Brian’s Reflection: Monday, September 10, 2007


Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested,
and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject
at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.

- Stephen Jay Gould, born on this day, 1941

You know, I had no idea really who Stephen Gould is! So, thanks to Google, I “looked him up”. He was a paleontologist, having announcd that he would be one having seen a dinosaur skeleton at age 5 at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. Just like me, who said, at age 5, that I wanted to “be a priest”. Gould was a scientist. And he was Creationism’s most effective opponent - Creationism as “science”, that is.

I cannot tell you how discouraged and disappointed and yes, even angry, I have become about this business of the clash between Creationism and Evolution. Why disappointed and discouraged? Because it tells me that Americans are not evolving. And not to evolve means that the American human imagination is withering. “Evolution” is science. “Creationism” is ….. well, should be ….. holy imagination. Holy metaphor.

The Bible has NOTHING (or very little) to do with science or history. Israeli (and other) archeologists have come a long way in proving that pivotal characters like Abraham, Moses, the Flight from Egypt, the Wandering in the Desert, the occupation of the “Promised Land” are NOT historical personages or facts. The Bible is a Holy Metaphor. The Bible is imaginative expression of how a people have chosen to understand their place and meaning in History. “Creationism” is a Holy Myth. A story attempting to express a people’s struggle to grasp - or, and here is the problem, create - their meaning in History?

Do you understand how confusing Science with Imagination kills the Soul? Kills Truth? Kills the freedom of the Human Spirit? Do we not see how thinking there was a physical place called Eden fatally leads us astray from understanding that we are called to become Beings of Divine Compassion?

Take nothing in the Bible “literally”. There is NO SUCH THING as “literal truth”. Only an invitation to open the heart and mind to Mystery.

Brian+