eureka.

It's been such a long time since i've read anything that's made me think, Yes. This is it. Eureka. In fact, i'm now wondering if this has ever happened before in the first place. But i had my eureka moment today, and i am bring this to you, in absolute humility, still dazzled by its brilliance.

Thank you so much, John Polkinghorne.

i've always been uncomfortable with attempts to polarise things. The world is a far more complex place, i believe, than can be explained by pigeonholing its various elements into mutually-exclusive categories. That might explain my impatience (barely concealed, i think) with discussions on whether art or science allows more scope for human creativity and intellectual beauty, or on whether science or religion provides a 'better' explanation of human nature and the world we live in. How reductive these discussions are, and how diminished the world as a result of their polarisations.

Unfortunately, i've found little support for my barely-articulated point of view in the little writing that i have encountered. Perhaps i just never knew where to look. Or perhaps our thinkers and writers, in some (possibly subconscious?) attempt to guard their respective academic turfs, have rather blinded themselves to the evidence before them, choosing instead to only see what they want to see instead of the whole truth in all its many-splendoured wonder.

Thankfully, there are exceptions. John Barrow's The Artful Universe Expanded is one of the books that has helped me understand better the relationship between the physical laws of the universe and the human capacity for aesthetic appreciation. And now, i've discovered, or rather, been introduced to, John Polkinghorne's writings on science and religion. This physicist-priest argues, against the current fashion, that any attempts to explain our world from a purely religious or scientific standpoint fail to do justice to the nature of reality. (And yes, shock and horror, the man actually believes that there is such a thing as 'reality'! And yes yes yes, i love and adore him for this.) Instead, he asserts that religion and and science bear a 'consonant relationship' to each other, while at the same time answering different questions about the nature of the universe and our place in it.

For a quick introduction to his thinking, you could do worse than to take a look at his official homepage. In particular, i found his 1990 lecture on 'God's Action in the World' and his 1993 lecture on 'Religion in an Age of Science' particularly illuminating. Here's a quotation from the former that i find intuitively right, though i suppose that in my ignorance i have no rational grounds for believing it:

"God is the all sufficient explanation, the eternal rapture, glimpsed in every Archimedean cry of Eureka."
(Bernard Lonergan)

Eureka. Amen.
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