To say that one can have a personal relationship with Jesus
is vague because what does this mean? If you have a personal relationship with
someone you typically use one of your sensory apparatuses: your touch, your
ears, your eyes, your nose and most importantly, your tongue. You use these to
learn more about the other person and to “experience” them.
If you are not using one of your senses to interact with
someone surely the experience you are having is inside your brain (perhaps a
hallucination or just a strong, irrational case of wishful thinking).
“Ahh, but your brain is ultimately responsible for any and
all of the senses you experience in the first place; a faulty brain can render
certain fake experiences—that is, generate seemingly real experiences”. The
religious individual might say this in an attempt to denigrate our reliance upon
the human brain as a standard to draw accurate conclusions about reality (this seems nihilistic from my perspective).
The above is most certainly plausible. Perhaps the brain
isn’t a reliable medium to gauge and represent the world around us. However, since science has a comparison of a functional
brain to a faulty brain, we can readily distinguish the difference and thus draw
accurate conclusions about a functional brain and the results that it should
produce (and vice versa). We don’t have to jump into the grand descent towards nihilism and
“What can we know then?”
We know that a functional/healthy brain requires physical
stimuli (physical (i.e. reality-based, drugs are physical too, remember) to respond—if
Jesus is immaterial, how can the brain respond to him? Thus, how can you have a
personal relationship with him?
