I often hear people likening our brains to radios. Radios can pick up electromagnetic waves that are invisible to us. Similarly, our brains can tune in to the “frequency” of the Holy Spirit and communicate with God through prayer and meditation. Once, I had a burden for a seminary student whom I had lost touch with for several years (before the age of Facebook, but now, through social media, we can easily keep track of our friends). I sent him some money to support his ministry, not knowing he needed money to repair his car. He had no money to pay for the repair and was praying to God for help. The money I sent him arrived on the same day he was supposed to pick up his car, and the amount was exactly enough to cover the repair costs. In this analogy of the radio, I was the agent of God who carried out His will in the physical world. This type of interaction is often called top-down causation, where a more complex system exerts influence on a less complex system.
The limitation of this analogy is that God is limited to interacting with the world through mental interaction with humans; there is no direct interaction with the physical world. He needs to use agents to carry out His will. I believe in the work of the Holy Spirit; even modern science cannot explain how it interacts with the physical mind. Returning to the radio analogy, some believe the Holy Spirit is an encoded radio signal only our mind can decode. In electrical engineering, there is something called the spread spectrum, where the signal is scrambled and spread out in the frequency domain. When we spread the signal over a large frequency spectrum, the signal level will be reduced. The signal can be so low that any instrument that picks up the signal will think it is just noise unless you have the key. Could this be the “still small voice of calm” the prophet Elijah experienced? Others view the Holy Spirit as information input. Information transmission doesn’t necessarily need a medium; God can transmit information directly to our brains. The inner workings of the Holy Spirit are not the primary concern of this book; I believe that using humans as His agent is only part of His interactions with the world. God indeed interacts with the physical world directly, and we will examine how He does it in more detail.