Makoto Fujimura composed a letter for Michael Card’s book from which I am posting an excerpt. It speaks to the theme of my second book, The Boundless Love of God: A Holy Spirit Story:

The cross of Jesus stands because we cannot possibly meet God’s standard of righteousness and goodness. We cannot even keep our own promises, let alone God’s commands. “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Jesus’ love for us can only be received as a gift. Only when we rest upon him does he give us wings, to hover between heaven and earth. these wings are gifts of grace, but they must be aligned to God’s direction and purposes. Our journey will begin in a Garden and end in a City. We are headed toward the City of God.

Michael Card referred to Jesus’ life of prayer:

Jesus’ life of prayer teaches us that we do not merely listen for words; we must learn to listen to the silence. For, as Mother Teresa said, “God speaks in the silence of the heart.”

Though his divinity possessed the very mind of God, his humanity continually sought out the Father in all-night prayer sessions. In the account of those sessions we hear very few words, and so we can assume that there was much listening. . . . Prayer, for Jesus, seems to have been a time for simply sharing the presence of his Father, of listening to the silence . . . .

I again refer to comments by Michael Card in his book, Scribbling in the Sand. In his courtship of the woman who became his wife, Michael was advised by a dear friend, “If you really want to show her you love her, . . . listen to her.” I took his advice, and that girl has been my wife for twenty years. Later I extended my understanding of this adage to my relationship with the Lord when I began to realize how much I wanted to show him the extent of my love for him. If we desire to demonstrate our love for God, shouldn’t we invest ourselves in listening to him? Isn’t it true that he demonstrates his love to us by listening endlessly to our prayers? . . . listening to the silence of prayer.

In my books and in my blogs I repeatedly emphasize that in repentance we have had the indwelling of the Holy Spirit restored by the grace of God through the sin sacrifice of His Son, Jesus Christ. Yes, we can pray TO Him, but we can also hear FROM Him in our time. By our examining the concordance between neuroscience and Scripture we have gained a small understanding of how this loving communion works.

In Chapter Six of my second book, The Boundless Love of God: A Holy Spirit Story, entitled “Our Hunger for Communion Today,” I cite discussions by Calvin Miller who has given confirmation that the plan of God has always been to have an intimate, personal, bidirectional communion with Man. Miller stressed the importance of seeking union with the Holy Spirit in our inner being. We learn how to listen in silence for his counsel so we can grow in righteousness and in obedience by his power as mentored by the life of Jesus Christ. Miller emphasized that the holy communion of prayer is “two-way.” Meaningful communion with God through the Holy Spirit is not only a voice but also an ear. Listening is the most valuable part of prayer. Our focused silence is key to blocking out the inner and outward chatter, or noise. The Holy Spirit wants us to be open to him, and our silence is a door for him to enter into our souls. Our silence is an ear for us to hear, and we have seen the beauty within the linguistic neural codes transmitted through synaptic networks that give “voice” to his counsel.

I will make several posts taken from a beautifully written book, Scribbling in the Sand, by Michael Card. The posts will relate to points I have made in my two books and in my blog to date. I have been discussing the compelling reality of dual interactionism between the Mind of God and the mind of Man, and it is important to see the beauty God created within the neural synaptic networks that enable this loving communion.

[God’s] relentless movement toward us, his romantic reaching out to Christ, embodies a beauty that is beyond words. Our God is beautiful in all his ways; it is a part of his perfection. This divine beauty has been woven into the fabric of creation, in the massive stars, inside the submicroscopic balance of the atom [and in the synapses that enable mankind’s cognition]. Though we will only ever grasp his beauty in the most finite and rudimentary way, as creatures before a Creator, still it can be enough to incite an unconscious but uncontrollable desire to respond, to make our own personal world beautiful in its own way, to worship.

I conclude the series of blog posts based on Chapter Five of The Boundless Love of God: A Holy Spirit Story with the following comments:

Both the immaterial Mind of the Holy Spirit and the immaterial mind of Man have the capacity to direct synaptic networks in the cerebral cortex and associated regions of the brain to transmit specified information within linguistic neural codes. The human mind of the God-Man Jesus Christ during His life on Earth was in an intimate communion with God the Father through His indwelling Holy Spirit. He was in full obedience to the counsel of the Spirit through His human spirit, even to death on the cross. The information that has been shared provides compelling reasons to believe from the neurosciences that the same process exists in our time through the human spirit in the mind of Man,. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ glorified has given a renewed direct access to the human spirit and repentant soul by the indwelling counsel of the Holy Spirit by God’s grace and boundless love.

I am posting an excerpt from a doctoral dissertation by Christoph Lameter that applies to the theme of the last several posts on my blog. It is a quotation included in Chapter Five of The Boundless Love of God: A Holy Spirit Story:

If God can act in reality through coordinating large amounts of quantum events for a purpose at a higher level then it is possible to assume that the same can be done with the human brain. God can effectively communicate with humans by direct stimulation of neurons in the human brain generating images and memories. God is able to communicate with humans in a direct way. May this be an explanation for the working of the Holy Spirit? Visions and other religious experiences could be understood through this process.

Visions, memories and other experiences alluded to by Lameter would be interpreted as Eccles’ “percepts” within linguistic neural codes by the immaterial mind of Man. The percepts would be products by the "working of the Holy Spirit.”

Dembski has posed the question to traditional theism of how God, who is immaterial and Spirit, can interact with the material world, imparting information into it without applying material energy. Quantum mechanics gives nondeterminism to the universe which characterizes it as being informationally open and accommodating free will, as Alvin Plantinga has pointed out. I am posting a quote from Dembski in Chapter Five of The Boundless Love of God: A Holy Spirit Story, that elaborates on this question:

“. . . in a nondeterministic universe, divine action could impart information into matter without violating any physical laws by which matter operates. . . . A deity capable of co-opting randomness would impart information by arranging outcomes [with small probabilities and specification], but do so by channeling the material energy in ways that violate no principle governing matter. If divine action takes this form, the problem of finding the missing material energy by which God introduces novel information into the world simply does not arise . . . . information is then being transferred without any transfer of material energy . . . . Quantum mechanics . . . offers such a picture of the universe, allowing God free play at the quantum level . . . . In a world of irreducibly chance or random events, as some interpretations of quantum theory allow, God can channel such events toward preordained ends.”

In Part Two of “Waves in Our Brains” we see how the specified, encoded frequencies and amplitudes of wave forms generated by the immaterial mind become synchronized with the wave frequencies and amplitudes of selected cerebral modules generated by lifelong learning and archived in memory. The synchronized wave forms in turn stimulate the synaptic transmission through coherent neural networks of the encoded meaning, purpose and intended action of the cognitive mind.

It is important to consider the relationship between information and energy and how information is transmitted through synaptic networks. I am citing the important work of Dr. William A. Dembski, whom I am blessed to consider a friend and from whom I have learned much.

Dembski has stated that information is dynamic, passing in, through and out of matter. Matter itself can be reduced to the information instantiated within its design, construction and function. “Anything that exhibits information needed at some point to be imparted with information. What causes information to undergo such dynamic transformation? . . . Energy.” Energy is always inferred from information and is the “causal glue” that connects items of information in an informational universe. Material energy is a form of energy but not the whole of energy as stated by Dembski. He asked if there are information transfers that transcend material media and take a nonmaterial form of energy for transmission. The question applies in the context of quantum tunneling which depends upon the material media of synaptic networks for transmission of information encoded with meaning and purpose within spike trains of impulses but cannot be reduced to the synaptic networks themselves. If the energy of an information relationship actualized within wave functions cannot be justified as being material then it must be nonmaterial.

At this time I will post a “take away” from all that has been presented to this point about the tremendous complexity of dualist interactionism. Along the way I have endeavored to make the posts as understandable as possible, but neurophysiology and quantum mechanics are . . . complex!

Dualist interaction involves a nonmaterial mind with the capacity to cause a probabilistic, directed transmission of synchronous action potentials through coherent synaptic networks of the physical brain. It occurs by quantum tunneling which induces conformational changes in the protein scaffolds, vesicles, vesicular pores and ionic channels of the components of synaptic networks. By this process neural transmitters are released from vesicular pores into synaptic clefts. The transmitters stimulate linguistically encoded spike trains of action potentials that are conducted through a network of postsynaptic downstream neurons. Synaptic transmission of specified (meaningful) information occurs by this process and is interpreted by a mind through a lifetime of learning. When the intention, attention or will of one’s mind generates encoded neural impulses the mind interprets the codes as Eccles’ “percepts” in real time so that one knows what one is thinking and intending. The linguistic code generated is by an immaterial energy of the mind considered in detail by the blog, “Waves in Our Brains,” Parts One and Two..