Betwixt and Between

In my last but one post, ‘Mr. James’ Best Friend’, I commented on the convoluted lengths that materialists, i.e. those who believe in physical existence only , are prepared to go to in order to ‘explain away’ certain phenomena.

This leads me onto another personal gripe. I sometimes get very frustrated with the media for acting as if there are only two camps to choose from e.g. science OR religion; evolution OR creationism etc. etc. Furthermore there is often an assumption that if you ‘believe’ in evolution, you don’t believe in anything but scientific materialism.

Like many people, I think the evidence for the evolution of species is overwhelming. I do however have some questions around the mechanisms by which evolution happens, or the circumstances in which evolution of particular types takes place, (which are all to do with ‘What came first, the chicken or the egg?’ type questions.) For scientists like Richard Dawkins, who wrote ‘The God Delusion’, I am committing the heresy of wondering if the laws of nature are as fixed, and if the universe and evolution are as accidental or as mechanistic as he claims. Of course, if you’ve read my other posts you will know that I don’t think they are. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in evolution.

And I also ‘believe in’ the first chapter of Genesis, but as ‘mythos’ not ‘logos’. Nowadays if we refer to something as a ‘myth’ we are usually saying that it isn’t true, but in fact myths are designed to represent truths which are too deep for individual words, via images and stories. Music can do the same, especially when it comes to demonstrating and representing emotions that are hard to put into words.

As a student of Kabbalah, I take the ‘seven days of creation’ story to represent the creation of the spiritual universe out of the Divine. There is a second creation story in Genesis chapter 2 (starting about half way through verse 4 - the New Jerusalem Bible sets this out very clearly) which represents the creation of the psychological universe (the universe of mind) out of the spiritual. Finally the physical universe comes about in Chapter 3 v.21 when Adam and Eve leave Eden (yet another name for the universe of mind), putting on suits of skin;-  I wrote about this process of universes emerging from one another in ‘A Spiritual Cosmology'.

Only a few hundred years ago, many religious people would have been amazed to learn that vast swathes of Christians in the future would be interpreting Genesis literally, and believe the world was created in 7 days. For a start they would point out that there are, in fact, two creation stories in Genesis, as I have pointed out above. I sometimes wonder if this is why a lot of learned people thought that it would be dangerous to translate the bible into everyday languages that everybody would be able to read for themselves….and start to take literally!

But basically it comes down to the big question which is completely outside of science’s remit (though try telling that to Dawkins or even Stephen Hawking) why is there something, rather than nothing?

Oh,- one last thing... I do tend to grind my teeth when scientists (Freud and Hawking included) announce, as if they know, that there is no life after death, but that some of us are too weak, too afraid of dying to face up to that. I think the possibility that there IS something after death also takes real courage to face.