Included below is a dialog between one of the readers of The Arrenkyle Papers and myself. It began as a message from Derek Kurth in response to May's IMHO article, "The New Meaning Of Life".

Dear Derek,

I want you to understand that I do appreciate your concern and your prayers. I meant no offense to you or to anyone of strong faith. Generally the tag line of my articles are intended to attract the casual browser into the article, not to belittle the issue.

However, for reasons that I need not delve into deeply here, I came to the conclusion several years ago that the stories and allegorical messages of the Bible provide something other than a definition of the true reality of the world. In other words, I am not a Christian, nor am I interested in being one.

I also am not interested in convincing any Christian that he or she is wrong. This was not the purpose of the article. My message is intended for the increasing number of people who are unable to ignore the disparity between the teachings of a religion that has been dragged through the dark ages of Western European interpretation and the increasingly sharp focus with which we can examine and understand the natural world. This article is a follow up to the article in issue 2 which examined the growing sense of lost spirituality that we face in the modern world.

Pardon me if I ramble a bit, but I do wonder sometimes whether or not people of strong faith are curious about why I believe what I do and how I came to understand religion as I do. Because it is not my place to try to affect the spiritual growth of anyone else, I tend not to engage in the type of philosophical and religious debates that would allow me to share my thoughts, and so I am left being understood so often only from within the context of another's beliefs. Thus I have resigned myself as being perceived as lost, or under the influence of Satan, or driven by pride or anger.

It seems to me that because of the nature of the Christian faith, Christians are unable to truly and deeply attempt to understand the very difficult introspection and transformations of understanding that I have gone through. This leads me at times to view established religions with a bit of cynicism, and if that came through in my article, I do apologize for any offense it might have given you.

Your message was genuine and caring. Thank you for that. And thank you for taking the time to drop by the Arrenkyle Papers and to share your thoughts with me.

Be well.

:^Dan

subject: RE: forever

Dear Derek,

I will assume that your question is genuine, that you are actually interested in the answer and that this is not the beginning of a dialog by which you will attempt to explain or justify your religion to me. Having grown up in the Christian faith, I am quite familiar with the details and beliefs of Christianity and would prefer to worry about my own salvation and let others worry about theirs.

Now that that's out of the way, let me go on to say that I don't mind discussing any of these details with anyone willing to engage in an attempt to expand genuine understanding. Too often, religious debates end up as a forum to challenge and bicker and often lead to such arguments as "if you believe that, then obviously" fill in the blank. I say this because your question seems to be the type of foot-in-the-door, leading question one would ask to begin a series of persuasive arguments in the attempt to inflict one's own personal, sacred beliefs on another.

However, I don't know you or you motives and so I'll simply tell you what I think and why. Since you are interested, let me start by saying that I am atheist not out of ignorance, or anger, or pride, but simply because this is the position that is the most consistent with the world as it presents itself to me. I'm not anti-God or anti-religion. I have simply opened up my mind, invited the physical and spiritual world to demonstrate itself to me, and this is what I have found.

There is an implicit assumption in your question of what happens when we die. That assumption is that the mind is somehow separate from the physical mechanism of the brain. You might ask yourself why do we perceive mind to be separate from our bodies. From the Christian perspective this makes perfect sense: the part of us that is able to reason, love, forgive, is something called the soul, an eternal part of God which enters our bodies and then leaves us to rejoin God after we die.

This is an obvious parallel to what happens with our bodies: we arise from the material of the world, live for a while, and then return as material back to the earth. If our bodies come from the Earth and then return to the Earth, from where does our mind come, and where does it return to?

This perception of mind as being separate from our bodies is easily reinforced by the act of dreaming, which seems to take us to places apart from our bodies. Dreaming seems to take us to another place, where we work, run, talk, sometimes even fly. Imagine early humans before they understood things like neurotransmitters, the hippocampus, and the distinction between different regions of the brain. With modern experiments, we now understand much better the mechanism of dreaming and what's going on in the brain. We're not having revealed visions and we're not visiting some other land.

Long ago, as we began to develop language and a spiritual awareness, dreaming must have felt like touching another world, traveling to a sacred place. Consider things like vision quests of the Native Americans, ancient folklore of prophets and seers. The concept of the other world would certainly have been as deeply entrenched into the understanding of the world as was how to hunt and gather food.

In ancient religions, called mythology by today's standard, this other world became the realm of gods, spirits, and the dead. God as He is commonly understood today is a rather recent addition to the wealth of attempts to find a concrete connection to this other world. All ancient cultures had some form of explanation for where dreams, visions, and the mysterious forces of the world come from. One might argue that they were all trying to understand God in their own way, and that only now through the teachings of Christ do we understand what's really going on.

However, it is my belief that if one looks at this critically, and not through the veil of a dogmatic, insistent faith, it is clear that we continually redefine this mysterious and unknown other world that we visit every night and that the explanations naturally become a part of the moral code by which people live. For some cultures, it was just fine to kill virgins, because that's what God wanted. Others found glory in death in Valhalla, where the spirits of valiant warriors dwell.

To be complete, a Truth must be consistent with all input, and not only the input that is convenient. Christianity, therefore, must have within it some explanation for the differences between all the various religions of the world, and I don't mean a blanket statement that they're simply all wrong. This is a difficult task considering the Bible was written at a time when cultures like the Maya, the aborigines of Australia, the tribes of Africa, were not known to exist. This isn't to say that one can't find such an explanation somewhere in the Bible, but that the explanation will necessarily be forced into generalities and hand waving, because the Mayan religion, for example, is not mentioned explicitly in the Bible. It makes much more sense to me to view Christianity simply as the modern, prevalent mythology which is appropriate for this world the same way that the Greek gods were appropriate for that world.

But I've strayed from the point. Through all known history, the concept of the mind as being separate from the body has been deeply entrenched within the religious view. Christianity is yet another interpretation of this. We call it the soul, and Jesus talks of this a great deal in the Gospels, saying things like, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." He also talks of the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of the Father.

And so, in Christianity, as in all other religions in other times and other places, the spirit as separate from the body and connected to the other world and God is a central, seemingly self evident, assumption.

Thus your question: what happens when you die? In other words, what happens to your spirit when you die, which makes sense only with the assumption that mind and body are separate. The answer is simple. Whatever happens to worms, beetles, mice, cats, dogs, and elephants also happens to us. When we die, our brains become oxygen starved, we feel a sense of euphoria, hallucinate for a bit, get tunnel vision, and then whatever was special about us, our memories, our hopes, simple stop as the cells of the brain slowly shut down. One might just as well ask, where does the information go when it's erased.

The existence of the other world, the spirit world, makes all sorts of concepts plausible: angles, devils, ghosts, psychic ability, reincarnation, Hell, Heaven, God. This spirit world is so deeply a part of the religious, spiritual experience that it seems ridiculous to question it, because if that goes, what else is there? If there is no God, no Heaven, what point is there to living?

This is the question that each of us must face and answer one way or the other. The fact that it's even possible to conceive of such an empty, godless, secular world must boggle the mind of some Christians. The fact that I claim to do this and yet still hold a reverence for a spiritual, yet secular, soul must seem doubly confusing, which would, of course, lead one to assume that I'm completely off base and totally confused.

What works for me is a spiritual understanding that is consistent with all the facts, medical, historical, philosophical, and still is mystical and profound. I know this must seem contradictory and new-agey, but we are spiritual beings, and the soul, whether defined as the part of God that is part of us, or as an anomaly of evolution, is real and profound and plays an integral part in what humans are and how we live.

I hope this helps you understand a little more about why I wrote the article as I did. If you still have more questions, please ask, but if your aim is to convince me, or save me, please understand that my beliefs are as sacred and as fulfilling to me as yours are for you. Also, at the risk of offending, I must ask that you please understand that I find the practice of trying to force one's culturally biased mythology on other people to be one of the most repugnant ideas that has ever come out of the practice of religion.

Accordingly, my aim has been to explain, not to convince. I know I tend to be rather verbose in my explanations. Thank you for indulging me to the end.

:^Dan

Subject: Who is Christ?

Hello again, Derek

I've been thinking about our communications. It seems that there might be many other people interested in this sort of exchange, and I would invite you to consider the possibility of my incorporating our exchanges into a future edition of The Arrenkyle Papers.

There were two questions in your last request. First, who (and what) is Jesus Christ? You also mentioned an interest in how I came to be where I am. I'll begin with the second, because that will set the context for the first. I'm afraid this may be rather long and autobiographical, but I think it will be the best way to explain.

There were some specific stages through which I went to attain the understanding I now have.

At stage one, I was going to church with my family rather regularly. The church we attended was on the other side of town, and was the same church my mother had attended as a child and had been married in. I remember that as time went by, mother and I attended while my brother and father often did not. I remember expending some of the prayer time trying to put in a good word for my brother. Over time, even our attendance waned as my brother and I entered high school. I was not baptized, either at birth or later.

In high school, particularly science class, I began to learn about the world, about how science is done, why a scientific methodology is an important tool for trying to discover the truth, and why so much credibility could be granted to the scientific explanations of the world at large. During this time I also began reading a lot of science fiction, particularly of Robert Heinlein. In his worlds, intelligence, truth, analytical abilities, and applied science were always held in high regard. Thus, with my young inquisitive mind, at age 16, I wrote in one of my first journals, "I feel that I have a vague understanding of the universe." I went on to discuss the two alternatives of an infinite universe, or a finite universe. This was about the time I read a translation of an explanation of the special and general theories of relativity written by Albert Einstein.

During this time I still felt, as did Einstein, that "God doesn't play dice with the universe." He was referring, of course, to some of the conclusions of quantum mechanics by men such as Erwin Shrodinger and Werner Heisenberg. I just thought he meant that it couldn't have happened by accident.

Thus the next stage which might be called the reconciliation, wherein I tried to find an understanding that was consistent with both the truth of God that made intrinsic sense to me and with the world as revealed through consistently repeatable experimentation. A couple years later, I wrote, "In the beginning, God created the formulas. Corollary: God created evolution. The missing link could be the addition of a soul. Corollary: if it weren't for God, human kind could never have passed beyond the animal stage."

It seemed to me in this stage that the truths we could uncover about the natural world need not discount completely God, His powers, Heaven, or salvation. To create the world need not mean, as once understood, building things the way we do, but might mean a subtler, more profound means, such as devising the formulas by which worlds make themselves.

This is the view that I expect most modern, rationally minded Christians hold. We are gaining an understanding of the world and becoming acquainted with things like planetary orbits, heliocentricity, cells, genes, chemicals, radioactivity, electricity. If anything, that such things are even possible seems to validate, rather than disprove the existence of a grand architect. After all, if we make things, who or what made the things from which we make things?

It was about this time that I wrote a short piece of fiction titled "A conversation with God," which explains the soul as a part of God. "A soul is a unit which can experience life in the manner that I have been explaining. Every soul is directly a part of me. In fact, hardly any of me exists that is not a soul." "You mean, I'm you?" "Oh, no no. You're you. ... You are part of me meaning you are a part of this huge group of souls, yet you are uniquely individual." Much of the story dealt with explaining how the physical world was only a subset of the entire reality, and so, of course, all the physical laws made sense within that context. We could understand the soul's true nature no more than "a flat earther could see up."

However, as time went on, and the prevalent Christian perspective continued to deny, rather than accept things such as evolution, the age of the earth, and its means of creation, I entered a stage that might be called science versus religion.

Thus my first serious essay on the subject, titled Religion & God, written at age 23, examined the validity of the two alternative means by which we attempt to understand the world. I wrote, "I can not accept the existence of God simply because hundreds of thousands of others do. ... If you say you felt God, fine. Maybe you did. Maybe you felt something and said, 'That must have been God.' I can not say which is correct. I can only say that it is absolutely not evidence of God for anyone who did not personally have such and experience, even if this feeling is apparently shared by millions."

Remember, I was analyzing these issues critically, not from a pre-conceived bias. I was trying to understand how and why people could ignore science and accept religion in its place, rather than seeking a whole, unbroken understanding that could encompass both the physical world as it reveals itself to us, and the less tangible, spiritual side of us. Again, from the essay, "If God is reality, then let him be questioned and tested, for if He is real, he will endure all investigation. ... But where religions are based on ancient philosophies, various interpretations, and faith, science is based on measurable, repeatable, experimentation. ... How can so many people listen to the radio, use computers, take medicine and watch satellite photos of our planet and still ignore the ability of science to explain the origins of stars, planets and life when it is exactly the same scientific methodology that was used for all the above?" In short, when it comes to accepting either science or religion as the means to the greatest understand of the world, science clearly won.

And yet, there was a missing piece. Trying to understand that piece led to the next stage. The missing piece is: If there is no God, why does everyone feel Him so strongly? If there is no God, then what is it they are feeling? Again, I continued to look for a holistic understanding, one which could accept the fact that we are both animals, in the evolution sense, and spirit, in the sense that we also are apart from animals in more than physical ways.

I began an even deeper investigation into religions from around the world. I read the Tao Te Ching, a bit of Buddhism, and read more of the Bible than I ever had before. I wasn't looking for "The Truth" in any one of these works. Rather, I was trying to understand the various ways that the soul, whatever it is that separates us from animals, has been interpreted and understood through time. I found a constant thread running through all ideas of enlightenment and the religious experience, and I couldn't help but wonder why, instead of acknowledging other religions as the various faces of God, Christians seem to view Buddhism, Taoism, and other religions as the works of the devil to stray souls from salvation through Christ.

At age 27, I applied what I had gathered and wrote the beginnings of a holistic approach to understanding the soul of man, one that made room for both the obvious science of the world and the profound experience that is God. This essay was titled "Crossroads" meaning the intersection between science and religion. In a sense, I was trying again to reunite science and religion. However, there was a critical difference this time. Rather than trying to understand religion as understood by the religious and reconcile that world view with science (a difficult task because of the inherent contradictions between them), I instead focused on an understanding of religion from a historical, sociological perspective, and attempted to present a philosophy that could grant a perspective of the profound, personal importance of God in our lives without being in conflict with the scientific world.

This begins a stage that might be called secular spiritualism, or as I called it, meta-religion. From Crossroads: "Religion is an understanding of the world and our place in it. Meta-religion is an understanding of religion itself, why we humans seem to need it and what it can do for us in our search for truth."

The crossroads is presented as a series of four lessons: The nature of truth examines how, because of the physical nature of how the brain is wired, humans are constrained to viewing the world in a limited way, and the truths which guide our lives are a combination of external teachings and internal processing. Thus cultures grow and various truths unfold over the years. The validity of any particular cultural, or even personal, truth can only be examined within the context of one's own understanding. Because of the limitations of both our physical senses and the way that our brain works, we have a perception of the world and label that Truth.

The second lesson was called the religious fallacy, which describes this difference between these two realities, those being the grand, unattainable mega-truth, and the piece of it each human is able to perceive. (By this I mean nothing particularly profound. My reality is lacking in the subtleties of Chinese culture, just as a young Chinese man's understanding of America will be different than mine. Or, even more plainly, your reality is different than mine, simply because you don't know what my basement looks like.) The religious fallacy, specifically, is mistaking the mythical images of a religion as actual fact, rather than as metaphor. In this chapter, I describe the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ as a powerful, mythic idea. It seems no more strange to me that Christians believe Christ was killed, resurrected, and then ascended to heaven, than that the ancient Greeks believed that Zeus really did live on Mount Olympus. The only difference is time, place, and culture.

The third lesson was the crossroads and personal transformation. Here I describe specifically how the mythic image of Christ on the Cross, or Buddha under the lotus tree, and even such modern ideas as Scientology, are all focused to give us the ability to control our lives in such a way as to enable civilization. There seems to be an eternal struggle between good and bad, and in all religions, this manifests itself one way or another as a struggle between the animal body and the spiritual mind. In Christianity, we are born out of a life of flesh and sin and into a life of soul through the ritual of baptism, which is a metaphor for the physical death of Christ and his ascension in spirit.

The fourth lesson was called the reality lens. This explains that, not only is one's perception of reality limited by experience and reflection, it can also be changed by others and by ourselves. This is done by repeated, concentrated focus. With enough reinforcement, we, literally, can believe anything. In basic training, the drill sergeant is re-imprinted as the mother image through excessive physical and emotional strain. In prayer, we attach deep emotional channels with the image of God, and thus God becomes more and more real to us. With enough focus, and I'm not kidding, one could believe that the ocean itself is the one and only God. In other words, be careful what you wish for.

Which, finally, brings me to where I am today, at 31, of asking: now that we know this, what can be done with it? One might simply go on believing that the blood of Jesus Christ washes away sin, that other people who think differently are victories for the devil, and that God said it, I believe it, that settles it. Christianity does have deeply strong, mythical images, and has been honed over hundreds of years to be not only an explanation of the unknown, but an effective foundation for a large, civilized culture. It would probably be just fine if we could all relax and have faith. However, because of the disparity between religion as mythology and religion as fact, and the insistence of many Christians to focus so strongly on the latter, many people are left with a dwindling faith in the Church, but with no alternative explanations. Last month's essay was in response to the question: can we find a way to acknowledge the soulfulness of man, without having to drag along the trappings of a belief that seems as relevant as stories of the Greek and Roman gods of yesteryear.

And now I can answer (finally :-) your first question, who is Jesus Christ.

It seems to me that there are two Christs, just as there are two Ceasers, or two George Washingtons, or two of any historical figure. There no doubt was a man (whose name in all likelihood was not Jesus Christ, which is more a title than name) who traveled, spoke, taught, and baptized people. From what I have read (and this is without reading as deeply as I would like on the matter as of yet) he and John the Baptist, and some other of his contemporaries, were from a brotherhood, a monastery of some kind. There was a particular and specific point to his teachings. It seems to me that when he said, "I and the Father are one," he was not professing to be the one God, come to Earth as man, but meant it in the same way he might have said, "You and the Father are one."

One thing I find particularly ironic about the gospels of Jesus are the parables and how they are commonly understood today. In Matthew 13:24, for example, Jesus says, "The Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field..." It appears that parables told BY Jesus are understood to be stories, yet parables told ABOUT Jesus are expected to be taken factually, rather than metaphorically. For example, in John, Chapter 9, Jesus puts clay on the eyes of a blind man, and then that man sees. In verse 39, Jesus says "For judgment I have come into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may be made blind."

To me, this is so obviously a parable about Christ, and not a description of factual events. At what point did the writings that became the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament change from being factual, historical descriptions, and switch into fables about the teacher himself? This goes deeply into trying to understand the minds of the scribes and prophets who recorded the tales. In fact, the distinction between historical accounts and fables may be a distinction invented rather recently by our modern mind. Back then, stories about people traveled by mouth mostly. It may have been very soon after the time of Jesus that the second, mythical, Jesus emerged through the telling and retelling of the stories about Jesus.

It is very likely that a man was tortured and put on the cross, but imagine how the story of that event would travel through those ancient times. Knowing what we know today about how urban legends spread, and understanding that they didn't have nearly as many people who could read and write, and knowing that their world was still filled with mystery and the inspiring, magical things that Jesus was teaching, it's easy to understand how, when writing about Christ in the gospels, the stories told by Jesus, and the stories told about Jesus, naturally grew into the writings that became the New Testament.

But the modern understanding of Jesus comes not so much from Jesus himself, or even the stories about Jesus, but from centuries of interpretation and redefinition of Christianity through the Roman Catholic church, which much later added concepts such as the Trinity, Hell as Fire, Christmas as the time of the birth of Jesus, and Easter as the time of his ascension. In the latter two examples, the winter solstice and the vernal equinox were celebrated by the pagan religions of druids and such, which is why we still decorate Easter eggs and put up evergreen trees. It must feel to many that these secular trappings of the holidays seem always to encroach upon the religious times, when exactly the opposite is true.

To close on the explanation of my humble perspective on Christ, I must explain how this beautiful and profound image of aspiring to rise to a soulful life seems to have been twisted in to the sublimely ridiculous.

It has to do with the perspective that there is one God, there is one Savior, there is one purpose for our lives, and this tiny planet is the one critical point in the universe upon which all of creation and meaning rests. Granted, I may be misunderstanding the mind of the average Christian, but it seems to be a common belief that when God created the heavens and the Earth, he happened to create the other hundreds of billions of Galaxies only as a backdrop so that two thousand years ago on the third planet from one of the hundreds of billion stars in this particular galaxy, a man could be murdered so that the fate of all the souls of forever could be decided.

One must either ignore the other stars and galaxies, and see them only as lights in the firmament that mean nothing, or one must expand the understanding of God, his plans and the meaning of souls to allow for such things as other saviors in other times on other planets, but such an understanding, by definition, is not Christianity, which teaches that at some time in the future, based on the struggles between good and evil played out on this tiny planet, time will come to an end.

Therefore for me, salvation through Jesus is not a tangible, measurable thing with profound supernatural consequences, but a lesson to be learned about living and loving and being.

I would rather think that, "Heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field."

Derek, you have been more than patient and kind to allow me to share my mind with you like this. I hope you find in here something like what you're looking for.

If you feel compelled, I would like to hear about your travels through the spirit world, so to speak. What does it mean to you that Jesus is your savior? What questions did you have to ask and then answer to find yourself were you are? I think the juxtaposition of the two would make an interesting offering for other readers, that is if you feel comfortable with the idea of sharing your personal thoughts with the world.

Be well.

:^Dan

Subject: Creationism as the modern faith

Greetings, Derek

I'm sorry to have given the impression that I'm still searching for a type of salvation. That was not my intent. Rather, I am concerned with how we as a society can answer the question: now that there's no God, what do we do now? which seems to me a quite different thing.

Anyway, on the topic of scientific evidence for or against God and Creationism, we begin to enter into the typical God/no-God dialog, which after all these years tends to bore me to tears.

You say you have thought about this a great deal and that you have gone through stages, but it seems to me that you began not with a question mark or an open mind, but with an already deep acceptance of the existence of God. Your search begins with the assumption that there is a God and that he will send you to Hell, and so you scrambled to figure out how to placate Him, which is exactly what that image is supposed to trigger you to do, of course.

With all due respect, Derek, until you are able to throw God out with the bath water, you will always be seeing the world pretty much as you did when you were eight years old. You suggest that the idea of Salvation came to you without direct human communication, but do you really think that if you were born in a small tribal village in the heart of Africa that the same image would have come to you, or that you would have been so worried about being cast into Hell in the first place?

But these are questions I'm sure you have asked yourself.

The dance between science and religion is a convenient mask. It allows us all to encamp behind evolution and creationism as if we were part of some cosmic beer commercial. It's not that simple. It's not this or that, right or wrong, up or down. The world is a fuzzy, ugly, chaotic mess, and we try to impose some sort of order on top of this and call it reality, whether that order takes the form of God or the Atom. It's all a level of indirection. It's very much like blind men arguing over the parts of the elephant. Science isn't THE answer, nor is anything else really, so to debate it as if the outcome can be decided this way or that is pointless. What we can do is try to understand why people believe as they do, why something like creationism exists, and what does it mean that it is in conflict with other views.

Let me ask this: How many angles can dance on the head of a pin? This has no more or less significance or meaning than asking "was it seven 24 hour days, or were the days millions of years long." Both indicate that there is some value in trying to juxtapose science and religion and try to make any sense of them together, which is a mistake right out of the box.

Creationism is angles dancing on pins.

Refusing to accept the origins of man will some day be as silly as insisting that the world is flat, the sun is really Apollo's chariot, or that dunking witches tells you something you didn't already want to know.

Creationism was born as a backlash against the learnings of the world that reduced man from the divine image of God to just another animal. No one started by looking at the Grand Canyon and saying, it must have happened in a few hours, or the strata of sedimentary rock and declaring that it just happened to have been made that way. Maybe the cave men did, but we can excuse that; they didn't know any better.

Science begins with a declaration of ignorance. Creationism begins with God. Until the creation advocates are willing to put God on the line and say, Hmmm, maybe God didn't make it, then they are all just like that little boy trying to dodge Hell. In other words, if you're looking for an answer, the first step is not to declare the result. I might as well declare that 3+3 is 11, then figure out how to invent base 5 and pretend that I'm still using both hands.

Here are the facts that are usually in conflict with the Christian point of view.

The world is billions of years old.

Life began in the oceans and has been in a constant state of change ever since.

Man is an animal.

That's basically it. Others are derivative from these basic ones. In fact, all dispute grows from the final one, Man is an animal.

Notice that there's no argument over the techniques to create a thermo nuclear reaction, or to create buckeyballs, or to build airplanes and heart lung machines. There's no Christian attempt to find alternate, biblical explanations for how to launch satellites into orbit, how to create an encoding scheme for high definition television, or how to synthesize artificial insulin. You won't find any discussion on alt.religion about trying to discredit the invention of the x-ray machine, or the MRI scanner, or techniques of gene therapy in favor of ones that are more in line with teachings of the Bible. No one seems to have trouble reading the chemical composition of distant stars using a stellar spectrogram or measuring the speed of light, or computing planetary orbital trajectories. We look high and low at every aspect of the world, and this one point, to the almost complete exclusion of all the others, has dictated the entire spectrum of this debate for the past one hundred and thirty years.

The problem isn't even a scientific one. The old monk and his peas, dog breeders, and then Crick and Watson, have all well established the mechanisms of genetics. The fact that we are building on our understanding of DNA today to fix broken genes and replace missing ones demonstrates that it works.

The problem comes not from accepting that natural selection, which is like selective breeding but takes longer, can shape a species through time. After all, how else can you start with a wolf and end up with a basset hound? The problem today is the same as it was when "The Descent of Man" was first published: Man is no longer divine, but just another beast.

It is because of this notion, unacceptable to Christians, that all of the alternative explanations have to be invented. Creationism as it is understood today is an infant science whose roots go back somewhere into the last century. All other science has quite a head start, forming an almost unbroken chain of discovery and refinement for the past thousand years, and a somewhat disjointed chain back several thousand years, starting with the mastery of man-made fire.

All that history and invention and discovery did not have as it's goal to lie to us about God. It happened because this is what you see when you look at the world.

Creationism is based on reaction, finding alternate explanations to the ones already discovered through trial and error and experimentation. Those alternate explanations would not be at all necessary if they did not impact on the mythical image of man as the image of God. It has its foundations in faith, not in science, and that is why it must be examined very carefully. The percentage of non-Christian creationists is no doubt quite low.

Eventually, whining about the inaccuracies of carbon radioactive dating, or twisting the interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics will give way to an increasing acceptance of genetics, especially when we're all eating manually evolved carrots and living manually evolved, disease free lives, and genetic therapy is as common as surgery.

If one's goal is to know the world, he must begin by declaring ignorance, wiping the slate clean, and seeing the whole world. If one's goal is simply to dodge Hell, then pick a religion, any will do, and believe as hard as you can, but those are not the same thing.

None of this, by the way, really has much to say about the proof or disproof of God. It does, however, demonstrate that science should be a pursuit to understand the world around us while religion helps us understand the world inside us, and that a sloppy mixing of the two only causes more trouble than it solves.

And where do I find meaning and purpose to keep me from despair? The world isn't here to make me feel better. The truth is the truth, whether it makes me happy or not. I find joy in the same things you do, in family, friends, and knowing that after I'm gone, some part of me will remain, even if it's only these silly words in alta-vista's inverted index files.

Thank you for allowing me to post our conversation as an article on the web. I will prepare them for the July issue. If you have some final closing words for the world, let me know.

Good luck and happiness, Derek. I wish you peace with your God, a long happy life, sunny days when you're golfing and rainy days to keep them green.

:^D

* * *

And so it goes on. I want to thank Derek Kurth for not only allowing me to share my beliefs with him, but also for allowing me to share his with you. Even though I don't think we really covered any new ground here, and no doubt everything either of us said has been said before and will be said again countless times, I hope someone has gained by our exchange.

A few final words to the readers.

The often quoted second law of thermodynamics does not simply state that everything is tending toward disorder. It is a specific statement about energy transfer in particular situations. It deals with determining which processes in nature are reversible and which are irreversible. For example, if you set a glass of cold water next to a glass of hot water, their temperatures will approach each other and not get farther apart. My college Physics textbook describes the second law as follows: "When an isolated system undergoes a change, the disorder in the system increases." If entropy always increased everywhere, no chemical reactions of any kind could ever take place. Chemical reactions occur when an external force such as a catalyst or energy is applied. Cooking food, for example. In other words, if you disolve salt in water, you can't get the salt out just by sitting around and waiting -- that's the irreversible process -- but if you apply heat, you can boil the water away and get the salt back. If the Creationist interpretation were true, the salt would be forever gone. The Earth is also not an isolated system. The energy from the Sun is the ultimate fuel which drives the chemical reactions which enable life. You can also consider the solar system to be an isolated system. In that context, the entrpy of the solar system is increasing because the nuclear reactions of the sun are also irreversible processes, meaning the sun will eventually use up its fuel, nova, and go dark and not get brighter and brighter. Yet the sun isn't an isolated system. It was born out of gravitationaly energy as a bunch of gas and carbon atoms smashed into each other, fueled by the death of other stars and, ultimately, the big gravity well in the center of the galaxy. The universe, as a whole, as one really big isolated system, will indeed see a net increase in entropy. Now, if you can trace that all the way back to the beginning, there's a Nobel Prize and a place in history waiting for you. In other words, entropy as it is generally understood relates only to isolated systems, not everything everywhere. When you shake the pan, all kinds of neat things can happen.

Still, I believe we will benefit from the skepticism and challenges from Creationists because, if nothing else, they force us to fill up all the holes.

And why don't I kill what I hate, take what I like, and live without morals? One could just as easily ask why don't Christians kill, hate, and sin, knowing that they're already saved, and that question would be just as pointless as the first. If we can't do better than to imagine those with opinions different than ours to be inches away from murder and rage, then we have no business even attempting a dialog. It's simply that I don't want to kill or hurt. I would be more afraid of a man who says, "Gee, I'd really like to kill and hurt you, but God will punish me."

These issues are deeply rooted within all of us, and, as these messages indicate, they define our perception of who we are. When one's very soul is threatened by a changing world, and all the modern world can do is leave us with, as Karen Armstrong puts it, a "God Shaped Hole" in our lives, then we are left with few choices. We can ignore or refute the world as it presents itself to us, revise our religious beliefs to incorporate the new data, such as defining the Big Bang as the moment of divine creation, or find something completely new like crystals, pyramid power, or the Psychic Friends network. Or, we can try to discover a new way of thinking about why we invented God in the first place.

Thus I forward Derek's final question to all of you. This is the core of the spiritual challenge that so many are facing today: If not God, then what? Or, as it sounds to my ears, how can we live without our fairy tales and bedtime stories? If living without this particular white bearded, angry old man, who Christians insist made the whole universe just for them, means that we're all going to take to the streets and strangle one another, then please, go believe. Just don't burn me at the stake for heresy. We've had enough of that. I think Derek called it killing what you hate.

The irony is that, once you've asked that question, there's no hope of ever finding a decent answer because it is based on the mistaken belief that there must actually be some explanation to all of this. There is no explanation, and until you get that, you're just counting angels on pinheads.

Go ahead and count them, if you must, but if we're going to invent a myth to give us some kind of cultural framework, let us at least pick one that doesn't run screaming from the revelations of the modern world.

:^D