158 cosmos
view of the octogenarian Carl Gustav Jung by John Freeman of the BBC. The
dialogue between them is instructive:^46
freeman When you were young did you go to church?
jung Oh yes! We all went to church.
freeman And did you believe in God?
jung Oh yes! We all believed.
And then as if to ensnare Jung, Freeman asked: “Now, do you believe?”
Jung replied: “Now? Difficult to answer. Now...Iknow.”
Jung, who claimed to be scientific in his work, did not think of his knowl-
edge of God as objective. In his unusual life, the world of science and the
symbolic world were conjoined.
As regards religion and truth we must make a difference between rela-
tionality and relativism if we want to avoid the appearance of the superiority
of one religion over another. In this regard the following words of Raimundo
Pannikar are instructive:^47
Truth is constituted by the total relationship of things, because
things are insofar as they are in relation to one another. But this re-
lation is not a private relation between a subject and an object. It is
a universal relationship so that it is not for any private individual or
group to exhaust any relationship. Truth is relational, thus relational
to me. But never private.Conclusion
I have held up the ideal of the complementarity of science and religion. Now
I want to suggest that the highest ideal is reached when scientific understand-
ing and religious truth are found in the same person. While the example we
think of most readily is Einstein, there is a story about Robert Oppenheimer
that well illustrates what I have in mind. It tells how at the test site of the first
atomic bomb he saw the spiritual significance of this triumph of physics. At
the experimental area called “Death Tract” (Jornado del Muerto) the observers
of the first blast did not know what to expect. Robert Jungk tells us that
“Oppenheimer oscillated between fears that the experiment might fail and
fears that it would succeed.”^48 Jungk then proceeds to describe the actual mo-
ment:^49
People were transformed with fright at the power of the explosion.
Oppenheimer was clinging to one of the uprights in the control
room. A passage from the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred epic of the
Hindus, flashed into his mind: