Lots of articles everywhere about Intelligent Design these days — the latest re-working of reality to allow God a place in it. It's a bit of a waste of time, all this discussion, in my opinion. If people insist on taking the Bible literally, at face value, and reforming the evidence on the ground to fit that, then there is no reasoning with them — they've abandoned reason from the beginning.
It's not a question of reason vs. faith either, in my opinion. I believe one can have a belief, a sense of a higher force, without taking virgin births, Adam and Eve, Noah and a man who make a sea part literally. You can believe in Mystery — in something beyond us that we don't understand, without necessarily believing that the stories that point and support that belief are also all literally true.
Over and over it has been shown that these tales that make up the Torah and the Bible were cobbled together from pre-existing mythologies and assembled to form these new groups, giving a new emphasis. Twice it happened — in the Torah and later by the Christians. That doesn't denigrate the mythology described in these books in any way, or deny its metaphorical power. A metaphor as powerful as these has the power to guide lives, to inspire, to order societies and to back up moralities. And they can be beautiful and poetic at the same time. That's a tall order.
But to say that it also literally happened is, well, to miss the point. It is to mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon, as the Buddha once said. The myths point towards a way of living, they give social and moral foundations and provide a backbone for daily behavior — but they themselves are not those foundations and backbone. They are signposts, not the thing itself.
Intelligent design strikes me as the latest convoluted attempt to allow something patently unbelievable to remain standing. If, for example, one confronts a person who insists that the first few pages of Genesis are to be taken literally with the evidence of the world around them, they have no choice but to admit that it probably didn't happen quite that way. Pause. Ummm, so, ahh, wait a minute! How about this? God didn't actually MAKE everything, but he set it in motion! How about that?
This sounds like a 10 year old desperately figuring out an alternate story explaining where the cookies went or how the dog got in the house. It's amusing, and maybe sweet in its desperation, but not to be taken seriously as literal fact. It is psychological fact, which is different. No less real, but very different.
The U.S. is a fragmented country — split between fundamentalists and infidels. Maybe that's why these days this issue is taken seriously and given so much media space. It speaks to larger divides and deeper problems.
I think it's possible to believe in God, Gods, a higher power, or the Force, or a Vast Active Living Intelligent System without taking the myths at face value. It doesn't devalue them either to not take them literally. But it can go either way.
I think in Buddhism there are 2 paths — and one consists of literally mostly just rote behavior. Just do the rituals, chant the sutras, behave correctly, and you'll get there — or your descendants will. The other road is about achieving release through deep understanding and lots of diligent effort. Often this is the road for priests, monks, hermits and wandering seekers. It is claimed that either road leads to eventual enlightenment — it doesn't matter which way you go — you don't have to know how a car works to arrive at your destination — but one should not mistake the car for the destination. Like a simple Bible reader in the USA, a dedicated churchgoer, one can achieve the end goal simply by following directions.
How this then got twisted all over the world into intolerance (forced teaching of Intelligent Design is intolerance in my book) is slightly beyond me — unless it's basic human nature to subdue the lands around you.
When I read about the Big Bang it is hard for me to believe that it all began more or less from nothing. And it's equally hard to believe that all will either disperse into empty wastes or collapse back in and restart the process over and over again. It's hard to believe there was a beginning or that there can be an end — a cycle is easier to believe, endless repetition, but then how did the cycle get started? How could anything always be here? Why is there matter or energy to begin with? In searching for an answer here is where an infidel like myself comes close to faith.
It is said that speed of light travel is impossible — that we would become energy and would therefore no longer exist as matter. This might be true, but viewed from a higher, much much faster level, that might not make much of a difference. What we consider as “existing” and what organizing principle may still exist when one becomes pure energy may not be so different. Simply (or not so simply) they may be different forms for the same thing, or non-thing, as the case may be.
Imagine speed of light travel in which yes we do become energy and we somehow maintain our organizing principles. Forget about space ships and maybe even bodies — we've become something less. We can then not only travel very quickly and far, but maybe time begins to be somewhat flexible as well. Here is where we can indeed enter wormholes and even stars become like planets — planets of energy, rather than of mass (though there is mass there, too.)
This level of travel — and of existence, really — would be all but invisible to us. Pulses and rays and concatenations of energy — it would be pretty hard to discern their organizational forms, if such things could exist, form where we sit. It would be the equivalent of another dimension — albeit the one the touches us fairly often.
Once one is converted into a form or pure energy would there be a reason to go back to being mass? Ever? Would this be considered a form or transcendence? It literally is. And does that put it in the realm of the spiritual? I think not, but appearances are deceptive. But it does allow one to imagine that there might be levels of “being” up our out there that we find pretty hard to imagine, and they are, when viewed by us, suitably Godlike.
