I think your prediction is wrong. I think that if that happened, the scientific-and-skeptical community would go through something like the following steps:
First, everyone would strongly suspect fraud of some kind. So there'd be a lot of attempts to check this -- from scientists and from Randi-type debunkers. Ex hypothesi these would not in fact detect fraud.
At this point we would have a very well verified phenomenon that's fabulously difficult to fit into the standard naturalist/reductionist framework -- the only way we know of for whether someone has been validly ordained as a priest to influence what happens is via some kind of mind that's able to work with concepts like "priest", "ordained", and "valid". So somewhere around here I would expect the great majority of scientific skeptical types to conclude that something is paying attention to human religious rituals. Might be God, might be aliens with eccentric interests, might be some sort of superpowered AI whose existence we never noticed, etc., etc., etc., but it seems like it has to be something with a mind and with abilities that go way beyond ours.
It would be worth checking a few more-reductionist things. For instance: just what changes to the process of priest-making suffice to make transubstantiation not work? (In many traditions, and in particular in those traditions that believe in transubstantiation in our world, priests have to be ordained by bishops, and bishops have to be ordained by other bishops, and the process involves a ceremonial laying on of hands. Is it possible that there's some thing that gets transferred when that happens? That would be interesting, and might make some of the more-natural options look a bit more plausible. On the other hand, does success depend essentially on intent everywhere down the line? That seems to require non-human minds watching.)
If someone comes up with an actually-working theory about chemical reactions, that would be very interesting indeed -- but it would need to be a theory that explains why the process only works for priests, and only when they are performing a eucharistic ceremony. Otherwise, it's going to be much less plausible even to the most thoroughgoing skeptic than "a god did it" or "superpowered aliens did it".
Distinguishing between the various kinds of superpowered nonhuman intelligence that might have done this thing would be tricky. It seems like it would need to be either something rather like the god of Christianity, or else something deliberately masquerading as the god of Christianity. That might already be enough to justify adopting Christianity as at least a working hypothesis.
I think your prediction is wrong. I think that if that happened, the scientific-and-skeptical community would go through something like the following steps
Perhaps you are right. It's not easy to be certain of this sort of hypothetical - I have a lot of confidence that there will be some people who react as per my prediction, and that there will be some people who react as per your prediction, but which group (if either) will gain enough backing to be considered the mainstream opinion is difficult, perhaps impossible, to tell.
[Originally published at Intentional Insights in response to Religious and Rational]
Spirituality and rationality seem completely opposed. But are they really?
To get at this question, let's start with a little thought experiment. Consider the following two questions:
1. If you were given a choice between reading a physical book (or an e-book) or listening to an audiobook, which would you prefer?
2. If you were given a choice between listening to music, or looking at the grooves of a phonograph record through a microscope, which would you prefer?
But I am more interested in the answer to a third question:
3. For which of the first two questions do you have a stronger preference between the two options?
Most people will have a stronger preference in the second case than the first. But why? Both situations are in some sense the same: there is information being fed into your brain, in one case through your ears and in the other through your eyes. So why should people's preference for ears be so much stronger in the case of music than books?
There is something in the essence of music that is lost in the translation between an audio and a visual rendering. The same loss happens for words too, but to a much lesser extent. Subtle shades of emphasis and tone of voice can convey essential information in spoken language. This is one of the reasons that email is so notorious for amplifying misunderstandings. But the loss in much greater in the case of music.
The same is true for other senses. Color is one example. A blind person can abstractly understand what light is, and that color is a byproduct of the wavelength of light, and that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation... yet there is no way for a blind person to experience subjectively the difference between red and blue and green. But just because some people can't see colors doesn't mean that colors aren't real.
The same is true for spiritual experiences.
Now, before I expand that thought, I want to give you my bona fides. I am a committed rationalist, and an atheist (though I don't like to self-identify as an atheist because I'd rather focus on what I *do* believe in rather than what I don't). So I am not trying to convince you that God exists. What I want to say is rather that certain kinds of spiritual experiences *might* be more than mere fantasies made up out of whole cloth. If we ignore this possibility we risk shutting ourselves off from a vital part of the human experience.
I grew up in the deep south (Kentucky and Tennessee) in a secular Jewish family. When I was 12 my parents sent me to a Christian summer camp (there were no other kinds in Kentucky back in those days). After a week of being relentlessly proselytized (read: teased and ostracized), I decided I was tired of being the camp punching bag and so I relented and gave my heart to Jesus. I prayed, confessed my sins, and just like that I was a member of the club.
I experienced a euphoria that I cannot render into words, in exactly the same way that one cannot render into words the subjective experience of listening to music or seeing colors or eating chocolate or having sex. If you have not experienced these things for yourself, no amount of description can fill the gap. Of course, you can come to an *intellectual* understanding that "feeling the presence of the holy spirit" has nothing to do with any holy spirit. You can intellectually grasp that it is an internal mental process resulting from (probably) some kind of neurotransmitter released in response to social and internal mental stimulus. But that won't allow you to understand *what it is like* any more than understanding physics will let you understand what colors look like or what music sounds like.
Happily, there are ways to stimulate the subjective experience that I'm describing other than accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Meditation, for example, can produce similar results. It can be a very powerful experience. It can even become addictive, almost like a drug.
I am not necessarily advocating that you go try to get yourself a hit of religious euphoria (though I wouldn’t discourage you either -- the experience can give you some interesting and useful perspective on life). Instead, I simply want to convince you to entertain the possibility that people might profess to believe in God for reasons other than indoctrination or stupidity. Religious texts and rituals might be attempts to share real subjective experiences that, in the absence of a detailed modern understanding of neuroscience, can appear to originate from mysterious, subtle external sources.
The reason I want to convince you to entertain this notion is that an awful lot of energy gets wasted by arguing against religious beliefs on logical grounds, pointing out contradictions in the Bible and whatnot. Such arguments tend to be ineffective, which can be very frustrating for those who advance them. The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic. It's about subjective experiences that not everyone is privy to. Logic is about looking at the grooves. Spirituality is about hearing the music.
The good news is that adopting science and reason doesn’t mean you have to give up on spirituality any more than you have to give up on music. There are myriad paths to spiritual experience, to a sense of awe and wonder at the grand tapestry of creation, to the essential existential mysteries of life and consciousness, to what religious people call “God.” Walking in the woods. Seeing the moons of Jupiter through a telescope. Gathering with friends to listen to music, or to sing, or simply to share the experience of being alive. Meditation. Any of these can be spiritual experiences if you allow them to be. In this sense, God is everywhere.