Last night was one of those nights - awoken by the first bird songs of morning at 4:30 AM, the unpleasantness of the dream that was running came through and was amplified, as it always is at such an hour. With the intellect at a low voltage, it is in these hours that the true depth of emotions is revealed, and they are as deep as the crying of a frightened child. This was about anxiety, being late to class, and inadequacy, not making it in class, things that I dismiss in waking life as unimportant. Something within me really, really does not believe that, though.
This was followed latter by another dream, this of my mother as she told me "I'm dying, you know," and on waking I found that this really mattered more than the waking mind could admit.
Which is true? Emotions are deep and searing - but often ridiculous. The first dream was about things over with long ago, things of younger days that are, in any case, irreparable. The latter was not ridiculous; in the first case, mind (rational thought) is the superior or more true; in the second, the emotions. But can we always tell the antiquated, that which is no longer relevant, from the truth of the present, where emotions find our true depth?
Lately I have been exploring the possibilities of a new concept of God, of one which is involved and evolving along with us. In this, it did not occur to me until this morning that evolution is still relevant in
America in today's theological debate. This is not because I have ceded spiritual wisdom to materialistic science, but because I never saw evolution as a theological problem. Years ago, in fact, I taught it to bored young minds at the university level, and, just in case some were seriously religious, would explain my own point of view concerning evolution: that, the way I saw it, it was God's exceptionally brilliant way to create life (of course it was exceptional - it is God!) Why this is so can take up pages, but to me at the time, I could think of no other way for God to reflect on our greater reality - that, even with increasing differentiation through evolution, we were all related to the first spark of life, which came from the dust of non-life, which came from the stars and so on; that is, that in infinite time, we are all one, not only in concept, but in hard, physical reality. We are all related absolutely to everything else. Brilliant.
However, it was not until a bit later that I learned where a truer conflict lay; that is, over the mechanism of evolution. For the materialist, all, including matter itself, is by pure random chance. In evolution, things just happen with random mutations and only the fit survive the random weather and conditions of the time. There is no divine plan or input, just a random number generator. And here is where we might shake the wheat from the chafe.
In the Scope's monkey trial, what infuriated the people of Tennessee was not the idea of a godless and random universe, but the idea that the universe was not created in the 6 days as spoken in the Bible - and further, that humans were not immediately made and separated from the beasts as the "image of God." Now, of the latter, it is still not proven that we share an ancestor with modern apes (no, we did not come from apes - they, too, have been evolving. Instead we may have had a common ancestor somewhere along the line, as far back as 30 million years ago and as close as 5 million.) although it seems likely. What seems almost certain is that we evolved from other forms, and, in the beauty of the divine plan, came through the wilderness of instinctual being into consciousness, where we can now conceive of a unity with God. This is not literalism, however, and I suppose there are many, perhaps millions, who would be scandalized by this divine evolution. However, it does seem to me that this deep emotion, this sense of scandal, is an attachment to something that is long-gone and futile. As our recent authors have stated, this form of thinking might be causing the end of religion in the wake of scientific knowledge. It, that this universe is only 6000 years old and was created at once and for all time in 6 days just isn't coinciding with current knowledge. It speaks rather of a connection and a hierarchy of being, not real cosmological time.
However, on the mechanism of evolution we have an entirely different matter; it is rather the materialists who are left holding the bag. It is they who have to prove that entire organs can change by random mutation, they who have to prove that an infinity of stuff can arise out of nothing, and they who have to show that clear laws of physics and the clear path of evolution towards greater complexity are all a matter of chance. It is here where it seems that mentation is inferior to something far deeper that touches emotion - where logic is not negated, but is superseded by an interior depth. Where, for example, the knowledge that your mother is dying is not only fact, but a deeply felt reality. The spiritual evolutionist cannot prove to the materialist that God exists, but it is such a richer and more true explanation, so much so that the materialist reductionist viewpoint makes the the fundamentalists view look like the tower of wisdom that it once was to people 3, 000 years ago. FK
This was followed latter by another dream, this of my mother as she told me "I'm dying, you know," and on waking I found that this really mattered more than the waking mind could admit.
Which is true? Emotions are deep and searing - but often ridiculous. The first dream was about things over with long ago, things of younger days that are, in any case, irreparable. The latter was not ridiculous; in the first case, mind (rational thought) is the superior or more true; in the second, the emotions. But can we always tell the antiquated, that which is no longer relevant, from the truth of the present, where emotions find our true depth?
Lately I have been exploring the possibilities of a new concept of God, of one which is involved and evolving along with us. In this, it did not occur to me until this morning that evolution is still relevant in
America in today's theological debate. This is not because I have ceded spiritual wisdom to materialistic science, but because I never saw evolution as a theological problem. Years ago, in fact, I taught it to bored young minds at the university level, and, just in case some were seriously religious, would explain my own point of view concerning evolution: that, the way I saw it, it was God's exceptionally brilliant way to create life (of course it was exceptional - it is God!) Why this is so can take up pages, but to me at the time, I could think of no other way for God to reflect on our greater reality - that, even with increasing differentiation through evolution, we were all related to the first spark of life, which came from the dust of non-life, which came from the stars and so on; that is, that in infinite time, we are all one, not only in concept, but in hard, physical reality. We are all related absolutely to everything else. Brilliant.
However, it was not until a bit later that I learned where a truer conflict lay; that is, over the mechanism of evolution. For the materialist, all, including matter itself, is by pure random chance. In evolution, things just happen with random mutations and only the fit survive the random weather and conditions of the time. There is no divine plan or input, just a random number generator. And here is where we might shake the wheat from the chafe.
In the Scope's monkey trial, what infuriated the people of Tennessee was not the idea of a godless and random universe, but the idea that the universe was not created in the 6 days as spoken in the Bible - and further, that humans were not immediately made and separated from the beasts as the "image of God." Now, of the latter, it is still not proven that we share an ancestor with modern apes (no, we did not come from apes - they, too, have been evolving. Instead we may have had a common ancestor somewhere along the line, as far back as 30 million years ago and as close as 5 million.) although it seems likely. What seems almost certain is that we evolved from other forms, and, in the beauty of the divine plan, came through the wilderness of instinctual being into consciousness, where we can now conceive of a unity with God. This is not literalism, however, and I suppose there are many, perhaps millions, who would be scandalized by this divine evolution. However, it does seem to me that this deep emotion, this sense of scandal, is an attachment to something that is long-gone and futile. As our recent authors have stated, this form of thinking might be causing the end of religion in the wake of scientific knowledge. It, that this universe is only 6000 years old and was created at once and for all time in 6 days just isn't coinciding with current knowledge. It speaks rather of a connection and a hierarchy of being, not real cosmological time.
However, on the mechanism of evolution we have an entirely different matter; it is rather the materialists who are left holding the bag. It is they who have to prove that entire organs can change by random mutation, they who have to prove that an infinity of stuff can arise out of nothing, and they who have to show that clear laws of physics and the clear path of evolution towards greater complexity are all a matter of chance. It is here where it seems that mentation is inferior to something far deeper that touches emotion - where logic is not negated, but is superseded by an interior depth. Where, for example, the knowledge that your mother is dying is not only fact, but a deeply felt reality. The spiritual evolutionist cannot prove to the materialist that God exists, but it is such a richer and more true explanation, so much so that the materialist reductionist viewpoint makes the the fundamentalists view look like the tower of wisdom that it once was to people 3, 000 years ago. FK
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