs a 2D map of the world, consistent but devitalized and impersonal. This is the worldview of scientism, if you like. Whereas the worldview of the right hemisphere is organic. It sees the world as a living thing, it's open to the new. It's a world in which things presence to us, and McGill Chris talks about that, he uses that word, things presence to us. They actually, yeah, they are there, and if we attend well, things will present to us. The right hemisphere allows us to be a skilled participant in the world, whereas as I said, that's a 2D and this so skilled participant, and the world is a rich experience, a 4D experience, in a narrative, in time and space, within affinity for what actually is. Okay, good. Does that, is that giving you a good flavor of the differences? Okay, so let's now just think about those in two ways. He picks out so many ways, he looks at beauty and the imagination and music and language and art and creativity. There's just wonderful, wonderful chapters and all those kind of things, but I just want to pick out a couple of ways and just talk about the difference between the right and left in terms of two things. One is language and metaphor. Now a metaphor is a figure of speech by which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable. So the Lord is my shepherd, is a metaphor, isn't it? It's not literally that God, you know, has a shepherd's staff and looks after sheep. Or she stole my heart, would be a metaphor. All the world's a stage, that would be a metaphor. By making an imaginative link of similarity, yet dissimilarity, it helps us understand the object or action or experience better. And obviously, metaphors are particularly important in story, poetry or personal experience, but all language actually is metaphor. Even the word metaphor is a metaphor. Pete, are you good at your breaking down metaphor? Yeah, go on, have a go, yeah. I have to carry a cross. Carry a cross, great. Meta is a cross, isn't it, and for is carry. So a metaphor means to carry a meaning across. You see, the metaphor is a metaphor, isn't it? Metafore is a metaphor. All language is a metaphor. Okay, a metaphor carries within it, implicit meaning. It doesn't explain, but it makes links so that we can understand the things that are linked better. A metaphor lives in the mind and helps us generate new thoughts and understandings, which it doesn't narrowly limit. So the Lord is my shepherd. If that lives in our mind, it generates new thoughts, it's not limited by the metaphor. It carries us across to the experiential and embodied world. Metafore's story and narrative are right brain phenomenon. They are to do with context and the relationship between things. The left brain, however, sees metaphor as imprecise and superfluous, inaccurate and redundant. Metafores to the left brain to coach on lock are perfect cheats. Instead, the left hemisphere wants to reduce the metaphor to an explicit statement of fact or to abstract definable concepts. It sees the abstract definable concepts as better and truer than the implicit truth in the metaphor. So it wants to reduce story to proposition. But enforcing the implicit into the explicit, the nature of the thing or the experiences changed. Think for example, this is my example here, of reducing the parable of the prodigal sun to the statement God welcomes back sinners. Something is lost. The truth becomes smaller, maybe more precise in some ways, but less contentful, less meaningful. It loses its life and it becomes inert and maybe disconnected, a statement, not an experience. Something 2D, rather than 4D. So the lived reality becomes merely a word symbol. And I think this happens a lot, where the left hemisphere likes word symbols, the kind of things that you might find in a systematic theology, words like omniscient or omnipresent. They are word symbols, but they're not really part of a story. And those can become our prime knowledge of God. So language can become reality itself. Life becomes just a language game, not an encounter. The right hemisphere, however, sees words as tools to encounter reality. Symbols and words are not an end in themselves. They are not reality themselves, but there's something that we can see through to reality. McGilchris writes this in the matter with things. He says, "The fact the spiritual traditions through the ages have spoken in images, parables and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer." Do you see what he's saying there? They speak in parables symbols, paradoxes, because that's the only way we can grasp the reality. But if you were to reduce those things into just an explicit set of word symbols, then actually that wouldn't enable you to grasp the reality of what they're referring to. Okay, so that's something about metaphor. And then the second area I just want to think about the difference is between belief. Okay, belief. In the left hemisphere's view of the world, belief is just a weaker form of knowing, laced with doubt. Belief for the left hemisphere is primarily a mental ascent to cognitive constructs. Thus to the left hemisphere, belief in God is a factual answer to the question, "Does God exist?" Belief has an eye-it relationship for the left hemisphere, whereas for the right hemisphere belief has an eye-vow relationship, is much more "I believe you, I trust you, I stand in a relationship with you that requires a certain way of acting and being." So for the left hemisphere, as I said, belief is about mental ascent to cognitive constructs, or cognitive ascent to mental constructs. But for the right hemisphere belief in God isn't merely a mental ascent to a truth, but is a living disposition towards the world whereby I live and act in a world in which God exists a world that is constantly enriched in meaning by God's presence. So the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere bring into being two quite different worlds, one of cognitive constructs and one of lived experiences. But McGilcus point is that we need both of these. So how do the hemispheres work together? Okay, not like this. Nigel Halliday sent me this a few hours ago, how the left and the right hemisphere communicate, but like this. Okay, so his point, it books called the master and his emistry, that the right hemisphere is the master. Basically, the right hemisphere is aware of new things that presence to it. It's aware of new objects in its embodied experience, and the right hemisphere kind of says, "Oh, that's interesting, that's new." You know, I haven't seen that before. I wonder what it is. And then the right hemisphere then instructs the left hemisphere to sort of go and find out, go and pick it up, turn it round, have a look at it, maybe pull it apart of it, see how it works. So it transfers its experience to the left hemisphere for processing if you like. The left hemisphere grasps what the right is already prioritised and focuses attention on it. It then represents the object in consciousness, fitting it into prior knowledge, categories to grasp what it is and how it might be used. So it essentially maps what the thing is. And this isn't an essential function, McGilcus says, to living in the world. He said, "Without the left hemisphere's distance and structure, there couldn't be art only experience." But here is the key issue. If the process stops with the left hemisphere, then we get stuck in our abstract concepts. What the left hemisphere then is supposed to do in a well-functioning human being is to return the knowledge that it has gained to the right hemisphere where the right hemisphere then reconstitutes that knowledge into its total picture so that it becomes that knowledge becomes alive again and integrated into our total experience of the world. So both hemispheres are vital in functioning well. We need both. The right needs the left in order to achieve its full potential but the left needs the right in order to guide its attention to the things that are important. So this is all the neuroscience. So that's the first half of the books. Okay. I'll try and describe the second half a little bit more briefly. So the second half then of the books is a cultural thesis really called how the brain shaped us or how the brain has shaped our world. And his thesis is that the history of Western culture has been a pendulum swing between cultures in which the right and the left brain has been more balanced and ones in which the left hemisphere is dominant. So there are moments in cultural history where the left hemisphere has actually become the master and subjugated or ignored or denigrated the knowledge of the right hemisphere. So I'll miss out. So examples of this would be, for example he would say the presacratic ancient world where drama art and story arose was a more balanced right left brain culture. But in platonic philosophy it became more left brain where knowledge was reduced to an idealized disembodied abstract form. Then he would say the church fathers for example were more balanced in the way that they looked at scripture in a more fluid way. And then gradually things became more left brain in medieval scholasticism where things became much more about logic and language. People argue for example how many angels you could fit on the head of a pin. Then he would see a further swing back to a more balanced right left brain view of the world. In the renaissance again the flourishing of poetry art music metaphor the embodiment of the world Michelangelo's David. And then in McGillchrist's opinion account to swing to a more left brain thinking in the reformation or particularly the latter parts the reformation. And that's also actually when I guess systematic theologies began to become written and more frequently written at least anyway. We can talk about that a bit later. Then it carries on with being left brain in the enlightenment and age he says not of reason but of left brain rationalism in which all questions can be reduced to simple expressible formulae otherwise they are not real questions. Then a push back towards a more balanced view with the romanticism again with the flourishing of art and poetry. And then the age we're in modernity and post modernity which he would see as a huge swing and increasing swing back towards a left brain view of the world which you know dissect and reduces everything down to its smallest components. A left brain disenchanted world of fact where only science can deal with what is real and only science is the path to knowledge. He says a culture of relentless progress of control over nature in which everything including human nature is transformed into a tool for power. And he would see post modernity. I don't have time to go into it but it has just a continuation of that. Another left brain attempt at control through the proposition that all reality is constructed by the self. And of course technology plays a huge part in this as well technology is really very left brain and we can discuss that later an iPhone is a very left brain experience using an iPhone. Okay good. So McGill Chris argument is scholarly and erudite. It's poetic and powerful persuasive challenging and enlightening. Of course there are critiques one could make as with any work of such breadth and some of his historical analysis lacks detail and nuance. For example I think the way his history and theology of the reformation it's much more complex than he allows for. For example he talks a lot about the way that the reformation destroyed images and statues. The iconoclastic elements of the reformation as being very left brain and became words themselves but he ignores the flourishing of art and poetry within the reformation such as poetry of Darn or Milton or the Dutch still life and landscape painters of the 1617 centuries. I would also argue that his larger worldview actually fits better with a Christian framework than a pan-intheistic one. And I could also I guess raise a question whether his brain asymmetry thesis does become a two totalizing thesis in which the whole history of western culture is fitted so that the full of humanity is interpreted as a result of left brain dominance. So you could you know push back on some areas but as I said it's an incredibly scholarly and erudite piece of work and I would hate to be in an argument within McGill Chris because I know I would lose and anyway being in an argument where he loses very left brain isn't it? Oh where you want to win all these is very left brain but so we wouldn't do that. Well what I want to spend the rest of the time thinking is about is the relevance of his ideas for Christian faith okay so this is where we get on to living with both sides of our brain and I want to start with modern evangelicalism and the crisis of modern evangelicalism. I'll direct you to Andrew Fellow's book Smuggling Jesus Back Into The Church which explores the way the church has been inculturated by the super values of modernity which are basically left brain values so one of the ways the church has been infiltrated by the world is with the left brain views of modernity and I would say in particular the way that our theology and doctrinal or moral maps of God and of Christian faith have become mistaken by us as the reality of faith. I think it's Owen Barfield who writes that an idol is when we mistake our map for the real thing or in McGill Chris terms an idol is when we mistake our left brain representations of reality for reality itself so I think in conservative evangelicalism there is a certain cognitive idolatry going on or I call this a doctrineolatry or Lewis uses a word a bibliolatry this is where we mistake doctrine or even the Bible for the encountered reality of the living God. We mistake the left brain representations of God for in theology and doctrine for God himself. McGill Chris says though just notice and this isn't sorry this isn't to say that doctrine and theology are not important is not to say that at all. Remember McGill Chris says we need both hemispheres we need the unfolding and unpacking of the experience of God in theology and doctrine and in fact the Bible does that itself it impacts the experiences of God in theology and doctrine so we need that to make sense of our experience but if our left hemisphere representations become the reality to us then we have an idolatry we take a representation for the real and have nothing real that actually presences to us that would be like having a map of how to walk to cellborn if if you said to me like many students say how do I walk to cellborn and I gave you the map and then you said to me okay I don't need to walk there anymore because I've got the map that can be what theology and doctrine is like I've got the map but are we actually doing the walk that's the right brain thing so when we become stuck in our left brain representations we've come stuck in a kind of circular logic as I said theology doctrine can become very self-referential as one student put it to me a hermetically sealed language that just refers to itself but doesn't actually touch anything in my real experience I wonder if that was what my friends said when they said I went to all these churches and everything was doctrineally theologically correct but nothing moved me because it was a kind of internal language game without touching the real world this leads us then to a crisis of meaning the scriptures are preached but in a vacuum and Christian faith can become devitalized from lived experience which may be also for why many modern people god remains hidden not because god is hidden but because our cognitive representations of god keep us from actually experiencing him which I think is what happened to the Pharisees they couldn't experience Jesus as god because their representations god in the way so the lived reality of god gets replaced by concepts so this cognitive idolatry I think also betrays itself in a tendency to reduce the narrative story and poetry of Bible to simplistic proposition so many people are brought up on they in Sunday school for example where you are told a parable and then Sunday school teacher will tell you what it means I once remembered tutoring a student here at Lebrie who said I don't read the Bible anymore I said why don't you read the Bible and he said because I know what it says and the fact what he had is the propositional truth of every parable or every story reduced by his father or his church pastor into a simple like one liner so why read the story again when you actually have the truth of it in inverted commas the result of this is that we often become spectators to our own faith I call this the ungodding of Christianity so the problem here is not theologian experience per se I remember as a new Christian being given my first systematic theology and it's true that I wept reading some of the pages because it just helped me understand what I was reading in the Bible in a wonderful way but the problem is we mustn't get stuck in those representations we've got to if you like feed back haven't we what we receive from the left hemisphere sorry what so the right hemisphere receives it passes that knowledge to the left hemisphere which if you like umpacks and unfolds in doctrine and theology but then that has to be passed back to the right hemisphere to our lived experience of God Neil's board the physicist said thinking we know things when we only know words we will not know our ignorance and we'll never wonder I think that puts it quite well thinking we know things when we only know words we will not know our ignorance and we'll never wonder I wonder if that's where the Pharisees got stuck they never wondered who is this person and what's he doing okay right okay so how then might we find our way back to a living faith I've just got three things to say as I finish how might we find our way back to a living faith that integrates both sides of the brain so yeah I sketched out how it works yeah this is just sorry this I this slide is just sketching out how it works I would say the heart of a living faith is an encounter with God that is the heart of a living faith an encounter with God that changes us not just to have a representation of God but an encounter with God and that's what the Bible is all about when you think about it you think of Jacob's ladder Moses burning bush eyes vision the disciples on the lake of Galilee Paul on the road to Damascus it starts with a living encounter with the otherness of God of Jesus this encounter can then be unpacked and unfolded by the left brain the encounter is passed to the left brain for unfolding and unpacking the left brain represents the encounter in consciousness fitting it into prior knowledge into theological categories to better grasp what the experience can mean and expressing it in words but then crucially it goes back to the right hemisphere to build what we have unpacked and unfolded into our lived experience of the living God so a living faith is neither stuck in unprocessed experience or in processed abstraction that's important it's not stuck in unprocessed experience or processed abstraction but there is this if you like this yeah this movement going on okay theology induction is a way that we must remain transparent a way that we see through to the reality of God not becoming opaque so it's the only thing we can see okay so now I've got just three things to say about how can we help become more yeah people with an integrated left right brain faith living faith with both sides of the brain so this is the first one faith starts with a disposition towards the world it starts with right brain rather than left brain attitude towards the world what is this attitude well if you remember what is crucial is the attention we give to the world so the right brain starts with giving attention to wonder and to awe to the new and to the unexpected to the expectation of something present to us in the world of God present to us it has an openness to the otherness of things not just to the maps in our head that's what we need I think for a living faith so wonder is the first of all passions and this is the attitude of little children little children wonder and just said we cannot enter the kingdom of God unless we become like a little child belief McGill Christ writes is a disposition towards the world as if God exists in order to open the possibility of an encounter with God without this disposition and this attention we give the world God will always remain hidden Abraham Heschel writes what we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder this disposition you could say is characterized by humility like I don't know everything so maybe there's more to find out by compassion that actually knowing something starts with love moving towards it and with reverence that in the world we encounter the sacred we stand on holy ground that's the first one I hope you've got some good questions about these because I'm just unpacking them very quickly secondly we we we should aim to develop a faith where imagination and reason are integrated imagination writes in McGill Christ is not as it is sometimes conceived the capacity the capacity to conjure the unreal but it is for the first time to see the real the real that is for reasons of deeply ingrained habit I would say the maps of the left hemisphere no longer present to us imagination is not just to register sense data but to see into the life of what is seen and through that to the greater reality that lies beyond I think this is the way the Bible works the Bible works primarily at the level of story narrative and metaphor not primarily at the level of abstracted abstracted proposition and again the systematic theology theology works really at the level of the abstracted I think the metaphors stories and overarching narrative of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation are supposed to back ties our imagination so that our imagination is filled with these encounters with God which we cannot reduce to mere proposition and this is why we can keep coming back to the Bible we don't have to be like the student who said I don't need to read it anymore because I know what it says because actually we are encountering God in his word this view of faith is much more messy than a left brain abstracted world of theology it allows for nuance it can allow for not yet knowing for ambiguity and multiple perspectives it can allow for both and categories like the incarnation or predestination of free will the right brain the left brain wants to say it's one or the other the right brain would say it's both and because bigger reality this way of looking allows for paradox this integrated way as well as more interested in the messiness of lived relationships between things than the inert isolated things themselves for building watertight theologies that don't touch the world the tell us of the left brain is cleverness but the tell us of the integrated brain is wisdom a quick note on preaching just do I know we got a few pastors in the audience so quick note on preaching okay in just thinking about preaching with both sides of the brain in the integrated world of the right and left brain preaching is not about the download of theology and doctrinal data it's not about getting our congregations theological or doctrinal ducks in a row the goal of preaching is that people would encounter God in his word that they would hear him speak to them a sermon is an invitation to enter further into the mystery of God and to know him better not just know more about him okay I won't say more about that we're running out of time okay and I'll leave that out to third one here we go I'm being right brain flexible here we go okay thirdly and this is the last one rediscover what it means for faith to be embodied faith is not mere cognitive abstract knowledge faith is to participate in the world as the embodied beings that God made us to be because it is in our right brain embodied experience that we encounter the otherness of things whereas our left brain as we see likes to stay with its algorithms and struggles to allow the new so faith is only alive as we operate with both sides of the brain together this is why when we gather together in a place okay that's not just a concept in a place as a body of believers we gather not just to be taught not just for our left brains to be filled with knowledge but to worship God which I think is a whole brain experience to encounter God in worship we encounter the otherness of God in liturgy in music in movement we kneel to pray or take communion in the seasons and the fasts the rhythms of life also the physical aspects of the place the church it's art it's architecture beauty matters in nature my previous lecture is God and nature you can we experience God the otherness of things but Gilchrist writes if all we do is to walk about in our surroundings rather than sit still and stare at them we are obliged to reckon with the otherness of things so we have to rediscover an embodied faith and it's noteworthy and that's why use this picture in remembering that the the central event of the Bible Christ a toning sacrifice Christ does not give us a proposition to repeat but a meal to enact the communion meal he gives us a right brain integrated experience of course this embodiness of faith is not just relevant to church it's relevant to all of life a total disposition towards the world and I Mary and I came across actually this pilgrim prayer on the on St. Coughborough's way and I love this because I think this encapsulates in this prayer an attitude to life this this was helping you to have the attitude to the walk but it may God go with you as you walk may you find the imprint of the infinite in all you see may you hear all the creator of life has to say to you may you find what you seek may you know that you are loved I think this encapsulates brilliantly a kind of a right brained approach to the world or an integrated brain approach to the world it has the expectation that God will presence to you in your walk and and you will see him and hear him and and I love that I think that's the kind of that is the attitude of of an integrated right left brain faith so I think this is the challenge before the church including the evangelical church in the 21st century not to live in our maps of God but in a living encounter with him not to do away with the maps either as I said those are vitally important aren't they in that circle the right to the left to the right but we shouldn't live only in our maps there's been quite a lot written recently about the the uptick in church attendance mostly amongst of the unchurched Gen Z's Gen Z people and my question is what will they find when they come to church interestingly enough they often don't want things like their alpha courses they don't want the reduce they want the experience they want to go to church but what will they find will they find religious iterations of the left brain algorithms that they're trying to escape or will they find a lived encounter with the living God and with their savior the Lord Jesus Christ that changes their lives that's the question I'll leave you with okay thank you for listening so patiently for one hour and five minutes I missed out okay aren't you Joel so we have people approaching all right stay back stay back stay back okay good I would see a lot in the end of here a lot I could ask I as always do myself the honor of asking the first question but I was noticing when you were going through like the the cultural of the yeah the kind of left left hemisphere dominant or balanced there was no example or there was no right hemisphere dominant example culture does it kind of what why is that and what would happen yeah yeah the culture became right hemisphere great so the question is yeah about yeah why why aren't there right hemisphere dominant cultures or only cultures I would say I think that there probably are some sub cultures that have tried to become sort of purely experiential so I was thinking of the beatniks Jack Carrowack or Alan Ginsberg people like that they tried to live entirely in experience if you read on the road is it on the road yeah yeah you know and then they took drugs to try and keep themselves awake to experience and and in the end he goes psychotic doesn't he I think in the book um but I think one of the reasons you don't normally have you know that that doesn't persist is because the right brain knows what it doesn't know so that it knows that it needs the left brain to unpack things um and to unpack its experience and make sense of it and um so yeah so that's very helpful so the right brain knows what it doesn't know and knows that in one sense it knows it needs help whereas the left brain doesn't know that it that it what it doesn't know so it thinks that it knows everything which is which is scientism you know today we experience that as scientism so scientism is that you know everything can be explicable by science and described in science described in formulae and whatever it isn't able to be described in that kind of way isn't real and doesn't exist so so the scientistic world views totally blind to what it can't see and as that therefore is always blind to poetry art music and and and and the sacred so that I hope I hope that makes sense so yeah in a way the right hemisphere is much more humble the left hemisphere is like is is much more hubris stick and uh yeah is it something just uh is there something about kind of the if you're only in the right brain would you would you sense like star of yourself as well like you wouldn't be if the left is the emissary kind of going out and bringing things back in yeah in the same way if you're absolutely in an experience you forget to eat you forget to come yeah that could be true yes yeah they yeah in the beat next yeah in the book they stopped sleeping they take i'm fetamins to stop themselves sleeping so they can just totally experience but I think we we obviously have to process experience don't we to um to actually act and live in the world you know how do I what is this thing that I've just picked up is it edible or not you know um that's a very helpful question isn't it like is it a rock or is it a cabbage um and there's another point actually where I think Abraham Heschel talks I didn't mention it but in it's interesting in um in Jewish tradition rabbinical tradition there are two different um traditions of teaching called um Haggadah Haggadah Haggadah and where have I got it um let me go it somewhere here we go and um and Halakar and Halakar is like very left brain kind of literal legalistic teaching which is fine to do but then you need Haggadah Haggadah which is metaphorical imaginative much more right brain and then he makes his comment he says halakar without Haggadah is dead so the left brain without the right is dead but Haggadah without Halakar is wild so the right without the left is just wild it's un you know it's it's just all over the place and not kind of and and it yeah so maybe that helps as well yeah so the question is what are you thinking about what about the extreme in terms of the what yeah yeah I mean that's I think that's true isn't it um the the extreme end of say yeah charismatic pentacostle or or mystical experience um it can become kind of so unprocessed and unfocused that it's almost just becoming experience for experience itself I I think and then some of the older people here will have lived through the Toronto blessing and that you know that uh kind of charismatic experience and I I know someone in the charismatic church who said this that actually entirely derailed their church because um people just became focused on having the experience and not on actually so maybe you could say yeah you're not not sort of seeing or questioning or and yeah yeah thinking about and processing what it is and and seeing through that to the reality of God so yeah but but obviously you know one would also say pentacostle charismatic church is yeah would generally probably be more in touch with their right brain than than their left that I mean that's not necessarily true because there's there's um a lot of theology and doctrine that goes on in those churches too so but I would say that probably you know that a lot of conservative evangelical churches are very very left brain to their detriment yeah I think anyway we'll get stuck in their maps yeah controversial statement okay let's get one yeah we have a question from somebody tuning in online he said considering man has made an image of God in what ways if at all does God have right or left brain chemistry yeah yeah well it's a good question yeah if we are made in the image of God I suppose it it means doesn't it that we are made I mean God we are made aren't we in the image of a God who's as the Bible says a living God isn't he he's a living God that you encounter not not just a concept were an idea so that would be where say the platonic idea of God would be much more just a concept or an idea or and some religions God is a formula or a technique but but that he's a living God but he's also if you like a speaking God isn't he who speaks in word even before Adam and Eve are around or humans are around he speaks in word let let there be light the members of the the Trinity communicate to one another but yeah I mean that's very interesting as well isn't it that now I just said the word Trinity reminds me that you know that the Trinity is is a relationship isn't it it is it is very if you like it's it's it's the right brain world of the relationship betweenness the betweenness and love God is love love is the betweenness between the Father the Son and the Spirit so yeah so that the kind of that represents if you like you could say the right brain certainly you know kind of what would you care kind of yeah represents that kind of reality but God is also a speaking of God isn't it who speaks in contentful words amongst himself and then to people so that would be I guess the kind of yeah that processing of the experience and when Moses for example you see that a lot in the Bible that even Moses says you know to God tell me your name he says I am who I am so he has an experience of God but he also he is God speaking to him in a in a sort of way that is unpacking that experience so I hope that answers I don't know that answers that question anyone else got anything on that to let's come into their mind on that question yeah would pan psychism or kind of the consciousness be more kind of right but like just all is there something about that that means more in that direction that's less particular less defined and and I'm just trying to think of different concepts yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean I think there's um I think yeah I mean pan psychisms are different and there's a great lecture on it on our podcast site I think it's a pretty good lecture good yeah I mean pan yeah pan psychism in a way I mean people at pan psychists are very interested in the connectedness between things you know not in necessary and so that yeah they're not in breaking things down you know materialists are very interested in breaking things down into the reduced most reduced parts whereas a pan psychist is someone who thinks that yeah consciousness is ubiquitous in the universe and is primary and ubiquitous in everywhere in the universe yeah they're very interested in the connections and and McGill Christ is very very interested in the relationships between things so he would say actually what makes a thing a thing is not the thing itself but the relationships that it's involved in and you know you and so that and I think that's I think that's very deeply true actually of reality rather than the left brain gets stuck kind of in the thing itself and what it is and just sees it on its own but if you think a lot of things like a joke a joke is contextual it's to do with the relationships of you know in Englishman and Irishman and Scotsman went into a pub or something you know you tell that joke you need to know the relationships of those three nations to find it funny or what you might expect so yeah and obviously the Trinity is relationship far the Sun and Holy Spirit so that's why I think I actually think his worldview fits better with a Christian worldview than with with a pan-end theistic one but anyway that's another conversation yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's always a temptation to divorce God's word from God's person right yeah yeah and I wonder if that is maybe the the temptation in some different traditions is that you you have God's person and God's word which are meant to be that moment yeah yeah I don't want to map them on the left right left no no that would be yeah yeah smaller yeah and they're meant to to to work together into a whole reality yeah yeah God's person, the sense of God and the unprocessed experience of God. Yeah. Or just have the word and get end up a process of distraction. Yeah. Do you need God's word and God's person connected? Yeah. Yes, absolutely. But the question is, yeah. And then you could think in the incarnation, you know, the word becomes flesh. Yeah. There's a great poem by Edwin Muir, the Scottish poet who grew up in very strict Calvinist background. And he has a line in a poem where he says, "The word made flesh is made word again." And as a criticism of, you know, the word made flesh has just been made into mental constructs. But it's what you're saying is very good, isn't it? That the word becomes flesh and, you know, and dwell among us. And so, yeah, the two are intimately related. It would be wrong, wouldn't it, to separate them out and kind of because God is, you know, there's the doctrine of God's simplicity in that sense. Yeah, he's fully integrated in all those ways, you know. Great. Okay, I think I saw another. It's merit at the back. [ Inaudible Remark ] And if you listen to what you're saying, you realize that we all, you know, make things the don't know, and say that. How do you become a balance? Yeah. [ Inaudible Remark ] Yeah, that's great. [ Inaudible Remark ] Yeah, in a more integrated brain way. Okay, so there's questions. Yeah, so if we're very, the question is if we're very left brain dominant, which probably many of us are, some by personality, some by upbringing, or whatever, we're very left brain teaching, yeah. And our culture obviously is pushing us in that direction, some through technology, young people through technology. There's a really fascinating study that I heard about where they show people a picture of a sun that is made up of lots of little suns. And then they showed it to some people just straight away, and then some people after they'd been looking at their phone for half an hour. And the people that are looking at their phone for half an hour tend to focus on all the little suns. And don't see the big sun. And the people who haven't been on their phones see the whole thing, see the big sun. So the technology just is very self-affix us, but the question is how could we become more left brain, or more right brain, or integrated brain, more right brain, and more right brain and reading the Bible. I think one thing to solve with would be humility. First of all, to realize that we don't know everything. And to even introduce into yourself the possibility that your left brain constructs of everything may not be the total picture. And just allow yourself that thought to sit with it. This is what I say, it's very easy in our world because we do it to box everything up. And you've got to allow God sometimes to break down your boxes, because he's bigger than our boxes. And our boxes may be helpful in some ways, but if that's all we have then we've constricted him. So humility to entertain that we may not know things and begin to maybe, and then wonder about what we don't know and all. That would be really good to even do that. I think that then when you read the Bible, for example, I would say, could you read the Bible more imaginatively? We had the lecture last Friday, aren't we, on the St. Ignatius' disciplines? And we talked a little bit about Lectio, Davina, or St. Ignatius' disciplines of imaginatively putting yourself into the story in the position of, say, Peter or John or whoever it is. So I think there's that, and it's the process of Lectio Davina, which we could discuss more. I think it's very, very helpful. I found that really helpful in developing a more right brain type faith, where you really work imaginatively with the metaphors that are in the Bible. And when you think about, I read the Psalms a lot, that would be something that would really help. Read the Psalms a lot, because the Psalms are just full of metaphors of who God is. As God says, I'm a rock, I'm a strong tower, I'm a shield, I'm a mother hen that gathers the chicks under her wing. And to allow those metaphors to be alive in your mind, and to work with them, rather than reducing them always just into propositions. So those are some ways, I know if that's helpful, some ways of thinking about that. What would I say? Yeah, I like this, you know, live with a faith to be more like this, that maybe God might presence to you in your day, and rather than in some kind of way, and that you might see the imprint of the infinite. Here what he has to say to you in your day, in some kind of way, I don't necessarily mean, you know, amazing, charismatic, supernatural experiences, but somehow just in the world in which you live, that he is present. And to have the attention, give your attention to that, those would be some ways. Do anyone else think of other ways that you might want to Peter? Read poetry. Read poetry. There are ways you can help the viral to become strange again. Right. That's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. that right brain or any curiosity openness to being rather than saying well I know it's dry, or I know it's actually approaching the curiosity of the ability to be said. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's very good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fresh, or read a whole book at a sitting, so just read a chapter and I read a whole book so you get a whole story happening to you. And maybe you can also go to the National Gallery, look at great art, look at how. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So it's from the buyer. Yeah. Beautiful. Rubens has this episode like that. I've never been active before. That can be another way to help. Yeah. Yeah. Grace Pepper, is Grace here? She's not here tonight. No, she did a fantastic, I think, prayer meeting we had on Monday where she got us to read a poem by RS Thomas called the Lit Feel, the Bright Field, and then read the parables of the treasure Jesus' Parable the Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure that a man finds in a field and like a pearl. And I think those two things, like, work really well together where the poem helped take you into the reality of the parable that Jesus is talking about. So that works really well and another thing could be talking about the Bible is just get a translation of the Bible that is very different to what you're used to. So if you're used to the King James, you know, get a message or something. I know that's a sort of paraphrase but it can really just. I like that because a lot of the time that, in fact, he quotes several times, is it Shelley or Colourage? I can't remember who talks about the film of familiarity that we have this film of familiarity which is very left brain that we think we know everything and everything will fit into what we know and you have to break down that the film of familiarity so that you can see the new and so that can really help where you get a translation that's very different. If you read the message the whole time, get a King James and, you know, sometimes that old language can just really penetrate through the film in a wonderful way. And you know, because I do think this is where the Pharisees got stuck is really. If you think about, they were stuck in their maps so they couldn't actually see Jesus. And I think that might happen to quite a lot of us actually that we got stuck in our maps. And the maps are great, okay? I love a map. I'm going walking tomorrow, I'm taking a map with me. I'm also taking a map on my phone which is great too, you know, to show you exactly where you are. It can be great. I just walk the whole walk reading the map. It's not going to be very good walk. Now, I think you've purchased the exclusive one-on-one experience later. [laughter] Yeah. We have another. Yeah, one question. Okay. Really good talk to you. Thank you. I've got lots of questions. Yeah. The first thing is to say that the most complicated organ in the universe is the brain. And we do not understand, obviously you portrayed it as if we know everything about it. We do not understand the brain. Yeah. There are people who are still working on the brain. Sure. Yeah, yeah. Okay. See us Lewis quote. You love see us Lewis. All right, in this preface to Paradise Lost, you said the reason is the organ of truth. Right. And guess what? Imagination is the organ of meaning. Yeah. Yeah. Is he actually saying left and right brain in that quote? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he may be. Yeah. So I know that quote. That is the organ of truth and imagination is the organ of meaning. And of course, you know, we need truth and meaning together, don't we? We definitely need them together. Because I think that's also something that really happens. I think for a lot of people is we have the truth of something, but we don't know the meaning of it. You see what I mean? And to have the reality of something, you need the truth plus the meaning. So you could have the truth that, you know, Jesus died on a cross 2,000 years ago, was nailed with, you know, four nails and it was exactly this place. But then you don't really have the reality due of the cross because you need the meaning. Reality. That's what Hans Ruckmarker said in his lectures, reality is truth plus meaning. And that's so, so then you to have the reality of the cross, you need to know the meaning. And I think what, actually, this is going back to preaching, but I think what preaching is helping us do is it's not teaching us new things, but it's deepening the meaning of what we know. That's what it should be. It's deepening the meaning, the connections and our connectedness to those things. So yeah. And you actually discover a lot, you know, there's lots of, like people do, talk about left and right brain and that kind of, you know, imagination reason, even though they wouldn't use the left and right brain terms. And I think, yeah, you can see it actually in a lot of people's thinking. As I said, there's this, in this Jewish thought, there's, you know, Halakha and Agadha, which I would really map brilliantly on to left and right brain thinking, yeah. So I'd just say that a lot of the research has been done as you said through strokes. Yeah. People who have had the corpus callosum cut. Yes. We don't know if the stroke actually affects the brain that's actually working normally. So, in other words, we don't know the effects of the fact that the brain is damaged and why effect that has on the brain. So we can't study the brain as it is, what I'm trying to say is brain as it is. Yeah. It's very difficult to say in a normal brain, this is exactly what it is. Yes. Yes. Yeah. People who have had problems. Yes. Yeah. That's absolutely right. All the scientific and medical, I mean, it's just chock-a-full of studies of people, you know, drawing things when the left brain's not working or the right brain's not working and, you know, how that affects what they do and what they see and how they respond. So it's, I would say, yeah, it's very well researched, obviously, that in a way that, I think, neuroimaging was one of his, especially, his people with schizophrenia, yeah, it was. Thanks, Jim. It was really interesting. I'm thinking about the whole, and seeing a wave, and actually, I think there's a different wave, also, a bit older, a bit older, so go to church, and I think we can do that later. I was wondering, sometimes, I can feel a difference if the person giving a sermon seems to have surprised himself or herself, and so we can wander together. Right. Yeah. Unless he, and in other cases, I can feel like the person has already, has the conclusion, and he just needs to fill in with people like him. Yeah. So if you can walk the journey together, it's like, I'm thinking, to me, it's a little bit, like, an artist that keeps drawing the same thing. The landscape of flower over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Yes. Great point. Yeah. Every time. Yeah. Yeah. It keeps being a question. Always in your answers. Yeah. Yeah. That's very, I like that. It's the difference between someone who's really wondering, honestly, it's something. I think it's a great mistake in preaching, which I have probably made it myself and seeing other people make, too, is to read a passage and then think, okay, what doctrine is this passage teaching and then teach the doctrine, not to actually teach the passage because they often don't really neatly fit into our doctrines, you know, and to actually see, because actually when you teach the Bible, or you read the Bible, it is surprising all the time, you know, Jesus is, I mean, if you really read it properly, he's just constantly surprising people and us with the things that they say. And I love, you know, when I read and pray in the morning, I read a Psalm every morning. I'm just always surprised by what it says and what, you know, the way it puts things. And I was reading Psalm, what is it, what, in the one 30s, one of the Psalms of a cent, you know, by the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept, famous song by Bonim. I discovered that they didn't do very much with the last few verses, which is, I want to just want to hit your babies against the wall as you did to ours, you know. I mean, it's surprising, it's a credibly surprising book, I mean, and often I'm left with the question of what do I do with that. And I think that's a good question for us to have, you know, rather than ignore it or try and squash it into something. So I like what you said, I think there is a sense, isn't there, constant wonder. That doesn't mean, obviously, that we can't say anything with certainty. But it does mean there's, that we can't say, maybe we can't say anything finally, do you know what I mean? Or do you know what I mean? Completely everything about something, there's always more to wonder at. You know, if you think that you know the doctrine of incarnation, I mean, I'll tell you just another story. I went at a lunch table, someone asked a question about the sovereignty of God. And there was a girl there who'd been, she was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. And so I said, well, what does sovereignty of God, what does it mean? And she then repeated perfectly the Westminster confession about the sovereignty of God, which was pretty impressive because it's quite long. And then I was really impressed, and then I said to her, but what does that mean? And she looked at me, and it was just a really long silence. She said, you know what, I've got no idea whatever. She had the facts, you know, but not the meaning. And the meaning of it is endless, isn't it, to wonder at. I mean, I think, obviously, as I said, we can say true things, but I think never completely exhaustively, can we, if you see what I mean, there's always more to wonder at. Which is wonderful, you know, that's why you can read the Bible again and again and again. You can read the story of the prodigal son a hundred times, and, you know, many, many times new things will come to you, and it will mean new things to you, deeper things as you read it. Question, yeah. Revivals, I've taken place over, I'm not talking about these sort of revivals, yeah. Revivals. Yeah. It's had an impact on society and in other parts of the way it's been, is that just any kind of fact that there's a change going on that's a recognition? Right. So you took, yeah, talking about revivals in, yeah, yeah, I mean, I don't know. There's enough about the history of revivals, but I would say, you know, I think that some revivals may be moments when I would say the Holy Spirit leads people back into a living encounter with God when perhaps the church of the time has become very, very left brain, conceptual, you know, abstract. I think maybe the start of Wesleyanism with, you know, with Wesleyan Methodism would be probably one of those cases in point where the, you know, the church of England had become incredibly just corrupt and kind of laxed days are cool and maybe in the talk next week we'll see how all the vickers are just interested on how much income there is to do with the parish that they're taking over, et cetera, et cetera. And then, you know, and then Wesley, yeah, he's brought back, isn't he, into a living encounter with God? And that doesn't mean he does away with doctrine and theology, but it doesn't mean, yeah, I think that in revival times, the Holy Spirit does that very much, yeah, but I wouldn't be able to speak for all revivals everywhere, but that's just one that comes to mind, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's a good question, so relationship between suffering and becoming more, yeah, more open in a right brain sense, yeah, it's, one of the things I didn't talk about the differences between right and left brain actually is the right, the left brain, sorry, it's stuck in its own circus, it's actually much more optimistic and, but McGilgrist would say like unrealistically optimistic about things where as the right brain can tend towards a more kind of melancholy, because it does see perhaps the complexity and maybe that's as well where it would see the brokenness of things, because the right, the left brain would like to have everything sort of worked out and mapped out and neatly in its own systems, whereas the, I think the right brain would be more, yeah, aware and open and give attention to the things that are not right and don't fit in. So yeah, I would agree with you, I think, is this, I mean, what you're thinking that suffering, I mean, it can be one way, can't it, that can break down our neat boxes, I guess, I guess that's the story of Job, isn't it, as well, because Job's friends have all their neat little boxes of how the universe works and then, you know, God chastises them because He says it doesn't work according to your neat boxes, so yeah, is that what you were thinking about? Yeah, but I think, I mean, there are lots of things that can also help us, you know, become more open with wonder, as McGilchrist says, just get up and go for a walk, because what he says is, you know, the, the left brain is stuck in the sameness and what you need to encounter is the otherness of things, and so just go for a walk, and in that sense, you know, again encounter the otherness of God that He's not the concept in my mind, but part of that, yeah, would could well be encountering the brokenness of things too, yeah, and the brokenness of ourselves. Thank you. Very much. Go on, Johnna, you come all the way from London, she's coming from London, so give you one question. It may be brokenness disrupts the egos and somehow so it's less certain, and then we would have a section like more willing to be receptive to a different way. Yes, no, I think that's absolutely right, yeah, when we encounter, I like that, because it's so easy for us to think we've got everything neatly boxed up, isn't it? And then as a Christian when, yeah, some suffering comes along, it can, I mean, that's very challenging for us, isn't it? But it can also be opening up, yeah, and I think that's certainly the book of Job, yeah. Good. Thank you all. Thank you.