Brain researchers have found that if a certain part of a person’s brain is electrically stimulated, he may experience a strong feeling of the presence of God.

Therefore (some writers conclude), we don’t think God is present because God is really present, but merely because our brains our brains make us feel that He is.

This is like saying that since my brain can be manipulated to make me hallucinate an imaginary cat, there is no reason to think that I ever see a real cat.

Why do so many religious students lose faith in college?  Not because they are getting smarter.  In the first place, our schools are not doing very well at making them smarter.  In the second place, the phenomenon of loss of faith is peculiar to our own universities.  There is no evidence that it was widespread in, say, medieval universities, which were much more demanding intellectually.

The prime reason it happens is that our intellectual culture is tacitly atheistic.  Don’t imagine that students are presented with compelling arguments against faith in college.  Frankly, most don’t encounter any serious arguments at all about the question of faith, either for or against – which is telling in itself.  Nevertheless a certain attitude is strongly conveyed without words.

This attitude has two main elements.  One is a widespread view that people who believe in God do so because of their upbringing, but that people who disbelieve in God do so because they have thought about the matter.  The other is a settled feeling that it doesn’t make any difference whether or not one believes in God anyway.  Students tend to live as though there were no God, and most people who live that way come to feel that even if there is one, He must be remote and uninvolved.

It’s true, of course, that those who are considered more intelligent are more likely to go to college, and that those who go to college really are less likely to take God seriously -- but not because they are more intelligent.  Rather because that is the sort of attitude college subtly encourages them to take -- and because the young people most concerned about seeming intelligent are the quickest to conform.

Why should free exercise of religion be defended?  Not because people can make wrongs right just by thinking that they are right, or because religious folk would like indulgence for private eccentricities, or because they would like exemptions from reasonable demands grounded in the common good.

No, free exercise is an element of the common good, grounded in our shared human nature.  As a rational being, man is ordained to know the truth, especially the truth about God; knowing the truth requires seeking it; and a certain liberty is necessary even for the search.

The common good has other elements too; religious liberty does not justify violating the natural law.  Even so, the burden of proof for regulations on religious liberty should be on the state.  Why?  Because governments make people do all sorts of things that are objectively wrong, and because even an erroneous conscience deserves some consideration -- not because it is erroneous, but because it is a conscience.

So on one hand, the claims of conscience must be exercised within the bounds of public order, but on the other hand, "public order" must be understood as the common good as viewed in the light of the natural law -- not as a synonym for whatever the government wants to do.

Any lawyers out there?  The real challenge is to figure out how to make coherent arguments along these lines within the incoherent framework of First Amendment religion clause jurisprudence.

Something you will never see at a Catholic church:  A marquee urging passing motorists, “Come for the latte, stay for the worship.”

Something you will never see at a Protestant church:  A website at which the list of pastoral staff gives not the name of the current pastor, not the name of his predecessor, but the name of the one before that.

“‘There's a young student at this university,’ says [British neurologist John] Lorber, ‘who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honors degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal.  And yet the boy has virtually no brain.’  The student's physician at the university noticed that the youth had a slightly larger than normal head, and so referred him to Lorber, simply out of interest.  ‘When we did a brain scan on him,’ Lorber recalls, ‘we saw that instead of the normal 4.5-centimeter thickness of brain tissue between the ventricles and the cortical surface, there was just a thin layer of mantle measuring a millimeter or so.  His cranium is filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid.’”  --  Roger Lewin, “Is Your Brain Really Necessary?”  Science 210 (12 December 1980), pp. 1232-1234.