The Cart Before The Horse. Our Preferred Position.

We live in a world where the cart goes before the horse.

We love to talk about results and focus on the success of our time. We win the game, love the music, enjoy the vacation, celebrate the promotion, love the new super highway, the new car, we love to get what we want. Results are king. The results are the cart full of our accomplishments. But it takes the pulling of the horse to take us anywhere significant.

Religion has little to contribute to the 21st century mind. This is the growing message that High School and College students increasingly receive from Science. We get that from the media and our neighbor too. I can appreciate why students absorb this conclusion. Science has made miraculous strides in the past two hundred years. It can describe the cosmos and its workings in ways that most of us cannot comprehend. Religion is just the horse. The science is the cart. And the cart is full of lots of goodies. The horse is looking tired.

A Calculus student once told me that it was possible to create a formula to do everything even when we cannot physically produce the results. I don’t doubt this is true. It surely must have driven people like Einstein to move ahead and show that correct theory leads to correct results. Eternal truths are not effected by our rejection or denial of the same. Truth and fact are eventually demonstrated by results. Profound belief in the eternal nature of truth is a requirement for anyone to persist in scientific discovery

when you cannot see the immediate and unqualified results. The horse moves the cart.

My student friend added that Calculus is about discovering the rules that exist in our universe. It does not create them. It cannot go beyond them. The universe is like a giant box and we humans may have the potential to diagram all the rules within the box. That’s a pretty big cart of stuff! And the horse keeps it moving, together.

Religion doesn’t mind stepping outside the box to the other side. Even the most negative forms of religion makes us think beyond ourselves. And the better religion which is forward looking pushes our thoughts and aspirations and achievements beyond our thinking. We call that action faith and belief. It takes us places that we would never go otherwise. The horse can canter and gallop when it gets moving. The stuff in the cart better be tied down or it will fall out!

Religion and science are twin sisters with distinct personalities. They shouldn’t be having spats between them. When you think about it they both lead us to awe and to appreciate the wonder of life. Science has fed off the faith of religion much to the resentment of some 21st century Scientists. With faith we learn that the twin sisters are both okay. And it is religion that pushes us over the limits to the other side. Even if the other side ends up being on this side.

I love the cart and what it contains. I love the horse too. We really can’t go anywhere without both of them. To get life right we will have to learn how to keep them together – in the right order of course.