Just to follow up with a final thought on all this.

It has been noted by many scholars of the History of Religions and Mythology that the great texts and arts of religion are meant to function symbolically - as symbols or signs that have deeper meaning and significance than their literal appearance.

I think that much of the dissonance starts when people believe religious symbols and texts as "literal" and base their entire understanding of the world on that. This sort of Fundamentalist view is certain to come into conflict with other faiths and beliefs as well as the tenets of science. 

Science is great at collecting data and in discerning and articulating patterns and structure of what we can observe. It describes what is. It cannot, and maybe never, be able to describe the ultimate "Why" behind all of the structure that we see in the physical universe.

There is also an understantable tendency to answer the "Why" with a "Who", making creation an anthropomorphoic figure with very human attributes.

This is why the Evolution battleground is still raging because of the personal attachment that many feel to a personal God. This personal attachment is lost in things like Quantum mechanics which ironically may have much larger implications for the nature of reality in the universe than the historical origin of a single species called human.

Cheers!
Dave

David Harvey
Conservator
Los Angeles, California

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