The Veil

Reality hides behind a sensate veil,
Forever denying our groping, grasping, groaning hearts.
Immaterial as thought, yet solid as stone,
She offers clues to her form, but never direct experience.
Trapped in our prisons of flesh and bone,
We can never penetrate the fullness of her mystery.
So in our fevered desperation,
We cling to our own constructions:
Metaphor and myth, science and shadow.
And in our ignorance, we mourn.

A cruel enchantress is she who hides behind the veil.
She teases and taunts, tempts and toys with us,
Bemused as we strive in vain to comprehend her.
A Siren, she sings to us her haunting melody,
And we are struck dumb by its faintest echo.
She stands aloof as we beg to taste her nakedness,
Longing for her touch, insistent, painful as it is.
Her sweet perfume suffuses, infuses, refuses us,
And the spell she has woven is complete.

At last!
Her seductive whisper finds us in silence,
But now we dare not yield.
Her arms are open, but we hesitate.
The Unknown is wide and we are wary.
Reality has treated us harshly in the past
And we know not where she will lead.
We haven’t the trust, the faith, the will to follow her.
We gaze through a glass darkly and fear what we will find.
For to know Reality’s form is to know the shape of God.

She is a veiled mirror,
And we know her not.

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Abiogenesis – The Final Frontier (of Evolution)?

While not -technically- part of Evolutionary Theory, abiogenesis is the area of evolution that I struggle with most. I’ve been reading Hugh Ross & Fazale Rana’s book “Origins of Life”, which provides a very technical treatment of the complex challenges implicit in the transition between chemical non-life and DNA-based life as we know it.

I found the first three parts of the series-within-a-series “At the Frontiers of Evolution” from BioLogos to be a much easier read, while still not oversimplifying the concepts or telling me what I should believe just because the author says so.

Basically, it positions abiogenesis at the “frontier” of evolutionary studies, acknowledging many of the unknowns that Ross & Rana call out in their book. Venema’s only real departure, and one that I can certainly respect, is that the jury is still out. Rather than seeking a “God of the gaps” solution to the current lack of knowledge, he prefers to continue studying and see if one day science may indeed produce a naturalistic explanation, as it has for many other phenomena once considered “supernatural”. Definitely worth checking out Parts 1, 2 & 3, at minimum!