Scientists try to "explain away" guardian angels!

[David Goldman]

Re: Scientists try to "explain away" guardian angels!

This study actually proves the existence of guardian angels.

That's what I gleaned from this article as well (BTW awesome find Jenny!)

This is becoming a common trend for all secularists. When their initial attempt to discredit the existence of a certain aspect of God fails, then their next attempt is to claim that it is the result of something mundane. The irony is that their "explanation" is much more convoluted than just accepting the True Christian's ™ simple truth of the matter.

So if we use Occam's razor, we have:
A) Angel (existence published some 3000 years ago) or

Psychosomatic artifact of an electro-chemical impulse in the neocortex induced during a singular specific incident of stress (published Sept 1 of this year).

I'm going with option A

[Nobar King]

Re: Scientists try to "explain away" guardian angels!

This study actually proves the existence of guardian angels. People experience this when they're not in a laboratory being probed by needles and electrocuted, so it's obvious that there is a spirit that they are sensing that is guiding them and helping them.

[JennyD]

For centuries, we’ve heard tales of people’s “guardian angel” experiences. Taking the form of a voice, a figure, or sometimes just a “presence”, the guardian appears in a traumatic moment and provides useful guidance. Scientists now have a ridiculous explanation for what anyone with a lick of sense knows is a supernatural occurrence.

In The Third Man Factor: Surviving the Impossible, John Geiger takes a break from adventuring in the world around him and instead explores the human psyche. Geiger refers to the “guardian angel” figure as the “third man“:

The term was coined by adventurer Ernest Shackleton, who, with two members of his crew, made a perilous trip in 1915 to get help after his ship, the Endurance, was trapped by pack ice in the Weddell Sea adjacent to Antarctica. During the gruelling trek, Shackleton said he and his companions felt that someone else was among them. “It seemed to me often that we were four, not three,” he wrote.

Geiger comments that, while many have believed the third man to be a distinct entity, science seems to indicate that the source is internal, a psychological reaction to circumstances:

There are two major explanations as to what is happening. One is that it’s a psychological response to extreme stress and that people have an inner resource they can call upon, and that is a sense that there is another being. They have a companion when they need one, which acts as a coping mechanism and allows them to overcome these apparently insurmountable obstacles.

The other is from very recent work in Switzerland that suggests that by using an electrical stimulus in the brain, some neurologists were able to evoke a sense of a presence in a clinical setting. So by simply stimulating part of the brain, they were able to create a sensation for a patient that there was another being beside her, when objectively there was no one there.

In Geiger’s research, in which he studied hundreds of documented “third man” experiences, he realized why people believed they were communicating with angels; the intensity of the experience. It has also been explained as a divine intervention by nearly every religious tradition in existence today. (Probably because it is?)

However, Geiger points out that agnostics and atheists also experienced the “Third Man”, and interpreted it not as a distinct being but as a product of their own psyche:

They will uniformly tell me that to them, it was a power that they were able to call upon from within themselves, even though it seemed like another being was there. A non-believer would see it as a product of brain processes, whereas a religious or spiritual person would see it as a guardian angel.

There’s no difference between the experiences themselves; it’s just the interpretation. So people might attribute an identity. Sometimes if they are religious people, the identity will be related to faith, and if not, then it may well be someone they know, like a relative or a friend who recently passed away.

So, what induces this “Third Man” response?

One is the principle of multiple triggers. So it’s not enough that you are under one particular stress, like you haven’t eaten for a long time or you are at high elevation. Those are all stresses, but it requires more than a single stress: It seems to be a group of stresses combined that bring on the phenomenon.

Then, there is the widow effect. For example, Nancy Reagan recently gave an interview in “Vanity Fair,” where she says that she still feels the presence of the late Ronald Reagan. If you ask them, a surprisingly high number of widows and widowers will tell you that they still feel the presence of their loved one. So a pattern I found in the book is that most often the third man seems to come when someone loses their companion. For example, if you have two climbers and one falls back and the other continues, it’s the absence of that second or third person that seems to [produce this effect]. When you lose someone on an adventure — they die or turn back — and you suddenly find yourself alone, it’s the absence of a real-life companion that seems to encourage the presence of the third man companion.

I also talk about the pathology of boredom. Monotony plays an important role in this phenomenon. So maybe you’re high on a mountain in a white-out [a blizzard-like situation of zero visibility] and there’s not a lot of sensory input. Or, if you’re on the Mir space station, where you have a very monotonous routine that persists for many weeks — this all contributes to the third man.
Another principle is the muse factor. Some people seem to have an openness to this kind of experience, and others do not. So if you are not open to the experience, then it’s less likely that you would be inclined to believe what you were encountering and accept it.

Finally, we have the power of the savior. The power of the savior is the most simple of the underlying conditions, namely that there must be faith in one’s ultimate survival. The third man cannot help those who will not accept help, and cannot save those who are resolute in accepting death. He needs a willing partner.

There's only one SAVIOR I'm interested in!

Geiger mentions that there are a number of people who have learned to “conjure” the Third Man as needed, as part of everyday life.

Once people recognize the phenomenon and realize that it’s an experience many have had, then the ability to utilize and harness it to good effect is tremendous. As much as anything in our ability to cope with severe stress, the third man factor is a fundamental tool in our arsenal for self- preservation. I’m talking not just physical situations like being trapped under a boulder in the wilderness, but in our everyday experiences. I think this phenomenon will touch — and has touched — many people. But there’s just been a failure to recognize the experience for what it is, which is an astonishing survival capacity.

So, there you have it. The guardian angel, long believed to be divine intervention, is simply a function of the human brain. Or maybe it's a demon you can conjure at will . . .