The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.
When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.
--Tao Te Ching,
Steven Mitchell, Trans.
At Oxford College, our Oxford Studies interdisciplinary course enrolls 85 percent of the student body every semester. Our theme this fall is "Faith and Science." Your response, after hearing that title, might be, "Shouldn't that be `Faith or Science,' `Faith against Science,' or `Faith in Science?'"
We're used to equating "faith" with "religion" and making much of the perceived conflict between these differing world views. But faith isn't religion; religions are congealed faith. Even so, religion and science don't conflict until one tries to be the other, as when logical positivists dismiss God-talk or fundamentalists preach "creation science."
The trouble is, we can't talk about faith in English, because we can't use it as a verb. We have to say "Believe," which makes it a head issue and leads to killing off the unfaithful, or we say "Have Faith" and revel in the quiver of the soulful liver. But "faithing," the enthused, active responding to the awe-full, is today perhaps even more evident among visionary scientists than among the righteously religious. (If you're uptight about it, it isn't faith, it's addiction.) Arthur Koestler wrote that discovery, humor and wonder all have in common the delightful shock of the unexpected intersection of planes of perception: "Aha! Haha! Ahhh!"
It's ironic that now, when science operates by uncertainty, probability, complementarity, chaos -- that scriptural literalists are still caught in the Descartesian/Newtonian myth of "fact!" We are all so afflicted with the disease of dualism that we can't recognize it -- still living as though "subject/ object," "mind/matter," "natural/supernatural" are dichotomies that "really" "exist!" We are dying of dualism.
The language of science tells us "what" and often "how," but the language of myth wakes us up to the meaning, the "why." The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden isn't "fact," but it is awesome truth about our life. Wanting to be like God, we eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil -- we'll decide and divide! Driven out and forbidden the Tree of Life, we eat from the Tree of Death. Using our knowledge, we have claimed unto ourselves the power of ending life on earth. Unconsciously, all of us live constantly under the mushroom cloud. I think that many phenomena of today arise from that decision for the power of death: apocalyptic religion, moral decay, drugs, devotion to entertainment. (Weird, that our Veda is Video; we're the most myth-ridden people in history, but our myths are canned, vicarious!)
Let's not blame "science" but ourselves for the uses we make of scientific discovery. The "scientific" world view, in astronomy, in biology, in subatomic physics, has today come around to what Taoists and Buddhists have always said: "reality" is process, not things; it's all one whole, and each event is its relationships; yin/yang, complementarity, not duality, is what's happening.
How hard it is, to wake up to the oneness and live it! We are supposed to be committed to that vision in liberal education. We know, though we don't act it, that all our names for academic "disciplines" and "departments" are just that: names. Can we myth ourselves up to a wholeness?
I have a Jesus-complex: when I'm not teaching, I'm woodcarving. One of my carvings is a Mobius strip entitled "Who is on the Lord's side?"
How many sides are there?
Hoyt Oliver is Pierce Professor of Religion at Oxford College.