Layers of meaning

If you are reading this today - did you see Google?  It has a tribute to Nicholas Steno, a religiously minded scientist in the 1600s who investigated geology and anatomy.  He pointed out the layering effect in geology and in living bodies.  I read his bio quickly and my impression is that he realized layers had to be originally laid down as liquid that later gelled.  Then another liquid layer over that ... and so on.  That's why we can cross-section rock layers and skin layers.  Mainly I thought it was great for pagan Google to go all Christian and Catholic today.

It tied in perfectly with a blog post I had read and liked on Beginning Theistic Science.  It is titled 'Can we conceive of mind-body dualism?'  Dualism is a concept used by Swedenborg and others to point out that the physical world and the spiritual world are totally separate and distinct and discrete.  See, some scientists take the position that our spiritual mind is connected enough with our body that we can make logical connections between them.  They are puzzled as to why the rest of us think that just because we cannot see a spiritual reality that does not mean it does not exist.  They are very literally minded when it comes to science: 'there is no God because we cannot prove that there is', 'what you see is what you get', 'the natural world is all there is - you do not need God to explain it'.  Some of us call them buzz kills, or atheists.  They call us lame, or unintelligent.

So, when I read philosophy lately (Christian philosophy), I come across words I've not heard of.  Dualism is one.  In order to understand the concept, I need a word that I can translate it to.  I can't think of one. Separate?  Totally different?  Unrelated?  They do not capture the part of the meaning where the two things - mind and nature - are so distinct that you can't get from one to the other.  Distinct?  That might work.  But not really.  Things in our natural world are distinct, but not as distinct as dualism considers mind and spirit to be.

Anyway, if you read the post, you will have it all explained to you brilliantly.

In real life, the concept is not needed perhaps.  But in science, it is.  If scientists want to assume there is a God, they have trouble getting others to see their point if they cannot use the concept of dualsim.  It is a struggle to push science past its literal bias and get it to consider that what we see is not all there is.  And no matter how we investigate things from nature, we will never get 'there'.