The "Threat" of Creationism, by Isaac Asimov

Scientists thought it was settled. The universe, they had decided, is about 20 billion years old, and Earth itself is 4.5 billion years old. Simple forms of life came into being more than three billion years ago, having formed spontaneously from nonliving matter. They grew more complex through slow evolutionary processes and the first hominid ancestors of humanity appeared more than four million years ago. Homo sapians itself—the present human species, people like you and me—has walked the earth for at least 50,000 years.

But apparently it isn't settled. There are Americans who believe that the earth is only about 6,000 years old; that human beings and all other species were brought into existence by a divine Creator as eternally separate variations of beings; and that there has been no evolutionary process.

They are creationists—they call themselves "scientific" creationists—and they are a growing power in the land, demanding that schools be forced to teach their views. State legislatures, mindful of the votes, are beginning to succumb to the pressure. In perhaps 15 states, bills have been introduced, putting forth the creationist point of view, and in others, strong movements are gaining momentum. In Arkansas, a law requiring that the teaching of creationism receive equal time was passed this spring and is scheduled to go into effect in September 1982, though the American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit on behalf of a group of clergymen, teachers, and parents to overturn it. And a California father named Kelly Segraves, the director of the Creation-Science Research Center, sued to have public-school science classes taught that there are other theories of creation besides evolution, and that one of them was the Biblical version. The suit came to trial in March, and the judge ruled that educators must distribute a policy statement to schools and textbook publishers explaining that the theory of evolution should not be seen as "the ultimate cause of origins." Even in New York, the Board of Education has delayed since January in making a final decision, expected this month [June 1981], on whether schools will be required to include the teaching of creationism in their curriculums.

The Rev. Jerry Fallwell, the head of the Moral Majority, who supports the creationist view from his television pulpit, claims that he has 17 million to 25 million viewers (though Arbitron places the figure at a much more modest 1.6 million). But there are 66 electronic ministries which have a total audience of about 20 million. And in parts of the country where the Fundamentalists predominate—the so called Bible Belt— creationists are in the majority.

They make up a fervid and dedicated group, convinced beyond argument of both their rightness and their righteousness. Faced with an apathetic and falsely secure majority, smaller groups have used intense pressure and forceful campaigning—as the creationists do—and have succeeded in disrupting and taking over whole societies.

Yet, though creationists seem to accept the literal truth of the Biblical story of creation, this does not mean that all religious people are creationists. There are millions of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews who think of the Bible as a source of spiritual truth and accept much of it as symbolically rather than literally true. They do not consider the Bible to be a textbook of science, even in intent, and have no problem teaching evolution in their secular institutions.

To those who are trained in science, creationism seems like a bad dream, a sudden reveling of a nightmare, a renewed march of an army of the night risen to challenge free thought and enlightenment.

The scientific evidence for the age of the earth and for the evolutionary development of life seems overwhelming to scientists. How can anyone question it? What are the arguments the creationists use? What is the "science" that makes their views "scientific"? Here are some of them:

A watch implies a watchmaker, say the creationists. If you were to find a beautifully intricate watch in the desert, from habitation, you would be sure that it had been fashioned by human hands and somehow left it there. It would pass the bounds of credibility that it had simply formed, spontaneously, from the sands of the desert.

By analogy, then, if you consider humanity, life, Earth, and the universe, all infinitely more intricate than a watch, you can believe far less easily that it "just happened." It, too, like the watch, must have been fashioned, but by more-than-human hands—in short by a divine Creator.

This argument seems unanswerable, and it has been used (even though not often explicitly expressed) ever since the dawn of consciousness. To have explained to prescientific human beings that the wind and the rain and the sun follow the laws of nature and do so blindly and without a guiding would have been utterly unconvincing to them. In fact, it might have well gotten you stoned to death as a blasphemer.

There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

In short, the complexity of the universe—and one's inability to explain it in full—is not in itself an argument for a Creator.

Some creationists point at that belief in a Creator is general among all peoples and all cultures. Surly this unanimous craving hints at a greater truth. There would be no unanimous belief in a lie.

General belief, however, is not really surprising. Nearly every people on earth that considers the existence of the world assumes it to have been created by a god or gods. And each group invents full details for the story. No two creation tales are alike. The Greeks, the Norsemen, the Japanese, the Hindus, the American Indians, and so on and so on all have their own creation myths, and all of these are recognized by Americans of Judeo-Christian heritage as "just myths."

The ancient Hebrews also had a creation tale—two of them, in fact. There is a primitive Adam-and-Eve-in-Paradise story, with man created first, then animals, then women. There is also a poetic tale of God fashioning the universe in six days, with animals preceding man, and man and woman created together.

These Hebrew myths are not inherently more credible than any of the others, but they are our myths. General consent, of course, proves nothing: There can be a unanimous belief in something that isn't so. The universal opinion over thousands of years that the earth was flat never flattened its spherical shape by one inch.

Creationists frequently stress the fact that evolution is "only a theory," giving the impression that a theory is an idle guess. A scientist, one gathers, arising one morning with nothing particular to do, decided that perhaps the moon is made of Roquefort cheese and instantly advances the Roquefort-cheese theory.

A theory (as the word is used by scientists) is a detailed description of some facet of the universe's workings that is based on long observation and, where possible, experiment. It is the result of careful reasoning from these observations and experiments that has survived the critical study of scientists generally.

For example, we have the description of the cellular nature of living organisms (the "cell theory"); of objects attracting each other according to fixed rule (the "theory of gravitation"); of energy behaving in discrete bits (the "quantum theory"); of light traveling through a vacuum at a fixed measurable velocity (the "theory of relativity"), and so on.

All are theories; all are firmly founded; all are accepted as valid descriptions of this or that aspect of the universe. They are neither guesses nor speculations. And no theory is better founded, more closely examined, more critically argued and more thoroughly accepted, than the theory of evolution. If it is "only" a theory, that is all it has to be.

Creationism, on the other hand, is not a theory. There is no evidence, in the scientific sense, that supports it. Creationism, or at least the particular variety accepted by many Americans, is an expression of early Middle Eastern legend. It is fairly described as "only a myth."

Creationists, in recent years, have stressed the "scientific" background of their beliefs. They point out that there are scientists who base their creationists beliefs on a careful study of geology, paleontology, and biology and produce "textbooks" that embody those beliefs.

Virtually the whole scientific corpus of creationism, however, consists of the pointing out of imperfections in the evolutionary view. The creationists insists, for example, that evolutionists cannot true transition states between species in the fossil evidence; that age determinations through radioactive breakdown are uncertain; that alternative interpretations of this or that piece of evidence are possible and so on.

Because the evolutionary view is not perfect and is not agreed upon by all scientists, creationists argue that evolution is false and that scientists, in supporting evolution, are basing their views on blind faith and dogmatism.

To an extent, the creationists are right here: The details of evolution are not perfectly known. Scientists have been adjusting and modifying Charles Darwin's suggestions since he advanced his theory of the origin of species through natural selection back in 1859. After all, much has been learned about the fossil record and physiology, microbiology, biochemistry, ethology, and various other branches of life science in the last 125 years, and it was to be expected that we can improve on Darwin. In fact, we have improved on him. Nor is the process finished. it can never be, as long as human beings continue to question and to strive for better answers.

The details of evolutionary theory are in dispute precisely because scientists are not devotees of blind faith and dogmatism. They do not accept even as great thinker as Darwin without question, nor do they accept any idea, new or old, without thorough argument. Even after accepting an idea, they stand ready to overrule it, if appropriate new evidence arrives. If, however, we grant that a theory is imperfect and details remain in dispute, does that disprove the theory as a whole?

Consider. I drive a car, and you drive a car. I do not know exactly how an engine works. Perhaps you do not either. And it may be that our hazy and approximate ideas of the workings of an automobile are in conflict. Must we then conclude from this disagreement that an automobile does not run, or that it does not exist? Or, if our senses force us to conclude that an automobile does exist and run, does that mean it is pulled by an invisible horses, since our engine theory is imperfect?

However much scientists argue their differing beliefs in details of evolutionary theory, or in the interpretation of the necessarily imperfect fossil record, they firmly accept the evolutionary process itself.

Creationists have learned enough scientific terminology to use it in their attempts to disprove evolution. They do this in numerous ways, but the most common example, at least in the mail I receive is the repeated assertion that the second law of thermodynamics demonstrates the evolutionary process to be impossible.

In kindergarten terms, the second law of thermodynamics says that all spontaneous change is in the direction of increasing disorder—that is, in a "downhill" direction. There can be no spontaneous buildup of the complex from the simple, therefore, because that would be moving "uphill." According to the creationists argument, since, by the evolutionary process, complex forms of life evolve from simple forms, that process defies the second law, so creationism must be true.

Such an argument implies that this clearly visible fallacy is somehow invisible to scientists, who must therefore be flying in the face of the second law through sheer perversity. Scientists, however, do know about the second law and they are not blind. It's just that an argument based on kindergarten terms is suitable only for kindergartens.

To lift the argument a notch above the kindergarten level, the second law of thermodynamics applies to a "closed system"—that is, to a system that does not gain energy from without, or lose energy to the outside. The only truly closed system we know of is the universe as a whole.

Within a closed system, there are subsystems that can gain complexity spontaneously, provided there is a greater loss of complexity in another interlocking subsystem. The overall change then is a complexity loss in a line with the dictates of the second law.

Evolution can proceed and build up the complex from the simple, thus moving uphill, without violating the second law, as long as another interlocking part of the system — the sun, which delivers energy to the earth continually — moves downhill (as it does) at a much faster rate than evolution moves uphill. If the sun were to cease shining, evolution would stop and so, eventually, would life.

Unfortunately, the second law is a subtle concept which most people are not accustomed to dealing with, and it is not easy to see the fallacy in the creationists distortion.

There are many other "scientific" arguments used by creationists, some taking quite cleaver advantage of present areas of dispute in evolutionary theory, but every one of then is as disingenuous as the second-law argument.

The "scientific" arguments are organized into special creationist textbooks, which have all the surface appearance of the real thing, and which school systems are being heavily pressured to accept. They are written by people who have not made any mark as scientists, and, while they discuss geology, paleontology and biology with correct scientific terminology, they are devoted almost entirely to raising doubts over the legitimacy of the evidence and reasoning underlying evolutionary thinking on the assumption that this leaves creationism as the only possible alternative.

Evidence actually in favor of creationism is not presented, of course, because none exist other than the word of the Bible, which it is current creationist strategy not to use.

Some creationists putt all matters of scientific evidence to one side and consider all such things irrelevant. The Creator, they say, brought life and the earth and the entire universe into being 6,000 years ago or so, complete with all the evidence for eons-long evolutionary development. The fossil record, the decaying radio activity, the receding galaxies were all created as they are, and the evidence they present is an illusion.

Of course, this argument is itself irrelevant, for it can be neither proved nor disproved. it is not an argument, actually, but a statement. I can say that the entire universe was created two minutes age, complete with all its history books describing a nonexistent past in detail, and with every living person equipped with a full memory; you, for instance, in the process of reading this article in midstream with a memory of what you had read in the beginning—which you had not really read.

What kind of Creator would produce a universe containing so intricate an illusion? It would mean that the Creator formed a universe that contained human beings whom He had endowed with the faculty of curiosity and the ability to reason. He supplied those human beings with an enormous amount of subtle and cleverly consistent evidence designed to mislead them and cause them to be convinced that the universe was created 20 billion years ago and developed by evolutionary processes that include the creation and the development of life on Earth. Why?

Does the Creator take pleasure in fooling us? Does it amuse Him to watch us go wrong? Is it part of a test to see if human beings will deny their senses and their reason in order to cling to myth? Can it be that the Creator is a cruel and malicious prankster, with a vicious and adolescent sense of humor?

The Bible says that God created the world in six days, and the Bible is the inspired word of God. To the average creationist this is all that counts. All other arguments are merely a tedious way of countering the propaganda of all those wicked humanists, agnostics, an atheists who are not satisfied with the clear word of the Lord.

The creationist leaders do not actually use that argument because that would make their argument a religious one, and they would not be able to use it in fighting a secular school system. They have to borrow the clothing of science, no matter how badly it fits, and call themselves "scientific" creationists. They also speak only of the "Creator," and never mentioned that this Creator is the God of the Bible.

We cannot, however, take this sheep's clothing seriously. However much the creationist leaders might hammer away at in their "scientific" and "philosophical" points, they would be helpless and a laughing-stock if that were all they had.

It is religion that recruits their squadrons. Tens of millions of Americans, who neither know nor understand the actual arguments for or even against evolution, march in the army of the night with their Bibles held high. And they are a strong and frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, the feeble lance of mere reason.

Even if I am right and the evolutionists' case is very strong, have not creationists, whatever the emptiness of their case, a right to be heard? if their case is empty, isn't it perfectly safe to discuss it since the emptiness would then be apparent? Why, then are evolutionists so reluctant to have creationism taught in the public schools on an equal basis with evolutionary theory? can it be that the evolutionists are not as confident of their case as they pretend. Are they afraid to allow youngsters a clear choice?

First, the creationists are somewhat less than honest in their demand for equal time. It is not their views that are repressed: schools are by no means the only place in which the dispute between creationism and evolutionary theory is played out. There are churches, for instance, which are a much more serious influence on most Americans than the schools are. To be sure, many churches are quite liberal, have made their peace with science and find it easy to live with scientific advance — even with evolution. But many of the less modish and citified churches are bastions of creationism.

The influence of the church is naturally felt in the home, in the newspapers, and in all of surrounding society. It makes itself felt in the nation as a whole, even in religiously liberal areas, in thousands of subtle ways: in the nature of holiday observance, in expressions of patriotic fervor, even in total irrelevancies. In 1968, for example, a team of astronomers circling the moon were instructed to read the first few verses of Genesis as though NASA felt it had to placate the public lest they rage against the violation of the firmament. At the present time, even the current President of the United States has expressed his creationist sympathies.

It is only in school that American youngsters in general are ever likely to hear any reasoned exposition of the evolutionary viewpiont. They might find such a viewpoint in books, magazines, newspapers, or even, on occasion, on television. But church and family can easily censor printed matter or television. Only the school is beyond their control.

But only just barely beyond. Even though schools are now allowed to teach evolution, teachers are beginning to be apologetic about it, knowing full well their jobs are at the mercy of school boards upon which creationists are a stronger and stronger influence.

Then, too, in schools, students are not required to believe what they learn about evolution—merely to parrot it back on test. If they fail to do so, their punishment is nothing more than the loss of a few points on a test or two.

In the creationist churches, however, the congregation is required to believe. Impressionable youngsters, taught that they will go to hell if they listen to the evolutionary doctrine, are not likely to listen in comfort or to believe if they do. Therefore, creationists, who control the church and the society they live in and to face the public-school as the only place where evolution is even briefly mentioned in a possible favorable way, find they cannot stand even so minuscule a competition and demand "equal time."

Do you suppose their devotion to "fairness" is such that they will give equal time to evolution in their churches?

Second, the real danger is the manner in which creationists want threir "equal time." In the scientific world, there is free and open competition of ideas, and even a scientist whose suggestions are not accepted is nevertheless free to continue to argue his case. In this free and open competition of ideas, creationism has clearly lost. It has been losing, in fact, since the time of Copernicus four and a half centuries ago. But creationism, placing myth above reason, refused to accept the decision and are now calling on the government to force their views on the schools in lieu of the free expression of ideas. Teachers must be forced to present creationism as though it had equal intellectual respectability with evolutionary doctrine.

If the government can mobilize its policemen and its prisons to make certain that teachers give creationism equal time, they can next use force to make sure that teachers declare creationism the victor so that evolution will be evicted from the classroom altogether. We will have established ground work, in other words, for legally enforced ignorance and for totalitarian thought control. And what if the creationists win? They might, you know, for there are millions who, faced with a choice between science and their interpretation of the Bible, will choose the Bible and reject science, regardless of the evidence.

This is not entirely because of the traditional and unthinking reverence for the literal words of the Bible; there is also a pervasive uneasiness—even an actual fear—of science that will drive even those who care little for fundamentalism into the arms of the creationists. For one thing, science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel among themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think.

Second, science is complex and chilling. The mathematical language of science is understood by very few. The vistas it presents are scary—an enormous universe ruled by chance and impersonal rules, empty and uncaring, ungraspable and vertiginous. How comfortable to turn instead to a small world, only a few thousand years old, and under God's personal and immediate care; a world in which you are his particular concern and where He will not consign you to hell if you are careful to follow every word of the Bible as interpreted for you by your television preacher.

Third, science is dangerous. There is no question but that poison gas, genetic engineering, and nuclear weapons and power stations are terrifying. It may be that civilization is falling apart and the world we know is coming to an end. In that case, why not turn to religion and look forward to the Day of Judgment, in which you and your fellow believers will be lifted into eternal bliss and have the added joy of watching the scoffers and disbelievers writhe forever in torment.

There are numerous cases of societies in which the armies of the night have ridden triumphantly over minorities in order to establish a powerful orthodoxy which dictates official thought. Invariably, the triumphant ride is toward long-range disaster. Spain dominated Europe and the world in the 16th century, but in Spain orthodoxy came first, and all divergence of opinion was ruthlessly suppressed. The result was that Spain settled back into blankness and did not share in the scientific, technological and commercial ferment that bubbled up in other nations of Western Europe. Spain remained an intellectual backwater for centuries. In the late 17th century, France in the name of orthodoxy revoked the Edict of Nantes and drove out many thousands of Huguenots, who added their intellectual vigor to lands of refuge such as Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Prussia, while France was permanently weakened.

In more recent times, Germany hounded out the Jewish scientists of Europe. They arrived in the United States and contributed immeasurably to scientific advancement here, while Germany lost so heavily that there is no telling how long it will take it to regain its former scientific eminence. The Soviet Union, in its fascination with Lysenko, destroyed its geneticists, and set back its biological sciences for decades. China, during the Cultural Revolution, turned against Western science and is still laboring to overcome the devastation that resulted.

As we now, with all these examples before us, to ride backward into the past under the same tattered banner of orthodoxy? With creationism in the saddle, American science will wither. We will raise a generation of ignoramuses ill-equipped to run the industry of tomorrow, much less to generate the new advances of the days after tomorrow.

We will inevitably recede into the backwater of civilization, and those nations that retain opened scientific thought will take over the leadership of the world and the cutting edge of human advancement. I don't suppose that the creationists really plan the decline of the United States, but their loudly expressed patriotism is as simpleminded as their "science." If they succeed, they will, in their folly, achieve the opposite of what they say they wish.

( Isaac Asimov, "The 'Threat' of Creationism," New York Times Magazine, June 14, 1981; from Science and Creationism, Ashley Montagu, ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 182-193. )

The one characteristic of your wonderful post is that it smuggles in the historical without clarity. Both you and I should know that clarity ought to be the chief characteristic of the age of science and logic.

You toe the line of a dialectic between faith and reason--a very useful dispute. It assumes the two positions of faith and reason as fundamental. This is the position you have pounded into your head and tout it when you want it so: "the two will always be in conflict." But when useful, you will be monist, for in your world reason must be ascendant, except when chance happens to show up, whatever that is.

You say: The fact of the matter is it was logic and reason, not religion that are the parents of science. Huh? What is a parent? A genesis? Is this a metaphor interrupting the order of logic? Are you trying to say history is logic? Get this straightened out before you confuse all these bumbling posters who are under your poetic tutelage. Historically, religion was inseparable from the birth of science--prior to Socrates and Plato, both of whom retained a profound understanding of the limits of logic. But better not talk about Plato for he would pound your arrogance: "Oh well, answered my own question." Aristotle then? No, you want to talk about Aquinas while arguing for the parents of science. Your argument is framed anachronistically. When exactly was science born? When? And if reason and logic are the parents, who gave birth to religion? Is this genealogy of yours--this parentage of logic and reason-- is this what you call a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy? For sure this is a mass confusion, a confusion very typical of today's journalism, most of which is propaganda.

Religion has fought every scientific advance, every step along the way. Yeah right.. This is so demonstrably false. OK class, back to logic 101: "All men are wise" and "All cows are brown" etc? What you should have said is religion has fought scientific advance. Or, science has fought religious advance. Both are historically true. And this one is true too: you fight religion at the expense of logic and history.

If evolution is proven correct, God is disproven. Only if you are a monist belonging to your school. Draw the map of reality and you can prove anything. Anything. You can even prove or disprove your own existence--as you wish, draw your map. *God forgive these Creationist shysters for doing the same.*

It was the womb of Christianity that kept Europe in the horror of the Dark Ages for a millennia. All I will answer to that is this

Aquinas made the mistake of trying to logically prove the existence of God False. He did no such thing. I see so many statements from ignorance. One thing that Aquinas did read was Aristotle. Aristotle said first principles are not proven. Can't be proven. The five ways make God's existence logically consistent. You see, Aquinas does not share your dualistic monism. He will not make logic the cause of existence, as in the Cartesian method. He will not make logic the first principle. (Dataman caught you on this). In your world, reason = existence. Therefore, anything that reason proves, exists. All else is antithetical (and on a better day, non-existent by insistence). And if the likes of you had lived at the time of Aquinas, they would have begun with your first premise and ended up proving existence from your logic. In other words you would do exactly what you claim Aquinas failed to do. But he did no such thing. You might rather join up with Abelard.

the moral influence of the concept of God was falling away from Europe. And you say, this proved true. What are you proving? To use your language: what also proved true was the rise of Christianity, whether Nietzsche postdicted it or not. What's your point? Is your monism a deterministic fallacy of the Latin kind? post hoc ergo propter hoc?

And now, just like Marx and Nietzsche (famous conservatives!) you try to answer to the problem of creating an ersatz morality. And like Nietzsche and Foucault, you argue that all what the others want is control. To which the words of Bob Dylan: "you gotta serve somebody." And you call in reason like a self-service station. How convenient. In your world, otherness does not exist as it makes way for your expansive reason, fueled by you high octane will.

you cannot do anything for yourself, only for others. Thus one is a complete slave to others. This is in utter contradiction to the principle of Capitalism, which holds one is responsible to oneself, for oneself. Here's where your dualism springs up again. Logically, a contradiction. But why ought the existence of otherness or plurality be a contradiction. Why does your monism push against your dualism? Why does the service to another logically (or did you want to argue existentically?) negate the existence of the self? Or vice versa? All this springs from your dualistic conundrum coming under a monistic domination of LogicWing's reason. The twisting and the convolutions that your logic goes through attempts to disprove the unprovable and while asserting the unprovable as the provable. This self-destructs the concepts of logic, facts and reason in the process because it reduces existence to thought. Read your Aristotle. Read your Kant: a hundred dollars in your mind don't put any in your pocket. The inability to see the fallacies inherent your accusations is the same inability to understand what has occurred in the history of logical thinking.

Maybe interesting to some, maybe not, but here...

So, if an imagining cannot exist without being informed by reality, it must carry information about the nature of reality with it (even though imaginings can be so very fanciful, compared to what is necessary for living beings to survive and thrive). But then, why do we take a bit of reality and imagine with it, even when we don't have physical experience with what we imagine? Reasoning the way an evolutionist researcher does when he finds bones, teeth, hair, etc.: What is the purpose of the human imagination and what does that in turn tell us about ourselves?

On human imagination and human imaginings... part 2 of 2

(As I explained in posts between my part 1 & 2, I am speaking of the principle of purpose, but not necessarily in terms of teleology --thought I am not making the arbitrary mistake of ruling out ultimate purpose. I am speaking of this principle as one in common between evolutionist and creationist research in order to detemine why attributes of living beings exist, as a clue to origins and understanding how life fits together in the here and now. For "purpose," one could substitute, "functional relationship," or "orientation" between a being and all with which a being interacts, or which in any way is a part of its environment.)

So, with that in mind, what is the purpose of the imagination? What does that tell us about our environment and about ourselves?

Imagination, why?: In order for us to understand what exists and to interact and function with what exists, volitionally and creatively. And why do we imagine, exactly what we imagine? Because those things we imagine, are rooted in reality and matter to us. I think that just about all readers will agree that the environment that we navigate by means of our imagination includes the physical world around us, so I won't go on about that. But certainly, in the "imagining of our hearts" all sorts of matters are felt and considered, accurate and inaccurate, matters having to do with not only "material" things, but with other beings and events and a panoply of abstractions and emotions about it all. If I'd start to describe that, I'd loose all but the most gracious reader and I may have to reach for the aspirin bottle myself, even if I did have a good sleep last night.

That's nice. Then, what is the whole reality upon which our real imagination reflects? Well, I'll ask it this way: What kinds of things constitute the fulsome or holistic set of realistic imaginations that you have? If your imagination is a reflection of reality (accurately or not, from one moment to the next) and your imaginations deal not only with what you experience as physical reality, what is the rest? Is the rest to be declared "unreal" simply because you have no direct experience with it, while someone else may have? Even when imagination is used by a scientist for the purpose of formulating his next physical experiment, he needs his imagination to get to the truth. Clearly, we need our imaginations, in order to understand as much reality as we may, as well or as faultily as we may. Clearly, this reality includes matters with which, in one way or another, we are beyond having objective experience, at the time we imagine them -- or we would not have had the abilty to conceive of the experiments we have thus far made, to determine what we have found. I won't say there aren't other uses, but this one I'll emphasize: Whether by postulate or by a wild imaginary swing of intuition, imagination is for meeting what is beyond our previous experience and comprehension.

So, we need our very real imagination, in order to grasp real things beyond our objective experience --because they matter to us.

Now, what are the things that matter most, to us? Clearly, what is most important to you is what relates to you. So what is most relational to you? Now I'm getting to your empirical dream/vision/experience, ms. boop. To beg the question, it dealt with spiritual beings, beings not of our space/time/energy. But as you best among FReepers know, these two 'characters,' real as I believe them to be, were not the subject or chief substance of your vision any more than the house slave was the essense of "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," that you memorized. The subject and essense of this opus done with betty b's real conscious self, and her real imaginative heart is a person, abundantly clear -- and one who claimed not only to be a person but who claimed to be PERSON.

Oops, did I just beg the question? But, how much did I, to say that? betty says that she had an experience which her conscious self knew to be real. Her consciousness is very well practiced in distinguishing between reality and fantasy and this was so real and experiential to her conscious self that it would be dishonest for her to deny it. Her consciousness is an objective reality, and her imagination is too, and both testify to her that this was empirical in the realms of what each deals with. Furthermore, it made perfect, functional sense to her after the experience ended, though she doesn't comprehend every single facet of it (just the way we don't comprehend every single facet of anything else we experience).

To go a step further, did this experience effect what most matters to betty, what is most relational to her? That's what she says and she's the one who had the experience.

Now, others have had similar experiences and the problem is that not all of these experiences are consistent with each other. By testimony, these such experiences have been with various kinds of messengers and voices and many messages have been at odds with many others, a major breakdown. But there is a set of these experiences which are consistent with each other and which are a part of a system of understanding which would say that counterfeit spirits also exist, which will also effect humans directly. (Further, there are many other evidences and corroborated testimonies which have supported this particularly consistent set of experiences and understanding, and no evidences which disprove it.)

Why would the part of betty which deals with maintaining what she knows and separating this from what she does not know (conscious) and the part of her which deals with reflecting upon what is relationally most important to her (imagination) tell her that she had a real, knowing, and unique experience about exactly what is most important to her?

As we have heard from many witnesses, there is a person... the person... I should really just say, there is PERSON (as Descartes should have appreciated, calls Himself "I AM THAT I AM"). He claims to be THE CONSCIOUS, THE IMAGINATION, who fills heaven and earth, yet is not of this world, who is beyond beginning and end, and who is beyond our comprehension but (listen scientists) who claims to reveal and convey His matter to those who accept it. Ever wonder as I used to, what in the Sam Hill this "glory" is, that seems such a word of self-aggrandizement and megalomania by this Deity, when we are told in something called the "Holy Bible" that all of what we do is only to be of and for God's glory? Megalomaniacal? Hardly. Glory means "matter" in ancient Hebrew -- a good dictionary will say "weight." In the Bible, when God's glory is addressed, it is concomitant with pure light. This insertion of meaning would tell us that since all is His, as betty b's dream attests, we are only in our thoroughly right conscious mind and only have the right, fulsome framework for the functions of imagination and all that is "us" when we accept His substance in the picture (all of the picture). His is the very substance of being by which we were created to relationally commune, individually as certain as a child is from his parents, and collectively as certainly as a bride is of and for her husband and vice versa.

How would the relationship between CONSCIOUS and our conscious, IMAGINATION and our imagination connect? Directly maybe? I'd say so. Stuff like physical "matter," energy and ultimately perhaps even time would just get in the way of this kind of relationship, though it is affirmed in this relationship that the bridge to the physical world was thoroughly crossed as well, glory to God.

Sigh. There, I did it, I blurted out the gospel... shoot... well something about the nature of the good news, anyway.

The Righ Stuff

We may believe and know as a much underrated empiricist with direct much direct experience named John ben Zebedee emphasized again and again, that God is CONSCIOUS BEING and has all the right PRETERNATURAL STUFF (GLORY) and accepting Him and His experientially conveyed data beats the alternative, to say the least. Furthermore, like us (whodathunkit?) what He creates, He creates from His IMAGINATION, a very real imagination creating a whole bunch of stuff that is very real on a whole bunch of levels, in a whole bunch of ways, but a bunch of stuff that is consistent and has integrity, as He is and has.

There exists no other 'philosophy' which deals with every bit of who we persons are and every bit of what we relate to and how, and which is not disproven but maintained by every kind of study (all kinds of humble and intellectually honest study). The truth is out there. The truth is here. Truth happens.

So, it is wonderful and important to study how fossils lay in the strata of the earth and how DNA is processed and what the implications of this may be, and so it is, to study the levels and interplay of the great dance within the Russian dolls of quantum mechanics, and of what layers and substances make up man himself, but what "matters" most?

Well, what mattered most in betty b's dream?

There is a subjectivity upon which all our objectivity depends.

Arlen - unspun

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PS: In addition to conscious and imagination, I've referred to "intention," in the above (volition, will) as have others. But, I haven't found much treatment of human consicience in this thread (thought I haven't read every bit of it). There is a thread running in FR about God, morality, and human conscience -- Morality: Who Needs God -- more on the many traits of man, having to do with his spiritually relational life, meant for the relationship that matters most.

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