[betty boop]

At least orthogonal shapes intersect....

And this to me is what's important, and why I liked general_re's description so much.

beckett, it's interesting that Gould chose to distinguish between reason (i.e., science in his view) and the spiritual dimension, and then to characterize them as "non-overlapping magisteria," such that "Truth" (science) and "Meaning" (faith) are entirely discrete. People may tell you Gould is correct in this; but nobody actually lives as if he believed it. So there must be something fundamentally wrong with this formulation.

Gould himself seems to have unfailing faith in science. At a very deep level, he seems to betray his own formulation. More superficially, his relegation of faith/meaning to the "shallow end" of the spectrum of truth should perhaps be seen for what it may very well be: a desire to rid science of any sort of "rival" or effective "competition" that could place his preferred world view at risk. But the point is, to my way of thinking, the two are not "rivals," but equally valid approaches to Truth that necessarily work in different spheres (i.e., time orders).

general_re's insight into matters "orthogonal," and stuartcr's wondering what the hail that could be all about, brought to mind an image that, to my way of thinking, is the symbol sine qua non of a crucial fact of the human condition: That man lives at the intersection of two orders of time.

That image is the Cross. Its "X" axis, to my mind, stands for Eternity, the realm of Spirit, the timeless, of the Eternal Now. The "Y" axis stands for the unilinear, serial time that is the time sense in which human beings directly experience their existence in the world: i.e., in terms of past-present-future. The time sense of the "X" axis can be accessed only indirectly, through meditation, contemplation, prayer.

It seems to me that science can only deal with the "Y" axis. It has no tool or method to deal with "X".

Yet at the end of the day, the "Y" axis is folded into "X." It's difficult sometimes to find the language to express the content of a graphical image. So I don't know how much sense the above will make to the reader.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for the analysis!

I wonder though if it is that science lacks the tools and methods to deal with the "X" or if scientists are more often determined not to deal with.

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

Harvard Genetics Professor Richard Lewontin according to The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism

I suggest that refusing to acknowledge the "X" can lead to kluged theories and error.

[stuartcr]

I see it as 90degrees apart, out of phase, not necessarily a 'Positive thing', in my mind, yet not negative. Others see it as an intersection, a 'good' thing. Just goes to show how different, yet equally correct, everyone can be about matters such as religion and God, etc.