Two Cultural Streams

The Dialogue Between Science and Religion

Traditionally, the chief vehicles for carrying and supporting our values and mores have been our religions. One of the chief difficulties we have had with the world about us is that it seems to be seriously materialistic, amoral (or immoral), and directionless. Our religions seem often to be stranded on the sandbars of the cultural flood. Yet, we are not satisfied with the prospect of abandoning our religions to the apparent whims of cultural change.

We live in exciting times. There has never been a time in history when discovery has been so rapid, and when the effects of discovery have had so immediate and profound an effect on our daily lives.

Spirituality emphasizes the immaterial and transcendant. It stretches for the ultimate causes of things, and strives to rise above the demands and distractions of the material world. What is important in human life is rising above and beyond the particular and the animal, and finding communion with whatever is the ultimate reality in the universe, be it God, Universal Mind, or the Great Spirit.

Cosmology

We have come in quite recent time to understand much more about the physical universe than our race ever suspected. This has shaken traditional spiritual views about ourselves and our place in the scheme of things. We know now that the earth is infinitesmally small, and that mankind is a very late phenomenon in cosmic history. Other stars and galaxies lie at infathomable distance from our tiny planet, which spins in vast loneliness.

Evolution

Over the last 150 years, evidence has been growing that the human race appeared in earth’s biological stream as a result of causes and events that are internal to the life process itself. Man emerges not as an entity imposed on creation from the outside, but rather as integrated with the rest of a complex biomass on planet Earth, and sharing the same basic vital processes. Our history stretches back for millions of years, with a surprising album of family portraits.

There is an apparent conflict between spiritual and empirical approaches to an understanding of man and the reality within which he finds himself. History is replete with arguments between two widely divergent camps. Evolution seems threatening to theists, since it seems to provide a materialistic origin for the race of man. PsyQuest grapples with the conviction that there may be different ways of knowing the world, but only one world. We are in the midst of a grand adventure of discovery, with much more yet to learn.