Creationism and the Spirit of Nature - Tikkun Magazine

mersion in their world and history that I haven't yet
done (maybe it was their cultural domination by the
larger bears that played a key role in propelling the
pandas to seek the autonomy provided by a paw that
could grasp), but I couldn't begin to do it without
taking the risk of opening my heart to theirs, or in
other words without trying to understand them. Only
then could I begin to see "the data" in a way that could
reveal its vital meaning.
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The implications of what I am saying here go much
deeper than the debate between evolution and creation-
ism because if we could succeed in freeing knowledge
from the grip of science and affirm the objectivity of
intuitive comprehension as the only route to under-
standing and communicating about the being of things,
we might also begin to transform the way people think
about politics and ethics, about the meaning of their
own lives and the lives of others and ahout what kind
of world we should he trying to create. The success of
the proponents of science in linking knowledge of the
truth with a method requiring that one look "at" things
from a detached and "unbiased" standpoint, while rele-
gating intuitive comprehension to the private realm of
personal belief, has had the effect of introducing doubt
into the soul of the universe and destroying people's
confidence that their own instinctive perceptions and
needs could possibly he the basis for deciding what it
is that everyone wants and needs. The core of the
ideology of science is that you can only know something
if you erase yourself, and this leads precisely to a
society of erased selves in which people experience
each other largely as anonymous strangers without any
common anchorage, passing each other with blank
gazes on the street and purporting (in order to guard
their inaccessibility in the name of privacy) to have no
idea what anyone else feels or thinks. We are so pre-
occupied with being detached observers peering out at
an "outside world" created by others that when a
pollster tries to use scientific methods to determine
public opinion on any given issue, each person nervously
tries to guess what he or she thinks others would say. As
a result, public opinion turns out to be the opinion of
no one, and with everyone feverishly reading the papers
or listening to friends or watching t.v. to try to figure
out what to think, democracy turns out to be mainly
drifts of "rotating otherness" in a world where no one
feels empowered to affirm his or her own existence.
Obviously, this is somewhat of an exaggeration-if
things were really this bad we would have had a nuclear
war by now-but the belief that scientific methods are
"hard" and therefore yield knowledge while intuitive
methods are "soft" and therefore yield only opinions
both expresses and reinforces an underlying feeling that
62 TIKKUN, VOL. 2, No. 5
there can be no objective basis for political or ethical
judgments, that "no one has the right to speak for anyone
else ," and so forth. The denial, implicit in the scientific
method, that one can achieve direct intuitive knowledge
of the "within of things," and the ethical relativism that
springs from it may help to explain the creationists'
insistence that the Bible must be read as literally true
in every respect. Their rigidity may be an example of
what psychoanalysis calls a "reaction-formationn-they
need to believe that the Bible reveals absolute spiritual
truth to the faithful in order to defend themselves
against an underlying insecurity, fostered by centuries
of the dominance of scientific ideology, that they do
actually have the capacity to claim any direct knowledge
of spiritual truth that would reveal in some nonrelative
sense what is good for human beings or how people
ought to live their lives. Of course, it would be absurd
to blame this underlying doubt and "detachment" on
the ideology of science alone-at the deepest level, it
results from our alienation from one another and our
anxiety that if we made ourselves present to each other
with the full openness required to feel certain of our
spiritual commonality, we would be too vulnerable to
rejection, humiliation, and pain. The effects of science
have been not so much to cause our "holding back" as
to reinforce its legitimacy by allowing us to deny that
this kind of intuitive, spiritual certainty is possible.
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vercoming our fear of each other requires
much more than launching an assault on
the scientific method, but I think it would
be an unqualified step in the right direction if we
abandoned the illusion that analytical detachment provides
us with a privileged form of knowledge and
validated the objectivity of what we learn from our
passionate immersion in the life-world into which we
have miraculously been thrown. No one will ever be
able to "prove" the objectivity of intuitive knowledge
by scientific methods because these methods proceed
via an objectification designed to make intuitive feeling
invisible-but it is equally true that the distinctive
vitality that characterizes the immediacy and "pull" of
being alive is accessible to us through the engagement
of intuitive comprehension alone. What establishes the
potential objectivity of intuitive knowledge is neither
the so-called "neutrality" of science nor the blindness
of faith, but the experiential recognition that the passion
and need animating each of us animates all of us; that
we can rely on our own fundamental need for the confirmation
and love of others, for example, as the basis
for knowing with certainty that this need fundamentally
motivates all living things.
The reason that this kind of spiritual knowledge has
political and ethical importance is that unlike scientific