God, theologian and humble neurologist

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas .(New Revised Standard Version, Psalm 8: 3–9)On November 23, 1654, Pascal experienced God. His servant later found the mathematician's account of his ‘night of fire’ on some parchment sewn into the lining of a discarded doublet: From about half-past ten in the evening until half-past twelve. FIRE. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. Not of the philosophers and intellectuals. Certitude, certitude, feeling, joy, peace. (Bishop, 1936)This paradoxical fragmented certainty about the ineffable seems to be a common human experience, expressed famously by Albert Einstein. The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. So to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that which is impenetretrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of true religiousness. (Barnett, 1964)This is the religious impulse, the spark of something beyond …