Dear Theophilus, 

It seems, going by what you wrote in your last letter, that you are still bothered by the relationship between science and religion. You still feel that somehow, science proves that religion is merely an invention of the human mind, that religion, as psychologists sometimes say, is a projection of human wishes and fears. You talk about religion not respecting history and belonging more in the realm of poetry, as if to say that poetry is equivalent to falsehood and untruths. Your view is held by many others and I will try to maybe balance out your view.

I want to again point out that the scientific approach to knowing is only one way - there are others. Secondly, be aware of the limitation of words. They can be compared to a net - no matter how far you cast it, it will not enable you to scoop up water. So it is with words - no matter how learned they sound, they are only an approximation to reality and we fall into problems when we identify with the signifying something as actually that something.

At the very outset, I would like to differentiate between two terms that are sometimes used interchangeably - imaginative and imaginary. Imaginary takes us out of history, removes us from our experiences. Imaginative builds on history and uses history to show us new aspects of our existence. What I will try to show is that all of our knowledge, eventually, is imaginative irrespective of whether we are talking about scientific knowledge or theological knowledge.

It is a central tenet of science that the determination of truth is the end result of rational processes and in this, objectivity is an asset. The tools used are inductive and deductive reasoning. The inductive method gathers examples and then generalizes whereas, the deductive uses these generalized cases for a specific example to state something that can be observed. This may be difficult to grasp so let us try to illustrate with an example. Let's suppose I have an apple and I let go of it. What do I observe? It falls to the ground. Then I try this with a pencil, a ball and many other things and for all of them, I notice that they drop. I therefore generalize and say that if any object is let go, it will fall to the ground and this generalization, as all generalizations, is called a theory. This is the inductive situation. Then somebody gives me a bar of iron and I now predict (deductive) that it will fall if I drop it. And, it does. But, and this is important, I have not ruled out that there is something that will violate what I have observed - there is always a chance that something will not obey my generalization. For example, if I were to give you a balloon filled with helium, and you were to let it go, you would see that it does not drop. From this I must be careful what I say cannot happen. Unfortunately, some people do not take this rider into consideration.

There is a commonly held view that theories are logically based on observations and this, to the surprise of many is rarely so. What we observe is that previous theories often color and determine what we see or notice. As in theology, so in science, breakthroughs come through revelation. In fact, rational processes can add nothing new - the newness comes through imaginative leaps which are not determined by nice logical paths. Permit me to illustrate with a very famous example from physics. It is often said that Einstein based his famous Theory of Relativity on the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment. The reason why this position is taken is due to the nice progressive development that one can see. But, the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment gave results which contradicted the Theory of Relativity. It was by ignoring the experiment that Einstein was able to propose something new and this caused physicists to go back to the Michelson-Morley experiment and to change it so as to get it to conform to the Theory of Relativity. This is hardly the picture that the public has of a strictly objective science, especially in the field of physics, the so-called queen of sciences. What the above example shows is that intuition can by-pass experimental results. One of the big names in science is Michael Faraday who laid the basis for our understanding of electricity and magnetism. His contribution was immense and yet, he had no mathematical education or special gifts. Therefore, don't look down your nose on anything which smacks of poetry or imagination for these are legitimate and important ways of understanding ourselves and the world that we find ourselves in.

Another charge that is levelled against theology is that it deals with symbols and with "unreal" things which are simply projections of human wishes and desires. Thus, most of us have known a father and we project this image onto some being out there that we call God. But the question arises - what is the greater truth? Are fathers images of the heavenly Father or is the heavenly Father a model for earthly fathers? One must not be hasty in jumping to conclusions here. In a sense, we have absorbed and been taken captive by a major symbol of our age - the machine. We have started to think of ourselves as machines and our development as that of the improvement of machines. What I am saying is that we tend to confuse what is the copy and what is the original.

It is interesting to note that one of the major branches of Christianity is called Orthodoxy which literally means - proper worship. Now this seems somewhat unusual because we think of faith involving definitions and dogmas and so on. But it is wrong to apply rational categories as supreme in discussing or approaching Christianity. What is probably more important than simply reasoning is poetry. But, to find meaning in poetry requires effort and diligence. You must read a poem not once, but maybe twenty times in order to grasp a little bit of what it says. I find it amusing to hear people criticize the Old Testament for various reasons and then, when I ask them how many times they have read it, they will most often reply - never. They read what somebody said about the Old Testament. This reminds me of the story of the heretic put up to the stake for execution. But, he argues, it says in the Bible: there is no God. True, he is answered, but turn the page over and continue reading: ....said the fool. Thus, we jump to conclusions, and we pay for this through misconceptions, errors, and puzzles and contradictions.

Poets use words not just to declare something but to convey some reality and therefore these words affect us at a variety of levels of our being. A poem, in a sense, has a soul in that it is a very unique coming together of words. The most popular and obvious poems in our faith are the psalms which, I have heard you say, do not really speak to you because they seem so ancient. They do not mean much to a lot of people because we have lost our ability to respond because our poetic education has become stultified.

Why are poems and poetry important? The answer that our faith gives is that the role of man is to offer praise which mute creation cannot of itself bring before God. Man is leitourgos - high priest of creation (this, by the way is the origin of the word, liturgy). Nineteenth century materialists criticized Christianity for using material borrowed from pagans in that certain symbols are common to both. But we must remember that a writer must use the language of the time and the culture of his age. So it is not surprising to see a certain overlap between what is found in the Bible and what was present in other cultures. One of the contentious areas, even today, is over the creation accounts in the Book of Genesis. We say that it is not scientific and it is therefore in the realm of myths and untrue. However, you must realize that the author of Genesis could not write like a twentieth century paleontologist because he was not a paleontologist, and secondly, his readers would not understand him. Putting something down in a poetic fashion means that it has lasting value. Scientific Laws have notoriously short life spans. Of all the scientific laws of the last century, for example, only a few exist and are accepted today.

In a sense, it is man who endows nature with meaning since nature is not reflexive, that is, is not aware of itself. There is a rich symbolism in nature and many cultures have referred to it although, we in today's day, have lost contact with this symbolism because of ads and political slogans and our general alienation from nature. The biblical writers were more aware of the symbolism of nature and they were also aware of the commonality of symbols among different cultures. Creation is symbolic in the sense that it is like a clear window which enables us to discern God. With the fall, nature has become opaque and the world has lost its meaning. Now. man, instead of seeing the sun as a symbol, a reminder of the creator, sees the sun as creator, as a god. Man becomes afraid of nature, since it is incomprehensible and has to be placated and approached through magic. Maybe an illustration will make my meaning clearer. Imagine that you are in a room with a clear window and the sun is shining outside. You look out the window and see what is outside. But, as the window becomes dirtied, as it becomes opaque, the light fails to come in from the outside. So, what do you do? You light your own candle or other source of light. But now, when you look at the window, what do you see? Your own reflection. Science does not clear that window, although it sometimes cleans away some of the dirt and grime permitting us a brief glimpse of the outside. Buddhism, in a different reaction, declares the window an illusion. To a certain extent that is true, but a deeper truth, that there is something beyond the window, is lost.

I hope that what I have said above clears up some of the questions that you may have felt. I remain, as always,

Bar-Abbas

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