How Would A Person Of Sempiternal Harmony
View The Laws Of God?
This essay reviews a way of reconciling the apparent differences between divine and scientific laws. It will do this by looking at a possible demarcation point in traditional religious understanding and laws of physics, chemistry, mathematics and other generally accepted laws of science. The essay will then pose a way of thinking about both religious and scientific understanding that allows spiritual and material consciousness to coexist to broaden an individual’s understanding of the universe. Through this understanding one can realize the old Hindu assertion that a divine nature exists in everything.*
It is natural for thoughtful people of faith to wonder why ideas like “intelligent creation,” and “natural selection” might seem mutually excludable concepts. Yet, when one considers that most of the main stream scriptures were written well before the birth of Darwin and that our most primal ancestors had the mental capacity of modern people, complete with the most sophisticated ability to question, it seems quite natural for the writers of religious thought to offer explanations to the questions of the time. The concept of the atom, gravity, the universe and countless other modern elements of the known world, for people of even the modest education today, were unheard of by the most learned person of antiquity. Religious understanding has always attempted to explain the un-explainable. These explanations were metaphorical while becoming the laws of God. As natural discoveries were coming to consciousness, religion attempted to maintain stability. The motivations for this may be many but the result is a split which opened between science and religion.
By accepting the concept of an Omnipotent, Omniscient Divine Power, whom we will refer to for convenience as God, a Sempiternal Harmonist would except the idea that some natural event occurred, near the point commonly referred to as the beginning of our ability to conceive of it (our conception of creation), which was the result of God’s revelation of self to the dimension in which our senses are attuned. Thus, God created our sensory, three dimensional, knowable universe by factoring an infinite unknowable dimension. One result of this factoring is a group of beings capable of sensory input for the awareness of their environment. The process of these observations has resulted in a group of rational observations which are now called, “laws of science.” For the Sempiternal Harmonist, laws of science are divine laws. For the pure scientist or atheist scientific principals end the discussion of the nature of God, while the Sempiternal Harmonist will remain open to answers posed through questions of spirituality. Examples of these kinds of questions could include, “Do I have a soul or spirit,” or “If I have an inner being will it live on after my body is through?” Other questions might ask, ”is there a proper way to live life,” “What is the role of morality in modern society,” or “If I fail to live a morel life will my ‘after life’ state of being be degraded in some way?” All of these kinds of questions are not answerable by pure scientific method. Yet, through contemplation, speculation, meditation, and openness to communication to a collective unconscious through awareness of dreams, feelings, and intuitions one might come to know the answers to the spiritual questions. The study of scriptures from all religious traditions will also play a vital role in understanding more about the multidimensional elements of our universe and us, which we might refer to as soul, or spirit. The primus is that good, honest, well meaning individuals of antiquity wrote down there understanding of relationships, morality and spirit creating a historical record of their knowledge of answers to religious questions.
As a person reads and understands the world scriptures, it is possible to realize that there are many commonalities between the different religious traditions. There are so many, in fact, that through the open minded method of the Sempiternal Harmonist, a unified body of divine truth can emerge in the individual consciousness. This process of coming to knowledge might be similar to that of the Gnostics just after the manifestation of Christ but on a much broader scale. This greater level of understanding is aided today through communication and transportation, not to mention the increased opportunities to study multiple religious ideas at the university level.
For the Sempiternal Harmonist laws of science are divine laws in addition to the scriptural laws. The reconciliation of differences between the two bodies of understanding is Sempiternal Harmony. The Divine Universal, Infinite Power (God) caused the universe to exist. The laws of physics, chemistry, mathematics, and other disciplines are our limited, human way of understanding the mysteries of God. Religious laws of God are metaphorical, yet real understanding prior to the coming of knowledge that deepens our understanding of Divine Law. The key to peaceful coexistence is open minded reconciliation of the two methods.
* Also see Tao Te Ching 21,(Taoism); Romans 1.19-20,(Christian); Nahjul Balagha, Sermon 54, (Islam); Perl of Great Price 6.63, (The Church of Jeasus Christ of Latter-day Saints); Rig Veda 6.47.18,(Hinduism)