Illusion and Reality

In the real world we live in a forest of differences.  It has always been so.  If the differences seem large enough to us, we may make intellectual or emotional enemies of those who operate on different frequencies than we do, or use different styles, or make appeals foreign to our own.  These last may relate to a number of factors including the use of language.  To resist we may enter into discussion about the issues which is a good thing, or we resort to other responses like ridicule or humor that may put down the other person or context.  This was illustrated strongly to me recently in reviewing the always interesting illustrated you don’t say panel and quotation by l. k. hanson.  In this panel he has an exaggerated (not uncommon in this kind of communication) of a fellow sitting at a desk with his right hand and forearm across a Holy Bible. From the teeth of the man there appear statements: Joan of Arc Was Noah’s Wife. The Earth Is 6000 Years Old.  Everything Was Made In Six Days.  Above the representative fellow appears a quotation from Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), an American Biochemist and Science Fiction Author.  It reads:

   IMAGINE THE PEOPLE who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who    would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs  on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes.  I personally resent it bitterly.

Permit some background of the biblical reference to early Genesis.  The reference to day creation is made.  Elsewhere we are told that to the Lord, a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as one day.  The uses of language show from the beginning.  Allegory, perception, myth, taken together with real experience is commonly used, not only in the Bible, but in literature at large – ancient and modern. Asimov would not want everything in his writings to be taken as literal – but some readers will likely do so. Jesus, knowing the human thought patterns used parable so to permit persons in their logics to find truth and to adjust their beliefs and conducts to it.  That many believed in a flat earth in the fifteenth century sent some persons to the open seas to find out.  There are still those who hold to a flat earth theory.  They do not really make any difference to real meaning, except to alert us to search for reality.  Persons believing in six days of creation do not make any difference in the context of the studies of the age of the earth.  The evolutionist, if wise, would argue that the story of creation in the Bible follows the order laid out even by evolution.  Was there some relationship from the beginning?  Do the days have to be 24 hours in consecutive occurrences?  Some persons follow a pattern they were taught in any field, and find it too magnetic to let go.  Seldom does the matter make any difference.  At worst it delays some progress, but that is made up for in striking out from the beginning in trying to answer nagging questions about nature and mankind.  They were the first faltering steps in finding out this or that truth.  Physicians who bled George Washington later began to doubt the benefit of bleeding patients who desperately needed the blood their helpers were taking from them.  Our lives are full of broken strings of paradox and contradiction.

The unthinking among us may be angry at views odd to them, or to understand who someone would think differently than they do.  They often miss the real issues to be addressed, not this or that fine detail, but the real issues: Is there a creator God?  If there is, is biblical God the best description available?  We can carry this further: Without God, where do we find values? Why do thinking-persons go to war?  Why do we not learn how to manage wealth to overcome poverty?  How do we develop better families?  The questions of real meaning to the welfare of the human race have little to do with theories of the days of creation, and they should not cause resentments in seeking truth leading to belief/conduct.  Asimov went off on a rant of extravagant language that likely took the search out of useful meaning.  Emotions flayed.  Persons often find ways, clear or confusing, to get on in their beliefs and are permitted, in good spirit, to find comfort.  This is permitted to persons in our era who believe in fortune tellers, in hallucinations, in astrology – even in simplifications of evidence.  History offers some oddities in beliefs as persons interpret the world.