Hi everyone. I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald, Currants and Trends Through a Mythic Lens,

the podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination.

The Emerald.

All that's happening on this green jewel in space. Hey everyone. This episode is devoted to what some might consider an impossible task, taking viewpoints that seem diametrically opposed to one another, and seeing if there can be found a glimmer of common ground.

In Western culture, there has been, for many years, starting around the time of Galileo and

crystallizing in the Age of Enlightenment, a split, a divide, rift, gulf, an abyss even,

between the worlds of science and spirituality. Why this rift came about, and the cultural necessities for it, I'm not going to go into in too much detail today.

But let's just say it came about for good reasons at the time, and over time has grown and grown into its current expression, which basically seems unbridgeable,

at least in America anyway. It's very much worth noting that this split does not exist everywhere,

that in places like India, for example, it is common to see physicists or brain surgeons lined up

at temples paying homage to stones that house nature spirits,

or temple priests who have no issue with the notion that the universe expanded outward

from a single point of concentrated energy billions of years ago.

But here in the West, it's an issue,

and one that is very, very polarized, with very little perceived wiggle room in between. Either the

universe is a bunch of randomly generated stuff chaotically slamming into itself willy-nilly,

or it was created by an old man with a beard who set down laws about who we can and cannot

love and whether we should mix shellfish with steak. So, with the topic as polarized as this, it's important to set some parameters.

If you've come here basically to troll, if you're already pretty much convinced that your

worldview is the ultimate worldview and that those silly scientists or silly spiritual types are

wrong, and that's all there is to it, this may not be the podcast episode for you.

If you absolutely positively think the world was created 5,000 years ago with the zap of a finger

...