Between Science and Spirituality

The Chronicle of Higher Education ^ | Nov. 29, 2002 | John Horgan

[beckett]

Between Science and Spirituality

By JOHN HORGAN

Can mystical spirituality be reconciled with science and, more broadly, with reason? To paraphrase the mystical philosopher Ken Wilber, is the East's version of enlightenment compatible with that of the West? If so, what sort of truth would a rational mysticism give us? What sort of consolation?

There are many claimed convergences between science and mysticism. Cognitive psychology supposedly corroborates the Buddhist doctrine that the self is an illusion. Quantum mechanics, which implies that the outcomes of certain microevents depend on how we measure them, is said to confirm the mystical intuition that consciousness is an intrinsic part of reality. Similarly, quantum nonlocality, which Einstein disparaged as "spooky action at a distance," clinches mystics' perception of the interrelatedness, or unity, of all things. I see a different point of convergence between science and mysticism: Each in its own way reveals the miraculousness of our existence.

The more science learns about the origin and history of the cosmos and of life on earth and of Homo sapiens, the more it reveals how staggeringly improbable we are. First there is the fact of existence itself. The big-bang theory represents a profound insight into the history and structure of the cosmos, but it cannot tell us why creation occurred in the first place. Particle physics suggests that empty space is seething with virtual particles, which spring into existence for an instant before vanishing. In the same way, some physicists speculate, the entire universe might have begun as a kind of virtual particle. Honest physicists will admit that they have no idea why there is something rather than nothing. After all, what produced the quantum forces that supposedly made creation possible? "No one is certain what happened before the Big Bang, or even if the question has any meaning," Steven Weinberg, the physicist and Nobel laureate, wrote recently.

Next questions: Why does the universe look this way rather than some other way? Why does it adhere to these laws of nature rather than to some other laws? Altering any of the universe's fundamental parameters would have radically altered reality. For example, if the cosmos had been slightly more dense at its inception, it would have quickly collapsed into a black hole.

A smidgen less dense, and it would have flown apart so fast that there would have been no chance for stars, galaxies, and planets to form. Cosmologists sometimes call this the fine-tuning problem, or, more colorfully, the Goldilocks dilemma: How did the density of the universe turn out not too high, not too low, but just right?

The odds that matter would have precisely its observed density, the physicist Lawrence Krauss has calculated, are as great as the odds of guessing precisely how many atoms there are in the sun. Some physicists are so troubled by the arbitrariness of the cosmos that they espouse a quasi-theological concept known as the anthropic principle. According to this notion, the universe must have the structure we observe, because otherwise we wouldn't be here to observe it. The anthropic principle is cosmology's version of creationism.

The next improbability is life. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins once declared that life "is a mystery no longer," because Darwin solved it with his theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet life is as mysterious as ever, in spite of all the insights provided by evolutionary theory and more-recent biological paradigms, such as genetics and molecular biology. Neither Darwinism nor any other scientific theory tells us why life appeared on earth in the first place, or whether it was probable or a once-in-eternity fluke.

Many scientists have argued that life must be a ubiquitous phenomenon that pervades the universe, but they can offer precious little empirical evidence to support that assertion. After decades of searching, astronomers have found no signs of life elsewhere in the cosmos; a 1996 report of fossilized microbes in a meteorite from Mars turned out to be erroneous. Researchers still cannot make matter animate in the laboratory, even with all the tools of biotechnology. In fact, the more scientists ponder life's origin, the harder it is to imagine how it occurred. Francis Crick once stated that "the origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to be satisfied to get it going." In his book Life Itself, Crick offered the speculation that the seeds of life might have been planted on earth by an alien civilization.

Once life on earth started evolving, many scientists have contended, it was only a matter of time before natural selection produced a species as intelligent as Homo sapiens. But for more than 80 percent of life's 3.5-billion-year history, the earth's biota consisted entirely of single-celled organisms, like bacteria and algae. So not even the simplest multicellular organisms were inevitable. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould has estimated that if the great experiment of life were rerun a million times over, chances are that it would never again give rise to mammals, let alone mammals intelligent enough to invent negative theology and television. Similar reasoning led the eminent evolutionary theorist Ernst Mayr to conclude that the SETI program -- the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which scans the heavens for radio signals from other civilizations -- is futile.

Multiply all of these improbabilities and they spike to infinity. As the psychologist Susan Blackmore has pointed out, we are bad at judging probabilities, hence prone to make too much of chance events; that is why we believe in ESP, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and other miracles. I do not believe in miracles, at least not defined in the conventional religious manner as divine disruptions of the natural order. But if a miracle is defined as an infinitely improbable phenomenon, then our existence is a miracle, which no theory natural or supernatural will ever explain.

Scientists may go much further in plumbing nature's secrets. They may decipher the neural code, the secret language of the brain. They may arrive at a plausible explanation of how life emerged on earth, and they may discover life elsewhere in the cosmos. They may find and verify a unified theory of physics, which will provide a more precise picture of the origin and history of the universe. Although there are good reasons for doubting the likelihood of such scientific advances, they cannot be ruled out. What can be ruled out is that science will answer the ultimate question: How did something come from nothing? Neither superstring theory nor any other of science's so-called theories of everything can resolve that mystery, any more than our supernatural theologies can.

Although we can never solve the riddle of existence, we can never stop trying. We must keep reimagining our relationship to the infinite. Skepticism alone --- and the cold, hard facts of science --- cannot serve as the basis for spirituality. Blackmore, a practicing Zen Buddhist, helped me reach that conclusion. She described Zen as a kind of rubbish-removal system that cleanses the mind of extraneous beliefs and emotions so that we can see reality as it truly is.

I found Blackmore's garbage metaphor appealing at first, because it provided a handy criterion for judging theories and theologies. The worst ones, I decided, distract us from the reality right in front of us by postulating parallel dimensions and universes, heavens and hells, gods and ghosts and demiurges and extraterrestrials. Too much garbage! Viewed this way, skepticism appears to be the ideal spiritual perspective. Skepticism clears away cumbersome beliefs on an intellectual level, just as meditation (ideally) clears away beliefs, emotions, and thoughts on a more experiential level. Skepticism can help us achieve mystical deautomatization, or so I wanted to believe.

My handling of real rather than metaphorical garbage gradually gave me a more complicated view of the matter. In my kitchen, we put garbage in bags that come in boxes of 20. After I yank the last bag from a box, the box itself becomes trash, which I put into the bag. Sometime after I interviewed Blackmore, every time I pulled the last bag from the box and stuffed the box in the bag, I intuited a paradox lurking within this ritual.

I went through more garbage bags than I care to mention before I solved the riddle: Every garbage-removal system generates garbage. Zen apparently works as an efficient garbage-removal system for Susan Blackmore. But as minimalistic as it is, Zen clutters more than it clarifies my mind. Once I started down this line of thinking, it was hard to stop. I began looking askance at skepticism, too. Maybe skepticism, instead of cleansing our vision, just substitutes one type of trash for another. Instead of belief in reincarnation, angels, ESP, extraterrestrials, parallel universes, and the Oedipus complex, the skeptic crams his mind with disbelief in reincarnation, angels, and so on.

The problem is that any truth or antitruth, no matter how initially revelatory and awe-inspiring, sooner or later turns into garbage that occludes our vision of the living world. Ludwig Wittgenstein had this problem in mind when he described his philosophy as a ladder that we should "throw away" after we have climbed it. At its best, art -- by which I mean poetry, literature, music, movies, painting, sculpture -- works in this manner. Art, the lie that tells the truth, is intrinsically ironic. Like Wittgenstein's ladder, it helps us get to another level and then falls away. What better way to approach the mystical, the truth that cannot be told?

At a scholarly meeting on mysticism I attended in Chicago, one speaker warned that if we can't talk about mysticism, we can't whistle about it, either. In other words, all our modes of expression, including art, fall short of mystical truth. But unlike more-literal modes of expression, art comes closer to uttering the unutterable by acknowledging its own insufficiency. It gives us not answers but questions. That does not mean mystical insights cannot be expressed within other modes of knowledge, like science, philosophy, theology -- and, of course, journalism. But we should view even the most fact-laden mystical texts ironically when they turn to ultimate questions. Some mystical writers, notably the psychedelic raconteur Terence McKenna, supply their own irony, but we readers can supply it even if the author intended none. We can read the Upanishads, Genesis, Dionysius the Areopagite, and the neurotheological suppositions of Andrew Newberg just as we read Blake or Borges or Emily Dickinson.

Viewed ironically, even the most fantastical ghost stories, including the old stories of religion, can serve a purpose. Whether they postulate superintelligent clouds of gas, insectoid aliens in hyperspace, a demiurge with multiple-personality disorder, or a loving God who for inscrutable reasons makes us suffer, well-told ghost stories can remind us of the unfathomable mystery at the heart of things. Our creation myths and eschatologies, our imaginings of ultimate beginnings and ends, can also help us discover our deepest fears and desires. But even the most sophisticated theologies and theories should never be mistaken for ultimate truth. What Voltaire said centuries ago still holds, and will always hold: "It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God defined the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one."

ther than art, is there any method particularly suited to evoking mystical awe without the side effects that so often attend it? In Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, first published in 1979, Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar suggested that the chief benefit of psychedelics is "enriching the wonder of normality" -- that is, enhancing our appreciation of ordinary consciousness and ordinary life. That is the spiritual value cited most often by advocates of psychedelics. But those compounds can have the opposite effect. This world may seem drab in comparison to the bizarre virtual realms into which LSD or DMT propel us. Instead of opening our eyes to the miraculousness of everyday reality and consciousness, psychedelics can blind us.

All mystical technologies that induce powerful altered states pose this risk. One mystical expert who has reached this conclusion is Jean Houston. A pioneer of the human-potential movement, she works as a kind of spiritual psychotherapist, usually for large groups rather than individuals. She seeks to rejuvenate her clients' psyches through dance, song, chanting, guided imagery, and role-playing, often with a mythological dimension. She and her husband, the anthropologist Robert Masters, proclaimed in 1966 that investigations of LSD and similar drugs could help human consciousness expand "beyond its present limitations and on towards capacities not yet realized and perhaps undreamed of."

Houston subsequently became quite critical of the via psychedelica. "l am by nature not pro-drug," she told me. Timothy Leary was one of the most charming people she had ever met -- and one of the most irresponsible. Too many people lured onto the psychedelic path by this Pied Piper suffered breakdowns and ended up in mental hospitals, Houston said. "If I were to take the American pragmatic tradition and say, 'By their fruits ye shall know them,' then I'd have to say I haven't seen too much evidence" that psychedelics promote a healthy spirituality. "Some might say it is a shortcut to reality. But the fact is, it doesn't seem to sustain that reality."

Houston's disillusionment with psychedelics led her to seek safer means of self-transcendence. In the early 1970s, she and Masters devised what they called the altered states of consciousness induction device, or ASCID. It consisted of a suspension harness in which blindfolded subjects could spin around in three dimensions. The contraption worked so well that Houston and Masters discontinued its use. "People would get addicted to it and even refuse to explore their inner states without first taking a ride," Houston recalled. The experience reinforced her suspicion that any spiritual practice or path -- particularly those emphasizing altered states -- can become an end in itself, which leads us away from reality rather than toward it.

Anything that helps you see --- really see --- the wondrousness of the world serves a mystical purpose. According to Zen legend, when a visitor asked the 15th-century master Ikkyu to write down a maxim of "the highest wisdom," Ikkyu wrote one word: "Attention." Irritated, the visitor asked, "Is that all?" This time, Ikkyu wrote two words: "Attention. Attention." Fortunately, life itself is so wildly weird and improbable that sooner or later it is bound to get our attention. And if life doesn't grab our attention, death will. Whenever death intrudes upon our lives, we feel the chill of the deep space in which we are suspended.

Spiritual seekers have employed mementos mori, like a human skull, to keep themselves mindful of death. An extreme version of this technique, used in certain Buddhist sects, involves sitting next to or on top of a rotting corpse. It seems that this practice may merely desensitize you to death rather than sensitize you to life. Moreover, dwelling on death, the abyss, nothingness, may convince you that it is the only abiding reality, and that all finite, time-bound phenomena, including our mortal selves, are ephemeral and hence, in some sense, unreal. To be enlightened, Ken Wilber once wrote, is "to snap out of the movie of life." This is perhaps the greatest danger posed by mysticism -- that you will be left with a permanent case of derealization and depersonalization.

If you are lucky, your glimpse of the abyss will make this life seem more real, not less. You will feel what Albert Hofmann -- the chemist who, in 1943, discovered the psychotropic properties of LSD -- felt after emerging from the psilocybin trip in which he had found himself all alone in a ghost town inside the earth. When he returned from this hellish solitude, back to the world and his dear friends, he felt "reborn," and he was overcome with gratitude and joy at the "wonderful life we have here."

This is by far the greatest gift that mystical experiences can bestow on us: to see -- really see -- all that is right with the world. Just as believers in a beneficent deity should be haunted by the problem of natural evil, so gnostics, atheists, pessimists, and nihilists should be haunted by the problem of friendship, love, beauty, truth, humor, compassion, fun. Never forget the problem of fun.

John Horgan writes about science. This article is adapted from his book Rational Mysticism: Dispatches From the Border Between Science and Spirituality, to be published in January by Houghton Mifflin. Copyright © 2003 by John Horgan.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for the heads up to your views and especially your witness!

But in His reckoning, it is all of one time ... like that 'panoramic' plane. It is our understanding of the phenomenon of time that needs work, for faith's sake and for further scientific advance.

I couldn't agree with you more on either statement. When people say "the universe is 15 billions years old" they rarely finish the sentence "from our space/time coordinate as observer." In even the most disciplined of science, the effect of space/time is rarely considered.

In his book Relativity Einstein made it very clear the space/time is the quality of the extension of field. It does not pre-exist. Getting my arms around that concept has made all the difference to me!

For lurkers:

Postulates of Special Relativity

Schwarzschild Geometry

Space-Time-Matter Consortium Publications

This is how I see it "all together:" Freeper Views on Origins

[LogicWings]

What I tell you is real, although unless you have been reborn of the Spirit this will seem as foolishness or may play into the hands of deception.

Please, you've had your say, now go back to whatever you were doing.
No wait,

Go read the Nag Hamadi scripts and then get back to me.

[beckett]

Before we can talk about 'spirituality' don't we have to define 'spirit?'

Pardon me for not getting back to you earlier. Your question requires a thoughtful response, and I haven't had time to devote much thought to posting the last few days.

On page 31 of his new book, The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker makes a remarkable statement. He says, "We now know that cells did not always come from other cells and that the emergence of life did not create a second world where before there was just one. Cells evolved from simpler replicating molecules, a non-living part of the physical world, and may be understood as pieces of molecular machinery --- fantastically complicated machinery, of course, but machinery nonetheless." In the previous 30 pages Pinker uses about 70 footnotes, a pretty high rate, but this rather interesting assertion goes unfootnoted. I wonder why.

Actually, of course, there is no need to wonder. Pinker makes a bald assertion because he needs to paper over abiogenesis, one of the deepest mysteries in science. Like many before him, he just wanted to skip this difficult little patch and get on to the more tractable problems of evolutionary theory itself. I don't fault him for it. But I do think his omission tells us something important about the much maligned "God of the gaps." Pinker's omitted footnote is a gap of the kind that can almost make God respectable again.

Imagine: inside, the nerves, in the head --- that is these nerves are there in the brain...(damn them!) there are sort of little tails, the little tails of those nerves, and as soon as they begin quivering...that is you see, I look at something with my eyes and then they begin quivering, those little tails...and when they quiver, then an image appears... doesn't appear at once, but an instant, a second, passes...and then something like a moment appears; that is, not a moment --- devil take the moment! --- but an image; that is, an object, or an action, damn it! That's why I see and then think, because of those tails, not at all because I've got a soul, and that I am some sort of image and likeness. All that is nonsense! Rakitan explained it all to me yesterday, brother, and it simply bowled me over. It's magnificent, Alyosha, this science! A new man's arising --- that I understand...And yet I am sorry to lose God!

Dmitri Karamazov to his brother Alyosha
The Brothers Karamazov,
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1880

A hundred billion neurons connected by a trillion synapses. Wow! The software combinations that can emerge from that amount of hardware, if one accepts Pinker's modular, computational theory of mind, certainly can account for the amazing complexity of human behavior, perhaps even, when one factors in Hofstadter's "strange [recursive] loops," for the crafty "illusion" of free will itself. Despite Michael Polanyi's categorical denial that biochemistry can be reduced to chemistry, it seems that step by creeping step the genome and its issue are giving up their secrets by reduction.

But how important is it, really, to parse out all these steps? By vanquishing the ghost in the machine, does this new knowledge really vanquish the altar too? Does BettyBoop's formidable metaxy no longer apply? Or does knowledge simply move us a little further down a path still jam packed with an unending supply of mysteries? Pinker notwithstanding, the luminous, numinous genome's great leap into Being is hardly well understood. But even if Polanyi is wrong and abiogenesis is replicated in the laboratory, does that somehow settle the question of existence?

In the immortal words of Macaulay Culkin: I don't think so.

Which brings us to the Big Bang and GUT. Kierkegaard tells us that "God is totally other." The extra-cosmic Absolute, if it exists, is not accessible from this plane --- from these dimensions. No Grand Unified Theory can bridge the chasm. For us, the moment before the Big Bang is eternally SILENT. We are hopelessly handicapped by our structure in the physical plane, caught in a strange, paradoxical loop with no exit. But here we be, hurled into this mystery without so much as a by your leave from any deity. How did we get here?

Julian Jaynes believed we formed God-consciousness by first worshipping our clan chieftan during the period when the "bicameral mind" was breaking down just before true human consciousness arose. The theory is fascinating and powerful, but has few adherents among cognitive scientists today. Apparently his emphasis on weird mass hallucinations and use of an unrealistically tight dating scheme don't hold up. Nevertheless there are plenty of solid theories among evolutionary psychologists to explain the God concept, most of them owing at least some debt to Jaynes.

None of them satisfy me, however. Some insanely huge piece of the puzzle is missing, and not even the best theories of evolutionary psychology show much promise of finding it. I noted with interest your pejorative use of the term "insane" to describe theists earlier in the thread. Is it so bizarre to be a little insane when presented with the great surprise of life? Is a leap of faith really that irrational?

Vitalism has long been discredited, supposedly. Hardcore materialists confidently aver that no leakage occurs between the material and the non-material. Knock on wood, baby, and wood is all you hit. Well, LW, my friend, here is where I finally get around to answering your question (remember your question?). I believe they are wrong. I think that somewhere way, way down deep in Mandelbrot's fractals --- way, way down, almost infinitely way down --- there is a leak. That's how the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen might say.

Through the leak comes Spirit.

[MHGinTN]

None of them satisfy me, however. Some insanely huge piece of the puzzle is missing ... Oh my! I know better than to do this, but here I go anyway, donning my asbestos underwear.

Let's assume there was a 'big bang, preceded by the Guth (is that the right guy?) inflation. Something happened that 'evolved' dimension space and dimension time as a conjoined spacetime phenomenon. Could it have happened something like this(?): before inflation, time existed as a zero variable dimension, and space existed as a zero variable expression, and life existed as a zero variable expression, and spirit existed as a zero variable expression ... and these four zero variable dimensional qualities were/are but four of the seven (I choose that because of my beliefs) dimensional zero variable expressions that are the essence of Our Creator ... the unmoved mover in whom there is no 'variable' of turning. With the command 'Let There ... Be Light' the Creator commanded an event of change that caused zero variable time to express a variable, then zero variable space to express a variable ... first causing the expression of a melding of dimension time and dimension space. Later, long after inflation and the bang, the additional melding of life results in an expansion of the 'bubble' of spacetime, and the even later addition of spirit, again, an expansion to the universe, the greater universe of time and space and life and spirit. [I'll pause here to hike up by asbestos undies. Have at it in all the fury possessed of any naysayer.]

[f.Christian]

good pt!

m_c...

Capitalism is not a system of government as Communism and Fascism are. It is the free market system of economics. To equate it with the other two is inaccurate.


33 posted on 12/07/2002 12:17 PM PST by music_code

Maybe you could expound on this and get the nobel prize in economics...

or 5 mins on rush limbaugh---

the new walter williams at least!

[beavus]

The latter. No insult intended.

You might link it. It's a marvellous web site.

[beavus]

How do you explain reported out-of-body-experiences, without ignoring more evidence than the testimonials provide?

It appears people imagine themselves floating out of their bodies. Efforts to demonstrate actual extracorporeal vision, by e.g. reporting things that could only be seen from the extracorporeal perspective, have not been persuasive.

This shouldn't be surprising considering what we know about vision. It seems to require eyes.

[Cvengr]

It is quite pedantic that vision seems to require eyes, at least within the bodily realm. The query isn't only about the bodily realm.

This is why cognizance of the soul and spirit, especially after devotion to materialism becomes so profound. Interestingly, it has been known throughout the history of man, and even throughout all of science, it is ignored.

Scripture provides incredibly robust discussion on this facet of our lives which is God created in us after His own image.

[Cvengr]

Happiness is discernable from joy.

[Cvengr]

I Corinthians 2:14: "But the natural (psuchikos in the Greek) man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned."

[Cvengr]

I have considered the "Jesus Seminar" and the Nag Hamadi scripts which you refer. Those which have been accepted in the canon of Scripture are great. The others speak for themselves.

You might find it enormously fulfilling to give equal time and read the Old and New Testaments completely,....or even partially while in fellowship with God.

[Cvengr]

Hank, I don't dispute the material or bodily realm.

The significance of the spirit is that it isn't of that realm, but is equally real, with persons and distinct discernible activity. The best way to understand it is through the Word of God. There also exists deceiving persons within that realm. Unfortunately, man might become exposed to spirit from that deception.

This is why I bring up the issue of Scripture, (the Bible), because it provides the best direct truth regarding the issue.

[Cvengr]

On the subject of healing and belief inducing action.

Gnosticism fails to properly address the issue, although recognition of one's mind, and the seeming causal effect on reality can be used by those persons in the spirit domain who are deceiving (demons and deceiving spirits) to further deceive the unrepentant.

Healing may be caused by fallen angels as well as by holy power. Not the best example to use when discerning the Holy Spirit.

[Hank Kerchief]

The significance of the spirit is that it isn't of that realm, but is equally real, with persons and distinct discernible activity. The best way to understand it is through the Word of God. There also exists deceiving persons within that realm. Unfortunately, man might become exposed to spirit from that deception.

This is why I bring up the issue of Scripture, (the Bible), because it provides the best direct truth regarding the issue.

If you think of the material world and "spiritual" world as distinct, you have the huge philosophical problem of how there is intercourse between them. If, on the other hand, you think of all existense a single thing, thus including the material and the spiritual, with material existense being a subset of the spiritual, the intercourse (or interface or intercommunication and influence) problems all go away.

If the spiritual existense is everything, and material existense is that same existense, "with something left out and 'inferior' to it," in some way, spirit is, "everywhere," (not geographically, but conceptually) and material existense is differentiated from it by those qualities we think of as the qualities of matter, i.e. space, time, mass, energy, life, consciousness (or sentience), and rationa/volitional (cognitive/moral) consciousness.

As for the Bible, very little explication of the nature of spirit and even the nature of man will be found there. The Bible does not explain spirit at all, it simply assumes it. For example, Compare:

1 Thess. 5:23 And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Luke 10:27 And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

1 Cor. 6:20 For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.

Gen. 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Here man is described variously as having a "spirit, soul, and body," or a "heart, soul, and mind," or "body and spirit," or the whole man, body and spirit breathed into him, being a "soul." (This is no doubt the best picture of the nature of man and the one most consistently used in Scripture.)

It is this way througout the entire Bible. The Bible does not explain, it is not a book of science or philosophy, it is a book of revelation of spiritual principles and those aspects of history relating to God's relationship to the world and man.

The highly metaphorical language of the Bible does not help understand the nature of things it never explains. Do you really believe the soul and spirit can be separated by a sword cut the way bones and flesh can be? (For the Word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Heb. 4:12) Of course this language is rhetorical, and effective, but not very illuminating in a philosophical or scientific way.

Hank

[MissAmericanPie]

That is simple, who gives the best evidence? Jesus, who turned water into wine, fed 5,000 with a handful of fish and a few loaves of bread, walked thru closed doors, and manipulated atoms and molecules as if they were tinker toys, or Muhammad, who claimed that he could do miracles, but chose to "refrain"? Jesus said the evidence he gives are the miracles, and those that bear witness, His Father and the Holy Spirit. Ask them who Jesus is, they will be happy to speak to your soul.

Between the two, whose life was a monument to truth and mercy? Who suffered for the truth without retaliation? Between all of them, who has ALL of the answers? Who called men to selflessness that is unheard of, or to a future so great that the mind can only begin to grasp it, and whose promise only now science is begining to nibble around the edges of? Don't go through your life asleep, wake up, pray for the answers, and read about your destiny and destination, then you decide. I think it's kind of important.=o)

[f.Christian]

"If the Christ of God, in His sorrowful life below, be but a specimen of suffering humanity, or a model of patient calmness under wrong, not one of these things is manifested or secured. He is but one fragment more of a confused and disordered world, where everything has broken loose from its anchorage, and each is dashing against the other in unmanageable chaos, without any prospect of a holy or tranquil issue. He is an example of the complete triumph of evil over goodness, of wrong over right, of Satan over God,-one from whose history we can draw only this terrific conclusion, that God has lost the control of His own world; that sin has become too great a power for God either to regulate or extirpate; that the utmost that God can do is to produce a rare example of suffering holiness, which He allows the world to tread upon without being able effectually to interfere; that righteousness, after ages of buffeting and scorn, must retire from the field in utter helplessness, and permit the unchecked reign of evil. If the cross be the mere exhibition of self-sacrifice and patient meekness, then the hope of the world is gone. We had always thought that there was a potent purpose of God at work in connection with the sin- bearing work of the holy Sufferer, which, allowing sin for a season to develop itself, was preparing and evolving a power which would utterly overthrow it, and sweep earth clean of evil, moral and physical. But if the crucified Christ be the mere self-denying man, we have nothing more at work for the overthrow of evil than has again and again been witnessed, when some hero or martyr rose above the level of his age to protest against evils which he could not eradicate, and to bear witness in life and death for truth and righteousness,-in vain... (not!/link)---."

[MissAmericanPie]

That was beautiful, and so true. Jesus was no stable boy to be kicked about by evil. He is the creator of all we behold and master of it, and able to manipulate it to his own pleasure and purpose.

All things work to the good of those that love Him, even evil is no more than a tool of instruction to perfect the perfect response, in those that seek to do His will, and conform to His likeness, to the question, yes? no? "For it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He returns we shall be like Him".

[beckett]

If a renowned astrophysicist can speak of multiverses with a straight face and get a serious hearing among his peers, surely your theory deserves a serious hearing too.

We're all staggering around in the dark. I have no problem admitting it. More and more, however, it seems our self-appointed scientific avatars do. They want us to believe they've solved it all, you see.

[BikerNYC]

That is simple, who gives the best evidence? Jesus, who turned water into wine, fed 5,000 with a handful of fish and a few loaves of bread, walked thru closed doors, and manipulated atoms and molecules as if they were tinker toys...

Evidence is a good thing. What is your evidence that Jesus walked through closed doors?

[MissAmericanPie]

Where is the evidence? It comes from the testimony of some very frightened men, hiding from the Romans, fearful for their own lives. Men, some of whom, did go on to die horrible and painful deaths, crusified, sawed in half, stoned to death, who overcame their fear in the face of the evidence of His ressurection and who spent the rest of their lives boldly and fearlessly testifying to the truth they bore witness to.

When was the last time you met someone who would even tell the truth, much less die for it in such fashion? If they did not believe, with all their hearts, that they would live again in glory, why would they bother with a lie? What a great deal huh? Live in poverty, on the run, hunted, arrested, beaten, and end up facing a horrible death for a lie, couldn't talk me into it, most people have much better survival instincts. Did these men exist? Well we do have their bones. Would you believe, even should someone return from the dead? Many didn't and don't to this day, that is too bad, it's a "no"
choice, even in the face of the evidence recorded in prophecy a thousand years before His birth.