Keynote

This blog isn’t about truth, nor is it about my truth. It’s about a discussion that I believe is quietly taking place within many people, a discussion with science on the one side and religion on the other side. It’s not necessarily an amicable discussion, our own thoughts, the give and take tete a tete in our minds. If there is any reflective relationship between our collective thoughts and society, then that dialogue is so brutal it may not even rise to the level of dialogue. Somewhere inside of us is a good old fashioned bar room brawl designed to get the other side to simply shut up.

This would be one of those psychological dynamics that takes place against our will, the same way that plumbing happens to occasionally back up, or that car wrecks occasionally happen. We would like our plumbing to be as open as the London Tube in the wee hours of the morning, our car to run silkily smooth without the need for repair, but we’re just not there yet. We know that a world of greatly reduced friction is possible, although technologically, we can’t yet live that life.

I’m going to try to facilitate a peaceful discussion between science and religion. It’s a discussion that can’t possibly end, for both are in a process of discovering the nature of the universe, and for those who say that religious texts aren’t discovering the universe, the texts are giving us the ultimate answers—then science is busy discovering the universe, the religious folks are busy trying to understand the texts. And this amounts to the same thing, everyone trying to discover the universe to their satisfaction. If you are the type of person that takes such an investigation seriously, then there is no end, there is always more to know.

So where can this meeting take place? And what shape of table shall be used?

I will let the scientists decide this, and they have, as they have published a wealth of books and been the subject of some marvelous television shows depicting quantum physics, medicine, cosmology—that is, they seem to be filling the water barrel with something I suspect we are hard wired thirsty. They don’t fill up the barrel with jargon or high ended math. They are making the complex concepts accessible to everyone with the use of metaphor. I was watching a show about the formation of the moon, and the scientist was using the metaphor of roller derby. So the meeting shall take place in a world of metaphor, all sitting at a table made of metaphor.

The odd and not so surprising thing, the world of literature, and religion is also made of metaphor. And if you think of the world in holographic or fractal terms, then everything you see can be a metaphor for something greater. In science alone, biology can be a metaphor for chemistry, chemistry and be a metaphor for quantum physics, and quantum physics can provide metaphors for cosmology and relativity. It’s not much of a jump from physics to baseball, and from baseball to spirituality—and all of these metaphors are incestuous, they can be used any which way for each other.

For instance, the Torah will speak of miracles, that is, things which don’t usually occur in nature, things which seem impossible, but have nevertheless occurred. This isn’t very different from the scientific anomaly. And so the parting of the Red Sea was an anomaly, the water from the rock another anomaly. With miracles, there is no asking why because there is no why—but with anomalies, asking why is the first step. It begins the process of investigation, which for Jews begins at the Seder, with the four questions. Jews should be investigating with the same ferocity as they do in the labs of MIT.

In other words, if you look closely, the scientific process isn’t very different from the religious process—you ask a question, you try to answer the question. Some answers not only change how you see things, they change how you see yourself, and then those answers change your world.

If you love a good metaphor, then you’ll fall into this process easily. It will be fun. And because the science world is so much like the old American West, a wide open frontier to be settled, the news and posting will come from there. But if I post it, then that means I’ve seen the same thing, described metaphorically, in some religious text---OR that the new discovery itself is a metaphor from something else.

I’ll just be like Philip Marlowe’s stream of consciousness, giving you the raw material, and then leaving you to your quiet moments with a bottle of Old Taylor and a cigarette to figure out the connections.