Unified Truth

I grew up attending my parents’ church, a suburban denominal offshoot of biblical Christianity, adamantly dedicated to their own unique perspective. That fact alone should provide all the insight you need into my cynicism about Western organized religion.

The Initial Swerve
On June twenty-seventh of 1973, I encountered a fellow whose worldview I simply could not refute and for the first time in my life, my thinking took a dramatic swerve. Despite my rejection of organized religion, I understood and embraced the concept of a Creator and of a perfectly created system which had somehow become skewed, rendering chaos amongst order. (For more on that topic, come back next week.)

Due partially to the radical fracture in my worldview, and in another part to the snide reactions of my friends, and in a third part to the apparent incongruity between “scientific” truth and “spiritual” truth, I adopted the latter and shunned the former.

I came to understand that much of what passed as “science” was nothing more than secular humanism, dedicated like many other religious aberrations, to creating God in their own image, an image which flattered followers and provided them reason to judge outsiders for lack of adherence. Even I could see where that was headed.

I came to believe science and faith were antithetical, not realizing that much of what passes for science is not actual science while much of what passes for faith has nothing to do with genuine faith.

The Rebound Swerve
In 2012, I discovered a book by Eric Metaxas chronicling his “Socrates in the City” gatherings where well-known scientists and leaders from around the world spoke about their views on science and faith. The audio version of the book featured original recordings of the presentations from distinguished and diverse thinkers like Sir John Polkinghorne, Os Guinness, and Francis Collins.

Francis Collins is former head of the original Human Genome project during the Bill Clinton presidency. He’s an accomplished researcher and dynamic speaker who is unapologetic about his combination of faith and science. In fact, he was the first person I ever heard proclaim the synchronicity of spiritual and scientific truth.

In “The Language of God”, Collins’ book about the miracles of life being uncovered through genetic research, he opened my eyes to the fact that Truth cannot negate Truth, and that any incongruity lies solely within our inability to comprehend the bigger picture. Somehow, that understanding gave me permission to dive headlong into a study of the sciences like physics, biology, chemistry, geology, and astronomy — topics that, in my college years, had taken a back seat to my study of beer.

What amazes me most is the hierarchical nature of, well, “nature” — macro systems and micro systems following the same patterns and laws. Perhaps just as mesmerizing is the two-steps-forward-and-one-step-backward dance of human learning throughout the centuries. We seem to make an impressive discovery, then misinterpret it’s meaning, and finally, correctly reinterpret it in a manner that allows us to make the next big discovery. And so goes the dance.

The Big Bang Theory, something that Einstein once called the most elegant theory he’d ever encountered, was first posited back in the 1920’s. Yet, it took almost a century to dominate science. According to that concept which has survived critical hammering by scientists of every caliber, our universe is not infinitely old. Rather, it is a very measurable 13.8 billion years old and has been expanding since its inception at a single point in space and time.

If everything that exists began at one precise point, then someone or something that supersedes our concept of existence had to set that action into motion. The fact that a rational entity set things in motion is further bolstered by the Intelligent Design concept which accounts for the very order and consistency within nature that allow us to observe and learn from repeatable sequences.

If there was a single Author of the Big Bang, implementing a specific design concept, it follows that there is only one fundamental and unified truth driving all of creation — a truth upon which that initial design was based. It’s a truth into which every branch of knowledge is woven like a 3D puzzle wherein every piece’s stability overlaps and depends on every other piece.

Our failure to understand that truth as it applies to every aspect of our existence, accounts for the totality of conflict within individual psyches and between cultures ever since we evolved to the point of self-awareness.

If you disagree, I would be seriously interested to hear why. The essence of learning is the willingness to field all alternative theories and either refute them or modify the original theory to accommodate them. That should apply to our understanding of the Creator as well as the creation. We need outside perspective to correct our intrinsic biases lest our egos fool us into believing we are the source of truth rather than the seekers of truth.

Today, a growing number of thinkers from every field of study are moving towards the concept of a unified truth — a Truth that’s been patiently waiting 13.8 billion years for humanity to unravel it.

Let’s talk.

A meeting of great minds who think alike