God-shaped hole in all of us
Researchers are intrigued that subjects who watched ‘awe-inspiring’ footage of the Grand Canyon and other natural phenomena were more likely to say they had faith in a higher power afterwards.
Psychology professor Piercarlo Valdesolo from Claremont McKenna College in California said: “Many historical accounts of religious epiphanies and revelations seem to involve the experience of being awe-struck by the beauty, strength or size of a divine being, and these experiences change the way people understand and think about the world. We wanted to test the exact opposite prediction: It’s not that the presence of the supernatural elicits awe, it’s that awe elicits the perception of the presence of the supernatural.”
So, despite living in a society that presents ‘goo-to-you’ evolution as a fact, the research group’s overwhelming thought was of a higher power behind these ‘awesome’, natural phenomena.
(Note that the Grand Canyon and other geological ‘beauty’ is not actually Designer-created beauty (from Creation Week) but rather the result of a later cataclysmic divine judgment on the world at that time (2 Peter 3:3–6)—the global Flood. See Creation 23(2):4, 2001; creation.com/canyon.)
- American audiences more likely to believe in God after watching BBC’s Planet Earth, study shows, independent.co.uk, 27 November 2013.
Readers’ comments
Comments are automatically closed 14 days after publication.