New book explains it all

I just started writ­ing a new book, sort of The World Accord­ing to Steve or Steve’s Sys­tem­atic The­ol­ogy. The final title is yet to be decided–perhaps Prac­ti­cal Mys­ti­cism or some such thing. From time to time, I’ll give you some pre­views on this blog page such as the following:

Well, let’s start at the begin­ning. “In the begin­ning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1 “In the begin­ning.” In the begin­ning of what? In the begin­ning of the cre­ation of the mate­r­ial uni­verse. In the begin­ning of time. In the begin­ning of space. Before the begin­ning of cre­ation, there was no time or space. There was just eter­nity, with­out begin­ning or end, just the eter­nal now. There was some­thing at the begin­ning. What was that some­thing? It was the logos, it was the Word, it was God. BANG! The big bang. OM! My God, what’s going on here? What’s with all this racket? I believe it is the event hori­zon exploding.

Of course, no one can ade­quately explain the begin­ning of cre­ation. No one was there—not sci­en­tists or reli­gion­ists. It’s pure spec­u­la­tion, mythol­ogy. Yet we want to know how cre­ation began. There are many ver­sions both from sci­ence and reli­gion, each try­ing its best to explain the unex­plain­able. We want to know. Yet, it is unknow­able. Give us your best shot. Give us some­thing to hold on to.

Humans want to know where we come from, what is our pur­pose, why are we here. Var­i­ous reli­gious tra­di­tions have tried answer­ing this ques­tion for mil­len­nia in var­i­ous ways accord­ing to the under­stand­ing of the per­sons addressed in par­tic­u­lar times and cir­cum­stances. There­fore, we have var­i­ous reli­gious inter­pre­ta­tions of the cre­ation story. Many of these inter­pre­ta­tions are alle­gor­i­cal and many are based on the best sci­en­tific under­stand­ings of the day.

To teach these mytho­log­i­cal sto­ries as sci­en­tific fact equal to the sci­ence of the 21st cen­tury is absurd. While they are truth on a spir­i­tual level, they are not sci­en­tific truth. The ancients who wrote these sto­ries had com­pletely dif­fer­ent goals in mind when writ­ing them than do mod­ern sci­en­tific thinkers. They were not con­cerned with facts as much as mean­ing. What is the spir­i­tual mean­ing of cre­ation? That is what they were try­ing to address. This is true.

Yet, I love read­ing the sci­en­tists expla­na­tions of the uni­verse and believe the big bang the­ory and evo­lu­tion to be valid, truth­ful sci­en­tific expla­na­tions of how cre­ation came about.

Both the sci­en­tific and mytho­log­i­cal expla­na­tions can be true at the same time deal­ing with cre­ation on dif­fer­ent lev­els of under­stand­ing. One is to be taught in the sci­ence classes and one in the reli­gion and the­ol­ogy classes.

Enjoy,

Steve

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2004 at 15:49 and is filed under Steve's Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.