When Explanation Meets Mystery

This is a post by Gordon Atkinson, author of one of my favorite blogs, Real Live Preacher. I resonate deeply with his hopeful attempts to draw meaning from the ongoing and creative tension between scientific explanation, on one hand, and what he calls "dark mystery," on the other. Along a similar line of thought, I've recently been reading the late psychologist Carl Jung's book Man and His Symbols which explores this tension throughout the collective human experience- affirming the human impulses to worship and explore while also critiquing materialistic movements that seek dismiss or devalue humanity's perpetual obsession with the unknown.

In January 2008, Atkinson wrote an essay for The Christian Century magazine exploring this theme. The essay was entitled "Brother Scientist."

"Life has always been most interesting for me at the rolling boundary between scientific explanation and dark mystery. Science is always moving forward, rolling up more data and triumphantly explaining old mysteries. At times it seems as though the ancient world of myth and dream has turned tail and fled. Not so. For every acre of forest that science paves over, myth and legend giggle and reveal ten more acres of untamed wilderness behind them. As our ability to understand the universe grows, so does our capacity for looking outward and upward and seeing all that we do not know. There is more mystery to explore now than ever before in the history of humanity.

Some people see the boundary between mystery and science as a battleground with barbed wire and trenches on either side. But I think that the place where our searching and empirical minds meet the mysteries of the world is the realm of worship and poetry. Before Adam and Eve, the world was chaos, like a vast unconscious mind with no boundaries and no definitions. The world itself hasn't changed, but our human perspective is continually solving mysteries and creating new ones as fast as we can.

Our love of answers has always been nicely balanced against our penchant for awe and worship. Reality is both a thing to be conquered and also something to be worshiped. This is the human way. I wonder when it was that science and religion stopped seeing each other as ancient twins of the human mind and started seeing each other as competitors.

While I and others like me slog it out in the worshiping world of mystery, brother scientist is observing, collating and solving mysteries as fast as he can. I don't want him to stop. I like the way he slays ancient gods. What I want is for us to embrace each other and walk though life together. He can solve old mysteries and I can celebrate the new ones."