perhaps one of the greatest misunderstandings in philosophical thinking is the misunderstanding of mythology. Religious and scientific thinkers alike tend to think that either something must be literally true or else it is a lie.....but a myth is not a lie. It is a metaphor. If I were wanting to describe someone was courageous I might say "He is a lion". Clearly, literally, without even having to think too hard about it, this is not true. Yet at the same time my statement would contain an underlying deeper truth that is a little harder to put into words....
In the opening verses of the Tao Te Ching there is a line that goes "The Tao that can be named is not the Tao". Most other religious thought has something comparable to say about the formless, infinite, transcendent aspects of ourselves that can not be described. And so to explain these invisible aspects of ourselves man has always used metaphors. The problem arises when man starts to believe that HIS metaphor for God or the transcendent should be taken literally and that all other metaphors are wrong.
In a post Darwin world in the late 1800s science declared that there was no God based on the evidence that Darwin presented in "Origins of the Species". Both Science and the Church had clearly missed the point of the old creation myths and the argument was over a purely literal interpretation.
This changing of the guard, however, set us up for one of the greatest ironies in the history of mankind. At that time, pre-Einestein, science viewed the universe as being eternal, it had no beginning. It was static. Time and space were fixed. We lived in a purely 3 dimensional universe and time was not a dimension but rather flowed like a river second after fixed second....and we were certainly not created in the image of an eternal and omnipresent God.
This model of the universe was in stark contrast to the model provided by the ancient Jewish text the "Sefer Yetzirah" (which translated means "The Book of Formation"). The Sefer Yetzirah is short and very mysterious text. Consider verses 5 and 6 from chapter 1 :
"5. These Ten Numbers, beyond the Infinite one, have the boundless realms, boundless origin and end, an abyss of good and one of evil, boundless height and depth, East and West, North and South, and the one only God and king, faithful forever seated on his throne, shall rule over all, forever and ever.
6. These ten Sephiroth which are ineffable, whose appearance is like scintillating flames, have no end but are infinite. The word of God is in them as they burst forth, and as they return; they obey the divine command, rushing along as a whirlwind, returning to prostrate themselves at his throne."
Verse 5 describes a 5 dimensional universe. 3 dimensions of space, 1 of time and one being the "distance" between good and evil. Verse 6 describes a universe that came into existence in spectacular fashion, expanded and then ultimately collapsed in on itself. This view of the universe was in stark contrast to the 3d, static, Newtonian model of the late nineteenth century scientific universe.
But within just a few decades of science writing off the old metaphors Einstein had rocked the world with relativity. Time was now just an illusion and all past present and future existed simultaneously. Time has become a dimension. Then Bohrs, Schrodinger and Heisenberg did their bit to advance Quantum theory. Everyone one has heard of Schrodinger's cat. When the box was opened the cat was either dead or alive. Whichever was the case became reality but only in our universe. The other possibility was just as real....but as Schrodinger told us, the other possibility exists in another universe. There were an infinite number of these "other" universes and this was the 5th dimension. The Sefer Yetzirah had described this as the polarity of good and evil. Last time I checked "good and evil" were not standard units of scientific measure but if we take the point of the metaphor here and consider and spectrum of infinite universes with total order (good) at one extreme and total chaos (evil) at the other extreme then we have a comparable model that is scientifically acceptable.
A couple of decades on and we have the discovery of Hubble. The universe did indeed have a beginning and was expanding as per verse 6 of the Sefer Yetzirah and so the "Big Bang" theory was born. The dramatic instant of the big bang is captured in the imagery of the words "These ten Sephiroth which are ineffable, whose appearance is like scintillating flames".
So you can see the great irony of ironies here. Science only ever considered the literal truths in the creation myths and not the transcendent truths within the metaphors. However these transcendent truths are as much a part of the scientist as they are with anyone else and so a whole new mythology of cosmology began which became a new metaphor for these eternal truths.
The new myths do not end there. Not by a country mile. Any number of geeky looking physicists can be found on you tube pontificating on theories that all of our lives, past, present and future, are still "out there" in the time dimension. Also we all exist simultaneously in an infinite number of other possible universes where our lives maybe very similar or very different to this one. Suddenly we have a scientific model of ourselves as having been created in the image of the eternal and omnipresent.
After Schrodinger and the boys gave us the 5th dimension other dimensions followed and physicists started adding more dimensions like there was no tomorrow (which there isn't because time is just an illusion anyway....but I digress) by the 1980's we were up to 10 dimensions and we were given string theory. The problem here was that string theory broke down at the instant of the big bang. Not only that but there were 5 different versions of string theories. Each made a compelling case but each seemingly contradicted the other. The problem of string theory has been overcome in recent years by the addition of one more dimension to give us M theory (membrane theory). Through M theory physicists have now realized that the 5 string theories are all correct and are just different manifestations of the same theory....
so what does 11 dimensions mean in the old metaphors. Back to the Sefer Yetzirah. The universe was created by God who had used 10 Sephiroth and 22 letters. We have already seen that the 10 Sephiroth make up the first 5 dimensions of the universe. 2 Sephiroth for each dimension as each dimension runs to infinity in opposite directions......but what of the 22 letters?? (there are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet). If we were to do the same with the 22 letters we would have 11 dimensions. Coincidence???.....you be the judge.
What other metaphors can we find here?? If we take those 11 dimensions we can break them down into the 4 dimensions of space and time and 7 other spacial dimensions. We live and move around in the 3 dimensions of space and we move through the dimension of time but we do not have physical access to the other 7 dimensions above those. In Hinduism, Judaism, Catholicism, and in Islam there is the theology of the seven heavens. The word for heavens in Islam actually means "sky". Our sky is 3 dimensional space so we could take the addition of each extra spacial dimension as being a different type of "sky" or "heaven" or "space". These dimensions are believed, by modern physicists, to be the realm of dark matter. Scientists cannot detect dark matter but they can detect its gravity. Current belief is that there is matter in these other dimensions and that gravity is inter dimensional and can leak from the higher dimensions down into our 3rd dimension.
It is not too hard to find physicists who theorize that if there is matter in these other dimensions then there may also be intelligent life just like us living there. In Islamic traditions Allah and the angels live in the 7th heaven but the Jin (as in genies) who were rebellious against Allah were kicked out of the seventh heaven and now live in one of the heavens between our realm and the 7th heaven. This is not all that different to Judeo Christian theology regarding Satan who was kicked out of heaven and now he and his demons are described as the powers and principalities in the "air".
Now after all of that let me say that in 500 years time it could be proven that M theory, String theory, Schrodinger's cat, the big bang, interdimensional beings and the illusion of time are all nothing more than the biggest load of pseudo scientific bunkum ever thought up. But for our generation that is not the point. The point is that we are evolving. The old religious metaphors are passing away but the eternal transcendent truths will just not go away and have quietly slipped their way into our new mythologies.
I think the moral of the story is not to get too tied up the metaphors as a full and literal explanation for everything but rather we should be as children and simply become lost and in awe of the eternal mysteries.
