Goines On: The Jesus experiment

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Inside the McDowell book Goines’ nephew had placed a cordial handwritten note that suggested Goines might “start with the table of contents and go to the chapters that pique your interest.” That didn’t sound too daunting, and Goines was bound to try it.
    His nephew had also written out four Bible verses, one beginning, “For the word of God is living and active…,” and another beginning, “All Scripture is breathed out by God….” Goines was familiar with the notion that the Bible (and the scriptures of other religions) were “inspired by God.”
    Receiving the book reminded Goines of an experiment he had proposed a few years earlier, to try to determine whether open-minded agnostics could “experience Jesus” if they were carefully shepherded through a procedure modeled on those of major Christian church denominations. Did a person actually experience Jesus, or just imagine he did? Clearly, some people believed that they actually experienced Jesus, but could the truth or falsehood of that belief be established?
    Goines noted that author McDowell had a background similar to that of New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, several of whose books Goines had read. Ehrman was a generation younger than McDowell. The two men had both gone to Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois. Presumably, both men started out being into Jesus. But while McDowell’s religious faith redoubled over the years, Ehrman’s faith evaporated into agnosticism as to whether God even existed. Had Ehrman stopped “experiencing Jesus,” or did he come to realize that he never had experienced him, only imagined it?
    Like Goines, Ehrman had given up his faith after years of wrestling with his doubts, while McDowell had thought his doubts away and seemed to have achieved virtual certainty: true-belief. How did these two men differ, psychologically? How was McDowell different from Ehrman and Goines? Do true-believers differ from other people in some way that can be detected scientifically?

[Tomorrow Goines thinks of a new experiment.]

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