Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to I think along the same lines as Johannes here.

Poetry
Mary Anne — (archived)

The hair on one's neck stands up when it hits its mark. Yet poems vary in meter, in rhyme, in form, in theme, in language. We experience them as the same because of our response. Still they are not the same except that they speak to us.

Robert, you see the correlation because of your understanding of science, your experience of faith, and your respect for both. You come to the question informed and prepared to accept the contradictions.

You also come prepared to accept Genesis in its current state.

Yahweh was not always so serene and masterful. Older remnants have him creating the universe by fighting a sea monster, just like Marduk fought Tiamat in the Babylonian creation stories. The Yahweh in Genesis comes from a version of the story developed during the Babylonian Captivity, during which the Jewish leadership deliberately sought to take the violence out of their Book in order to make their faith more flexible, in order to survive the Captivity with their identity as a people intact. They opened the door to a kind of transcendent insight as an unintended consequence. Their experience is historically unique, but other religious traditions have achieved this insight without Yahweh or Genesis, and some to a greater degree.

The world abounds in epic poems and pourquoi tales that have the same object but not the same form. Yet they all speak in a deep and resonant way to the people for whom they were written. You, or anyone, can pick one of them to speak truth to your heart. To declare one to be truth in an objective sense establishes it as a literal truth, and there our troubles begin.

Science tells a different story than faith does. Scientific inquiry is the crown jewel of rational thought. It was poured from the same chalice as democracy, and heady wine that was, but the religious tradition of its inventors remained tied to the Earth. Science practiced properly produces a kind of transcendent wonder. But its heart is so different that it does not speak to the tradition that produces a transcendent, universal God who is everywhere and so Other that we cannot comprehend it. This defies the rational heart of science, which expects proof.

If one believes in God, this separation of science and religion is a hard thing. Yet there is no conflict, any more than red is more or less true than yellow. Each is to itself. They are different wavelengths, but they are both Light, and they both have their beauty.

We are human beings. We are capable of maintaining enormous contradictions inside ourselves. We carry the knowledge of our mortality around with us and yet laugh and play. We fly kites made of our shrouds. I agree that science doesn't have to conflict with religion, and that religion doesn't have to fear science, with one caveat: they must both stay in their realms and not impinge upon the other. We humans can handle that. We already know that the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge are not the same tree.

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