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Where are we from? As important as it may be to
understand one’s ethnic origin and cultural
identity, there’s a bigger question that every
child, sooner or later, asks of their parents: “Where
do people come from?” In each culture according
to its fashion, every child gets an answer. For
me, growing up in suburban New Jersey in the 1950s,
it was:
Question: “Who made us?”
Answer: “God made us.”
As I grew up, I began to find another answer to
that question. This other school of thinking did
not grapple with the same questions of right and
wrong that was the thinking and training of Christianity.
But it taught me to believe in something at least
as intoxicating as the divinity of the origins –
the possibility that the world around us was constructed
in such a way that we could actually make sense
of it. This great secular faith drew strength from
a culture in which science seemed to fuel not only
the fires of imagination, but the fires of industry
as well. And this faith extended to living things,
which yielded, like everything else in the natural
world, to the analysis of science.
It seems like a presumption of atheism or agnosticism
goes hand in hand with believing in evolution. It
is simply taken for granted that smart, modern,
well-informed people have risen above the level
of petty superstition, which is exactly how serious
faith is regarded. In this day and age, Religion
as culture, in the sense of Jewish culture, Islamic
custom, and even Christian tradition, maybe grudgingly
accorded obligatory respect—just enough, to
evade the charge of cultural imperialism. But religion
itself, genuine belief, just does not belong. Partly,
this is the fault of religion, which has become
stagnant in its teachings, annually, weekly repeating
the same message without any clarity or connection
to what is transpiring today.
If asked to justify such attitudes many of us will
often claim that science has proven many of our
concepts of God, our ideas of where we came from,
how we got here wrong and that science is the only
authority. Many of us believe that scientific inquiry
has ruled out the divine. I believe nothing of the
sort is true. To me, the key is the two working
together
I believe that evolution does not prelude the idea
of a God.
Question: “Who made us?”
Answer: “God made us through evolution.”
For many of our ancestors the sun was a God itself
to be worshiped. To The Egyptians he was Amon-Ra.
To the Greeks he was drawn across the sky by Apollo
in a chariot of gold. This list goes on, punctuated
by tales of mass panic when the sun’s its
rays were lost at the height of a total solar eclipse.
It is easy to see how our sun gained such status.
The perceived movements of the sun define our days
and nights, its warmth creates our seasons, and
its energy grows the food that nourishes and all
of nature. To attribute all this to a power supernatural
is understandable, maybe even logical.
If the sun’s place in human imagination was
once divine, its demotion to the status of mere
matter surely began when Anaxagoras argued in 434
B.C. that the sun was “just” a ball
of fire floating in the air above the earth’s
surface To be sure, Anaxagoras’s analysis,
which placed the sun a mere
4,000 miles above the surface of the earth, left
a little to be desired.
Despite the inadequacies of his analysis, it turns
out that Anaxagoras’ contemporaries were not
at all amused by his calculations. He was condemned
by his authorities and banned for life from the
city of Athens, such was the rage of its citizens
against the notion that the sun could be explained
as mere matter.
Despite the achievements in science over the last
100 years, none of us could suggest that our understanding
of this planet, the universe and ourselves is so
complete that we should close up shop. The more
we investigate, the closer we get to merging our
spiritual selves with our physical selves. Scientific
materialism assumes that the objects and events
of the natural world can be explained in terms of
their material properties.
When Kirchoff found that sodium in the laboratory
produced a dark line identical to one of the Fraunhofer
lines in the solar spectrum, he instinctively made
use of that key assumption. If only one element
can produce that line on earth, he reasoned, and
then only that very same element could produce it
on the sun. By assuming that the laws of physics
and chemistry are constant, Kirchoff and others
extended the experimental reach of science all the
way to the sun, 93 million miles away.
It is true that scientific materialism makes a
considerable leap of faith. At its core is the belief
that natural phenomena can be explained by material
causes. That belief, of course, could be challenged.
If I wanted to oppose the assumption of materialism,
I might walk into a meeting of solar physicists,
for example, and then claim that the sun does not
contain helium. Someone in the group would be likely
to ask a simple question: “How, then, do explain
the 587.6 nanometer emission peak in the solar atmosphere?”
My response: I do not have to explain it! Light
from the sun, I would claim, is a miracle. Supernatural
forces are responsible for that light, such forces
are responsible for that light, and such forces
are beyond scientific explanation. This explanation,
regardless how un-scientific, is just as valid as
any other… based on whether your perspective
is scientific or spiritual.
Rather than try to destroy the other side’s
viewpoint, we need to find the key that will bring
the two sides together. Then and only then can we
fully understand what and who we are. To do that,
we must work with an open mind and create a bridge
between the two forms of thinking. If we look backwards
into our cultures and our histories, the world was
pretty much viewed as an unchanging place. Ideology
was rigidly stamped into the mindset of people by
a blind faith. In order for us to become truly evolved
in the spirit our minds must be open to all the
possibilities. That is, not necessarily let go of
old concepts, but be ready to redefine them with
new information and ideas. In other words, build
upon what is there with fresh spiritual mortar.
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