I know I promised the next blog would be about the tactics of the ultra left and right but I’m making some revisions based on the TikTok claims of disruption of the Trump rally which will require some research. So, please take this bit of cerebral jerky and chew on it.
First, a caveat: you know that’s from the Latin Cave, Beware. But here’s my caveat: I believe that the harder someone tries to convince you of something the less likely that something is going to be true. So haranguers pitch and politicians harangue telling you things time and time again stating it is so, but it may not be so and in the case of haranguers and politicians, well, you get my point. It’s kind of like the number of times the” Call this number!!!” is repeated in a television or radio ad. The more times the number is mentioned the more likely the ad is for a bogus product.
Let’s also remember that perspective is predicate to perception and perception determines action. Now when dealing with concepts the resulting action is a belief that the concept under discussion is true. Thus, when we are told in the Bible that God created the heavens and the earth in seven days we accept the concept. We do not assume it is metaphor nor do we assign some other displacement theory to the story. But what we do assume, because of our perspective, is that those days were human days not God days. We have no concept of what a God day is like nor how long, or short, it may be. The species man in the twenty-first century measures distances and time based on three things: the rotation of our planet, our planet’s revolution about the Star Sol and the distance a specified man can walk in a given period of time (leagues, meters, miles, etc.) We also measure distance based on the human aspect of the distance from elbow to wrist (cubit). Builders kept a Golden cubit in a sanctuary for purposes of standardization just as weights and measures are standardized by various governments and international institutions. As late as the 19th century inches, feet, meters and kilometers were not standardized across national boundaries. So, having ordered our world over the centuries according to our human attributes it is not surprising that we have also applied human attributes to our concepts of the universe and how it acts.
So, accepting that anthropomorphism is the natural human response in attempting to explain natural phenomenon it is not unexpected that humanized stories would be told as examples of how and why those phenomenon occur. Thus, our first reconciliation is back to human time and God’s time, but if we look at the story the beginning is the same for science and religion. BANG, God created the heavens and the earth. Neither science nor religion can explain what there was before but both agree that the heavens and the earth came into being from a single action, The Big Bang could certainly have been God. If we suspend the anthropomorphic requirement of one revolution around the Sol, (which didn’t really exist quite yet) then Evolution and Creationism agree.
That’s one, but how about Man being created in God’s image? So we look at ourselves and we believe this is what God looks like but when we first did this we didn’t have the ability to look at the atomic or sub-atomic levels. Since the entire universe is made of matter consisting of atomic and sub-atomic particles it should be easy to assume that God and Man are made of the same substances. Thus Man being created from the same material as God explains the Creationism concept and science would not disagree. The real miracle here is how primitive man (as we describe our forebears) would know so much so early. Early man knew somehow that the universe is comprised of certain particles and that if all the universe is so then God and Man must share a common composition. Remember, it took scientists more than two thousand years to prove the atomic theory of the natural philosophers and it is doubtful that Leucippus (the father of atomic theory) was the first to have the ideas he espoused, so it is probable that men knew even earlier about the nature of the universe. Thus, what we have is science evolving to prove ideas and concepts held by many beforehand but expressed in stories using our human attributes to establish the symbolism, metaphor and simile required to explain a non-tangible.
The Bible (and Torah) tell us Man was the last of God’s creations and science tells us that, indeed, the age of mammals is our current age so no disagreement there. The story of the creation of Adam is that God created him from the dust of the earth or simply, the same substance from which the rest of the universe was created. God then reminds Adam that, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” So, there is another agreement with science, atoms to atoms as it were, particles to particles.
I could go on and on citing examples where if you strip away the anthropomorphism of the tales of religion you will find natural principles exposed, but I already have my degree in religion and theology (as well as constitutional law and political science) so I don’t need to write another thesis. Suffice it to say that if you can separate the emotionalism generated by those on either side from the facts, you will find that science is only discovering things man as a species has known since we started walking upright and communicating with one another. For those of you more interested in how to do this I recommend Rudolph Bultmann’s “The Scope of Demythologizing” or Paul Tillich’s “Dynamics of Faith” which will give you a sound foundation for discovering the process of taking things apart. I also suggest some basic study of the science of human communication wherein a common core of experience is necessary to be able to communicate and that the most common of those will be basic human instincts thus resulting in the use of our physical selves and practices to express difficult concepts.
I’be been studying these things my entire life and I recommend the study to others who want to explain why things are happening as they are.