You're collapsing two distinctions.
One is between information structured in such a way as to operate on our brains so as to produce a subjective response, and information that we have to do some work to interpret. (E.g., music in the form of sound waves versus music in the form of a printed score -- at least, for people who understand music notation but don't have the fluency of some professional musicians who can look at a score and "hear" what it says.)
The other is between information we are able to make sense of and information we aren't. (E.g., the text of a novel, and the same thing after encryption using a cipher I don't know how to break, with a key I don't know.)
In practice some things are intermediate. (E.g., the text of a novel, and the same thing after "encryption" with ROT13.)
Giving me a micrograph of an LP's grooves is much more like the second of those than like the first. Maybe the information is interpretable in principle -- I guess I could measure very carefully, and then do a Fourier transform by hand and figure out what frequences are present, etc., etc., etc. -- but in practice, showing me those micrographs is going to convey essentially no information about the music to me. I'm not much better off than if you'd encrypted the data (and certainly worse than if you'd just ROT13ed it.)
So when you contrast music and words, you're confusing matters because most of the difference you profess to find is not between music and words, but between different degrees of "difficulty" in reconstructing the content in a form we can make use of. If you'd compared "listening to the audiobook of a novel" with "reading the text of the novel, after encryption with a cipher of moderate difficulty" you'd have had something much nearer to the comparison between "listening to music" and "looking at micrographs of a record groove" -- and you'd no longer have found so big a difference between words and music.
The thing is, you could have done this right and it would have served your purpose almost equally well. Audiobook versus printed novel; recorded music versus printed score. For all but the very best musicians, the printed score will have far less power to please or move than the recorded music; the relationship here is much closer to the relationship between an audiobook and a printed novel; and you could run with that and draw your analogy with religious/spiritual experiences. But I have the impression that you wanted to stress (I would say, to overstate) the ineffability of those experiences -- and as a result you made a bogus comparison instead of a good one.
Well, OK, but this is a very different kind of critique than you were offering before. Before you were making a simple (and wrong) technical claim:
The "information entering your brain" is very much NOT the same in both cases.
Now you're mounting a critique of my rhetorical choices. It's a constructive critique, so I thank you for that. But let me explain why I made the choice that I did.
The point I was trying to make is that the subjective sensation of spiritual experience matters. It is too facile to dismiss God as simply "a pernicio...
[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.