Faith vs Science: Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

    Well, last Saturday night, my women's basketball team got beaten pretty badly in the state play-offs. Strangely enough, I learned something pretty important  that made the trip to Stockton very worthwhile. My recent bedtime reading has been C.S. Lewis's classic Mere Christianity. For most of my life, I've pretty much avoided anything that even remotely smacked of Christian apologetics, but I finally worked up enough curiosity about Lewis's viewpoints to take a crack at it.

    My religious upbringing would make a great Coen Brothers film as it was filled with ne'er-do-wells, crackpots, and outright crooks. I was told at ten years of age that I was probably going to burn in hell forever, and later convinced myself that it was probably going to happen because of the guilt I had over lusting after the Rubenesque attributes of the preacher's daughter, my girlfriend during my high school years. The time I spent attending the Baptist church of my youth gave me a very strong aversion to what some people cynically label church people.

   C. S. Lewis though has a pretty good reputation for someone imbued with a Christian outlook. He lacks the typical "used car salesman" pushiness that I have come to expect from a Baptist variety of a man of the cloth. I spent most of my life tuning out both their insane blather and incessant efforts to notch another soul saved on their shepherd's staff. I never turned my back on Jesus though, just some of the craziest of the  lunatics who claim to be on a first name basis with him as they draped one arm across my shoulder and tried to pilfer my wallet with their other hand.

     I was reading a chapter about Faith when Lewis started talking about the necessity for a fledgling Christian to leave some of the more confusing ideas alone till he or she has walked along the path for awhile. He notes that most of us are not going to be prone to sudden insights like St. Paul and that the best we can do is to trust the process of "growing up". This is especially true, he points out about the argument whether it is 'good actions' or 'faith' that matters most. "The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two into one amazing sentence. The first half is, 'work out your own salvation with fear and trembling'- which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions: but the second half goes on, "'For it is God who worketh within you'- which looks as if God did everything and we nothing."

     Upon reading this, my mind made an instant connection to Iain McGilchrist and his amazing study of the hemispheres of the brain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. In his book, McGilchrist makes the argument that the compared to the right hemisphere, the left brain is more materialistic and hyper-analytical, prone to collecting data and information often even without a purpose. It is also lying and manipulative and  dead set on wresting the ultimate position of power from its  more spiritual and creative right brain counterpart. McGilchrist asserts that the historical periods of humankind's greatest inventiveness and effectiveness have been when society's needs were being managed by the greatest collaboration between the two, in other words, when the Corpus Callosum, a thick bundle of fibers that is vital for enabling both hemispheres to work together, helps the two hemispheres collaborate to create, well, you know, the magic.

     Lewis's words opened the door to a key point of understanding not only of the full import of McGilchrist's argument, but also for understanding one of the Bible's most fundamental messages as well.
The ultimate war between the hemispheres of the brain is in fact the perfect explanation of Lucifer's fall from grace. In attempting to explain the issue of whether it is faith or good works that guarantees salvation, and leaving it as a conundrum that Christians must work out on their on, Lewis's argument enabled me to recognize that Lucifer was driven by the same hubris that materialist science has been driven in its attempts to wrestle the scepter away from a more spiritual consciousness, and much like this Luciferian point of view, science will never be able to sensibly rule or even give meaning to this world on its own.

     The key to understanding this mystery involved is in how the Enlightenment thinkers handled the greatest mystery of them all, which is the concept of infinity. They put infinity in an imaginary box, dug a hole in the bottom of the Vatican basement and poured concrete over it and pushed a large section from the walls of Babylon over the spot. What we need to understand that there is no piece of infinity that, placed upon a slide and then placed under a microscope, would ever would yield up all the mystery of the infinite. I would argue that even a spectacle as large as the Super Bowl is just a diversionary effort to keep the secret, you know, well, secret.

       Secularism has done some great things for humanity, but its zealots have also committed themselves to the keeping of the human race in the dark about the need for left brain materialist thinking to admit that the concept of an all powerful deity can most likely be explained by the humanity's need to grapple with the ideas that are engendered by our efforts to understand what it MEANS to exist in an infinite universe. The powers that be have to understand that such efforts will ultimately expose them as the nonsensical, narcissistic Pharisees that they are. How else can you explain their stupid, self-serving ideas and unceasing efforts to destroy humanity's ability to hope.

       The real message that C. S. Lewis's writing enabled me to understand was that we human beings have many amazing accomplishments to be proud of, but if they are not attached to and/or explained by our existence in the metaxy, or in-between-state, they are really kind of meaningless, and only by viewing them through the prism of an infinite reality can we finally achieve some kind of understanding of our true self.