Kevin Sharpe
We evolved with a "god spot," a desire and need to look toward something beyond us, something that can provide meaning and direction for our lives, our high and low experiences, and can help us understand and control what goes on in the world around us. With what do we fill that spot? I propose in this series of lectures to explore how our forebears achieved this tens of thousands of years ago and how infants do so today. Such barely culturated experiences and beliefs teach about what the god that adequately fills the god spot must satisfy. The lectures continue by describing how Christianity has, does, and might better fill this god spot in each of us.
LECTURE ONE asks the above question and sets the scene for the series of lectures by reviewing prior and current approaches to this topic.
LECTURE TWO. What is the physical basis for spiritual experience? This lecture draws on recent experimental work on spiritual experience by such people as d'Aquili and Ramachadrin.
LECTURE THREE. What is the spiritual experience of infants? The experimental work of Hay, Lye, Petrovich, and others significantly informs our understanding of the earliest spiritual experience of each person, no matter what their culture.
LECTURE FOUR. How did mind evolve? Recent theories (from Mithen, for instance) attempt to understand the evolution of mind. Spiritual experience plays a role in this development.
LECTURE FIVE. What does prehistoric art teach us? Working from theories and research of such contemporary people as Gallus, Marshack, Bednarik, and d'Errico, this lecture sets the scene for an exploration of what prehistoric art may suggest about the experience and beliefs of our forebears.
LECTURE SIX. What do prehistoric line markings teach us? Building on Lecture Five, this lecture describes the lecturer's research into the significance of non-representational and non-geometric lines made with fingers or incised into rock surfaces. This very early form of human expression may contain keys to how our forebears thought.
LECTURE SEVEN. What is the god spot? This lecture brings together the work outlined in the prior six lectures. It proposes, based on this, what a god must be like, at least rudimentarily, to adequately fill the god spot.
LECTURE EIGHT. How well does the Christian God fill the god spot? Christianity as spiritual and religious traditions leads historically from the human need to have the god spot adequately filled. The nature of the god spot, therefore, says something about the basis for theological understanding of the nature of God and how Christian revelation might build and develop from this. How well does it fill our god spots today?
Copyright © 2000 by Kevin Sharpe. All rights reserved.