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James Krugel is Professor of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University. Krugel suggests that neuroscience can lend some understanding to biblical scholarship on how human beings might hear the voice of God. In a recent interview, Krugel suggests that the ancient worldview of the prophets included the idea that the mind could be penetrated by spiritual entities: The human mind could be penetrated by outside forces. Not only by God—who is sometimes depicted as going inside people, “probing their kidneys and heart” to find out what they’re really thinking—but by various sorts of “spirits.” Some of them were benign, but others were wicked spirits dispatched by Satan to take over. They were like bacteria; you couldn’t see them, but once they got inside of you they would take charge, making you think and do things against your will. So the Bible and other texts from the same period contain prayers specifically designed to ward off these evil spirits. That’s part of what I meant by sem...

Unsatisfied with natural theology and fideism, Paul Moser attempts to introduce a new kind of evidence for God, an evidence, “appropriate for the reality of a God worthy of worship” (20). Such evidence is personified in human agents as they are transformed by God. His argument is as follows: (1) Necessarily, if a human person is offered and receives the transformative gift, then this is the result of the authoritative power of the divine X of thoroughgoing forgiveness, fellowship in perfect love, worthiness of worship, and triumphant hope (namely, God). (2) I have been offered, and have willingly received, the transformative gift. (3) Therefore, God exits. (200) Revelation of the divine, according to Moser, would be appropriate to the kind of being God is. Consequentially, God would reveal himself “in human hearts rather than just to expand human reflection or information” (26). Moser calls this kind of theology, “kardiatheology,” a theology of the heart. Moser's questio...

Francis Spufford, in a metaphor laden piece for the Guardian , defends his Christian faith against atheism on the basis of his feelings: "I assent to ideas because I have feelings; I don't have feelings because I've assented to the ideas." Spufford claims that no one can know if there is a god or not; God "isn't a knowable item." And so all he can go by is his feel of God.