The Word of God

Stephanie Zastrow got me thinking about the devisiveness of religion in her recent entry where she talked about some of her personal perspective, experiences with religion, and how religion acted as a devisive force in her own life. Even the most devout of us cannot deny that religion, as much faith as you may have in God or some god, is not always Good in the hands of men. But... let's not put all the blame on religion quite yet. In our very own classroom, there is tangible dissension not only between atheists and theists, but also between scientists and literal interpreters. (Allow me a small aside in which to say that science and religion are not at odds. While there are many well known atheist scientists, and also prominent creationists etc. denying science, there are also well known theist scientists, such as Albert Einstein.) My point is in illustrating these conflicts is not to exacerbate anything, which we are handling maturely, but to point out that certainly division occurs over other ideas. Science can be divisive, creating distinct academic camps. Social sciences and more humanity oriented disciplines create academic rifts as well.

So what is my point in all of this? People argue, we all know it. But what do these divisive ideologies have in common? Metaphor. Symbolism. Language. Let me justify my position. The most divisive modern issues are those without clear answers. No one's ever been killed over the sum of two and three. But religion, philosophy, ideas. These things cause our society to be dynamic, and to be violent. People fight for what they believe to prove that it is Right. The article Singing Neanderthals notices that symbolism and metaphor are central to verbal languages. The author observes that the long time stability and static state of Neanderthal society may be indicative of a lack of the benefit of abstract metaphorical thought, which in turn would suggest a lack of verbal language. His continuation of suppose that the Neanderthals formed ugly, hairy 5'2" choirs is definitely interesting, but hardly conclusive. I would venture to guess, however, that many of us (let me know if my guess is completely off the mark, I'd like to know if I'm wrong) found the article compelling and convincing. Why is this? I myself would have liked to believe this fantastic theory. The very article itself is a work of language. The authors cutting skepticism on the "symbolic Neanderthal artifacts" and optimistic and romanticized depictions of frenzied displays of dance and song, and tender caring humming and singing to loved ones, gives us a lovely story to visualize in our heads, and every reason to disbelieve the contrary evidence. Now, I'm not denying the possibility of Singing Neanderthals, but the article was a popularization of a social science already strained to it's limits to have evidence whatsoever, and not conclusive at all! Despite the severely inconclusive evidence presented, the article does not come off as severely inconclusive, but instead, as a reasonably well formed support of a Hmmmming, singing language used by a pre human species. Steven Mithen does not use language to evaluate his evidence, he does that on his own, and then uses language to paint a portrait, to make his idea beautiful, acceptable, to readers, to us, to all who receive the language.

Language could, using identical evidence, spin this article in completely a different direction. Language is incredibly powerful and dangerous in it's ability to distort and create in that way.

Returning to the topic at hand, we've now read four very different articles: the beginning of Genesis, a newspaper article, a casual internet science expose, and a passage from a book. All of these thing talk about the beginning of humanity as we know it, but their language is absolutely different. Sarah Marheine, in her post, illustrated how the language in the bible and the language of science do not necessarily conflict, though they not at all the same. I have heard (and I can't cite this, but I do think it is a good example) that in Orthodox Judaism there is a belief that a)The Torah is the Word of God and is absolutely true, and b) some general belief in rationality and science apparently, amalgamating in c) if there is some apparent conflict between the Word of God and Science, then, in actuality, there is no conflict, it human minds are yet unable to comprehend how they are the same. This is a compensation for this feebleness of language.

So what I'm really getting at is What exactly do you mean? Not to turn this into a philosophy course, but, words all words are metaphors. How do we learn the color red? A red chair, a red book, a red sweater. Our collective knowledge of all these experience we roll together into an abstract concept of red, but no one will have seen exactly the same things, and so no one will have the same red metaphor. Religion, based on archaic and translated texts, is especially susceptible to these little language spins created by us imperfect humans, and even our own beliefs and convictions will be shallow if we don't explore the meanings and origins of the words in which we form them.