There is a style of literature, in its modern form dating from about the early twentieth century, called magic realism, in which fantastical elements exist side-by-side with "realistic" elements, with no warning or comment by the author (or the characters!) to identify what is fantastic or "real." I say that this is the "modern" form of magic realism, because in the past, many of the greatest works of literature, from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey to Dante's Divine Comedy were written this way. Gods or spirits or saints appear to characters, who though they might be terrified or astonished, interact with them as if they were as real as any other creature. A character enters into the other world as if he were entering into another town or country in the "real" world. This is not like conventional science or fantasy fiction, where there are labels all over the cover and in the text making sure you know what it is (although many modern science fiction/fantasy writers make use of "magical realist" techniques).

I believe that the Bible and other holy texts are also examples of pre-modern "magical realism." The ancient commentators on the Bible realized that many things in the Book were not to be taken completely literally, but allegorically. Elements which a modern rational mind would consider totally fantastic exist side-by-side in the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, with more or less "realistic" narrative about kings and prophets and battles.

I also believe (and this is much more speculative) that the people of those days, along with the people who created the holy texts, lived in a much more "magically-realistic" world than we do. They regarded dreams, visions, or peculiar happenings as part of a "real" world of the divine or numinous which coexisted alongside and even "within" the physical world. This does not mean that they were literal believers in the sense that our modern fundamentalists were. They just had, as I mentioned in my earlier entries here, a wider sense of what "reality" might be. This sense of living in a "magically realistic" world may have been, as a good rationalist would say, because these ancient folk were ignorant of the true, scientifically explainable causes of all these "divine" events. They were just plain ignorant, while we in the modern age are not.

Maybe yes, maybe no. Sure, the ancients didn't know about quantum mechanics, which is pretty "magical-realistic" itself when you think about it. They didn't know about evolutionary psychology or microbiology. But they did know that the world is often composed of names, and stories, or even, as some modern thinkers speculate, "information."

I converted to Catholicism in 1979, from a secular Jewish background, after eight years of often agonizing religious searching and questioning. I have been a fairly faithful Catholic Christian ever since, even though I currently don't attend church. A Bishop would regard that as "falling away," but I just can't stand any of the church services where I am located. That does not mean that I don't pay attention to my religion and the spiritual life. I would rather learn and struggle with theological and philosophical questions than sit and listen to bad music and bad sermons. I only hope that God understands this.

I cannot speak here of all the reasons I converted, but the ones relevant to this series of essays concern art and story and symbolic actions. I first was attracted to Catholicism in Rome, where the pageantry of the colorful Papal court was on display in every major church. I was immersed for years in the glorious art produced on behalf of the Roman church, and later learned more about the glorious art produced by the Eastern Orthodox church as well. Christianity allows for such a rich artistic tradition because it believes that the physical world matters. It is not an illusion. The physical world matters because Christians believe not only that God created the world and called it "good," but that God, in the person of Jesus the Christ, entered into it as an incarnate human being. And in an allegorical sense, the world can be used as a symbol to point to divine realities.

Now do I believe that Jesus was really a divine being walking the Earth? That he lived for thirty-three years, died, and was resurrected from the dead? Well, yes, I believe this. But do I believe it literally? Back to "magical realism." I believe it as happening in a magical-realistic world, which is very close to this one, but not exactly the same as the physical world that our scientific friends investigate. There are things that co-exist in more than one world, whether holy objects, maybe even holy animals, and holy people. Jesus Christ, especially two thousand years later, is made of stories, or even "information," rather than ordinary flesh and blood. Miracles are made of stories, no matter how many people will tell me that they occurred in the "real" world and "how could I not believe" this or that. It does not matter to me what the "real" story of Jesus might have been, whether he was a cult-leader who had children with Mary Magdalene or whether he was a madman from the boiling kitchen of first-century sectarian Judaism. The real Jesus is the story that is told about him, even along with all its emendations over the years. It also doesn't matter to me that it took centuries of adjustment and sometimes open war to tell this story. If you have ever made up a story or a work of art, you'll know that it is a process that involves a lot of revision and possibly some violence (at least to your art) before you get it right. I dare to say that religion, and its scriptures and doctrines and liturgies and sacred actions, is like art.

It is not like science, which must be proven or falsified by experimental evidence. But it is also not disposable, something that would wither away under the burning light of scientific rationalism, because it comes from the same place that art does. And people are not going to stop making art, or stories, or songs, or anything else creative.

I'm not going to talk about the sociological aspects of religion, which I'm not really qualified to talk about. Nor will I lay out the obvious objections about how many atrocities were and are perpetrated in the name of religion. This is not what I'm talking about. I haven't burned a heretic at the stake in a long time. I'm also not talking about the supposed moral uplift generated by religion. I know as well as you do that atheists can be highly moral beings, in fact as they point out, they are more moral than believers because they don't believe in any divine reward for doing good.

My religious journey, which is like my artistic and scientific/mathematical journey, will last as long as I am living and conscious. I have wondered whether, if I immersed myself in the purifying cold waters of science, my attraction to religion and my life of faith would be washed away and I would emerge as a "bright" shining atheist. This has not happened. What has happened is that science and mathematics have become another transparency in the layered pages I wrote about in one of the earlier essays here. I myself live what many people would consider a "magical-realistic" life. This would be considered by some people as simply "fantasy-prone," a condition which could be alleviated by therapy and "getting a life." But our society still makes some allowances for the charming eccentricities of its artists.

I also have wondered whether I was being called (by God or some other deity) to go into science or mathematics full-time, even in my middle age, and become a professional in the field. I've been told it is not impossible, though highly improbable, and would probably take more time, energy, and money than I have left in my life. I envy the daylights out of those scientists I've encountered, either "live" or online, because their work seems to be simply more "important" than mine. When, back almost six years ago, I asked my physicist host at Fermilab what they were doing there, he replied: "We're trying to find the ultimate basis of reality." Gosh, you can't get more important than that. I'm just putting colors on panels and hanging them on walls (and hopefully the client's walls as well).

But if color and word is all I have, and I will not be smashing atoms at CERN, at least I can attest to the multivariant, multi-universal world I live in, by using the media I have at hand: color, shape, image, story, pattern. This is different from a scientist's world, which is why I probably wouldn't make a good scientist. I'm not single-minded enough. In the multiverse, the transfigured Christ co-exists with a blaze of photons. In the multiverse, the rings of protons and anti-protons in the Tevatron co-exist as rings of alchemical monads transmuting as they collide. Pythagorean divinities scatter galaxies and spin their discs, and the Angel of Mathematics announces the trigonometric identities of the Holy Trinity.

This concludes my series of essays on science, religion, and imagination. In my next post, I'll return to writing about calculus.

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