…(1 Corinthians 2:9, KJV)

I’m reading Fundamental Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions, by Huston Smith (HarperCollins 1976).  He purports to examine singular threads of belief woven through all belief systems. His contrasting of science against the belief traditions resonates with me. Smith does not discard science, nor discount belief. Rather, he notes that the musings of scientists themselves concur with those of the mystics, who frequently found religious imagery fatuous.

A few of Smith’s comments:

“As humans beings…we live in a meso-kingdom flanked by a micro-kingdom within and a macro-kingdom without….our senses detect the meso-kingdom only…”

“…our imaginations have nothing to build with save the building blocks our senses provide…”

“In its further reaches the physical universe dons forms and functions we cannot visualize, in imagination any more than with the eyes in our heads. There is no way in which we can image them.”

And he quotes J.B.S. Haldane: “…that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

And David Finklestein: “…we haven’t the capacity to imagine anything crazy enough to stand a chance of being right.”

Perhaps all this resonates because it validates.  I recall my Catholic sister once asking what I believed, when I replied, “I believe that I cannot know.”

I suspect the early philosophers, the christian apologists, and the mystics knew these things intuitively (witness St. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians). I expect they knew the insubstantial imagery created for religions served merely to sustain the masses. I wonder how they’d feel today on seeing that the icons have themselves become the gods and displaced the wonder?

.