ABSTRACT
I have no inkling why some people believe (I almost wrote, “choose to believe,” but that would be to beg the question I am trying to address and to engage in the type of rhetorical trickery I am trying to avoid) in the existence of a supernatural creator of the world in which we live. At the same time, I have no glimmer of a response to the implicit counter-question as to what exactly preceded, or caused, or provided a context for the “big bang” with which our universe is thought (by those of an evolutionary mind-set) to have begun. I acknowledge immediately that these two perspectives are by no means necessarily incompatible with each other. I acknowledge, too, that my everyday concepts of “before” and “cause” and “context” are inadequate to this discussion in ways that I am not able to comprehend. I find some respite in the notion that it is the very nature of the universe, outside a concept of time, to be in a constant state of inflation and retraction (Steinhardt, 2003). I find affirmations of such a view in the fragmentary writings of Heraclitus “Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed. . . . It is in changing that things find repose” (as cited in Wheelwright, 1959, pp. 70-71). I acknowledge that there are many ways of knowing and learning, all of them bound up with some form of communication. A frequent difficulty is found in communication between and among these different ways of knowing and learning, and that is the issue to which I wish to attempt some small contribution. While the specifics of this collection concern Christian belief, I want to make a more general beginning with regard to communication in the “Western” culture with which I am most familiar.
