Engineers are problem solvers. We seek to understand how things work or why they don’t. We apply ideas and concepts that enable us to make coherent sense of the world in which we live.
When I was growing up in church, the Holy Spirit was a difficult concept. It was most often presented as part of the Trinity, the three “persons” of the Godhead. The implication of “persons” was that the Holy Spirit had some similarity in form to the human Jesus.
Could a spirit have human-like characteristics? Would it resemble Casper the Friendly Ghost (Holy Ghost) or worse?
Trying to understand the Holy Spirit as a “person” was not coherent to me so I sought a different approach. As far as I can tell, my ideas are compatible with scripture in general, and more specifically with the teachings of Jesus.
I imagine the Holy Spirit as simply an inaudible and invisible signal from God, much like the signals that carry information to a mobile phone, radio or television. The ability to perceive this Holy Signal is, in part, what it means to be made in the image or likeness of God.
The decision-making function of our minds is analogous to the tuning function inside a radio. We usually “tune” a radio to receive one particular signal above all the others. Unfortunately, our minds are not quite that precise.
Signals come into our minds from culture, friends, influential family members, our own self-interests, sermons, etc. They also come from the Holy Spirit. Decision making is simply giving priority to the influences of one or more of these signals.
I see this in the preaching of the prophets. They heard the Holy Spirit (God’s signal) about being faithful to God, which was influenced by the religious culture’s emphasis on God dealing with his people based on rewards and punishments.
God’s signal is always present, along with the other signals. But it is not automatically dominant.
I still have free will to decide which signals have what degrees of priority.
Some would argue moral decision-making is simply a product of our higher brain functions made possible by evolution. Higher brain functions do allow us to perceive ideas that are not limited to procreation and survival.
We see examples of cooperation and apparent love in groups of animals, or even between animals and humans. A non-human animal might risk its life to protect its own pack or family, but it will not make that sacrifice for a different family.
A hungry lion does not return the lost baby zebra to its mother. The weak and powerless are not objects of compassion. In other words, I believe while our higher brain functions give us the capability to make purely unselfish decisions, we did not inherit the inclination to do so through evolution.
Jesus taught us that God desires we exhibit agape love—compassionate love, which is not self-serving, seeks the best for the object of that love, without regard to cost, personal/group benefit, or compensation, as in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Feeling this is the right thing to do is due to the influence of God conveyed by the Holy Spirit.
We might imagine Jesus, filled with the Spirit, as the person who was able to tune God’s Holy Spirit signal better than anyone else in history and live a life genuinely guided by agape love. The goal of people who claim to be Christians should be to also tune into God’s signal so it becomes the dominant influence in our lives. Perhaps that is a primary function of prayer.
An old gospel song, Turn Your Radio On, captures this idea. Originally written by Albert E. Brumley in 1939, the Bluegrass version was made popular by Ray Stevens.
So turn your radio on and listen to the music.
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Ron Perritt has a MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering and a Master of Theological Studies Degree from Emory University and is currently a member of University Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, LA.
