Science, Religion, and the Human Experience

science, religion, metaphor, and history 113

Cosmos is made out of concepts. Concepts are intellectually and socially

constructed over time by a fusion of personal constructs. A cosmos is a world-

view based inboth/andthinking more thaneither/orthinking: it is synthetic

more than analytic, expansive more than reductionist. It understands by open-

ing out wider and wider, rather than closing down narrower and narrower. The

preference for narrowing-down understanding as opposed to opening-up un-

derstanding is a matter of psychology (the vain, sad, frightened desire to be

certain), and of history.

History of Concepts

The history of concepts is a peculiarly effective way of describing religion and
science. Religion and science are not rigid, eternal ideas. They are concepts
that change through time. Therefore history can explain how science and re-
ligion came to be what they are today. History works differently from either
science or religion. History has its own epistemology, working through events
by narrative, relating how we got from point A to point C by going through
process B.^2 History assumes the reality of persons in the past, including their
thoughts and their feelings: their whole personalities. Some historians today
have become part of the problem by ignoring the meaningful reality of persons
and societies with a cosmos different from their own. No one is a “dead”
anybody. To think so is to misunderstand the nature of time. When is “now”?
As we reflect on our lives back to say, our tenth birthday, did we think at age
10 that we were really in the past and that the real “now” is reading this article
today? Will we think tomorrow that we are at last in the future? On the contrary,
when we were 10 is “now”; when we are reading this is “now”; when we are
dying is “now.” “Now” is an infinitesimal point moving across time, so that all
moments are “now.” It follows that Bach, Confucius, and Galileo are no less
alive than we are today. History is never concerned with the dead past, always
with the living encounter with persons livingnow.
History, properly understood, means opening up minds to understanding
other cultures rather than imposing current assumptions on them. History
takes the worldviews of other cultures seriously, whether in modern Papua,
ancient Babylonia, or traditional Christianity. A worldview—a cosmos—is
based in its society; on the other hand, a society is formed by its worldview.
People’s ideas are more important for the way they speak and even act than
the economic and social structures that support them. Ideasareevents: the
history of concepts takes ideas seriously, as having real consequences.^3 Terms
such as “concept” have a variety of meanings among philosophers, psycholo-
gists, mathematicians, and others. But they do not lack definition. “Definition”
or “range” can best be understood in terms of the way words and concepts
have been used over time. Etymologists have long understood this in terms of