Introduction: In search of a third lens

Abstract

I dreamed that God and science were lenses of meaning that humans apply on the chaos of reality, in order to make sense. This dream helped me to realize what I wanted to achieve with this book. It is a kind of quest, a quest for meaning. Gaston Bachelard (1969a) points out that dreams and reverie are an occasion to focus on important symbols in a space less distracting and tumultuous than the everyday reality around us. Dreams are serious and should be treated seriously and sincerely. The symbols of my dream were riveting and enthralling, but they refused to tell a story. I need to stage them, to look for plots and invite characters in hope for a narrative ripple. That is why I do not stop with a tweet but go on to tell a story. Dreams are made of symbols. People craft symbols all the time, add, alter, share and drop them. Human civilizations pass on symbols, which are elements of these very complex lenses, between generations and places. This is systemic learning. Education is not just the formal schooling we pursue in modern societies, but everything that helps us to learn and pass on knowledge between generations (Ingold, 2018). Taken together – this “everything” is the lens of my dream: a fundamental sense-making mode of society. It does not mean that they are real or not, I am not discussing the existence of God or reliability of science in this book. I am concerned about the importance of sense-making systems and, especially, in a complex world, like ours, today. God of the Abrahamic religions (Armstrong, 1993, 2001), as well as the gods and goddesses of polytheistic religious systems (Hillman, 1997), have been a most powerful sense-making lens for humanity since ancient times. The Enlightenment added a second strong lens – a coherent and consensual system of science, based on paradigms (Kuhn, 1970). In more traditional and before-modern societies science was a part of the gods or of God. To learn, to explain, to think, was part of the divine order and there was a holy harmony or at least a significance of transcendental significance to be found or to lean one’s thinking against. Monotheistic Christianity, judging all other divinity as illegitimate competition, was adversely predisposed towards systems outside of its own body – magic, witchcraft, the creatures of folk tales, etc. were regarded as coming from the evil adversary of God. Then the Renaissance split God and science apart, and the latter started to compete more openly with the former. Modernity of the last century was marked by laicization. Some