Can Science Explain Our Good Vs Evil Nature?
There was a picture I saw somewhere recently, I can’t recall where, but it had a profound effect on me. It was a simple illustration of a human figure lying on the ground with a sphere, almost a wrecking ball you see on television destroying a building blow by blow, lying on top of him, effectively crushing him. There were words next to each of the two subjects of the drawing pointing to each respectively. The word ‘past’ pointed to the ball, the word ‘present’ to the squashed human figure. How accurate a description of our modern human condition I thought.
The past represented in such a way points to a universal depression of sorts, a burden we are crippled by, that we are all susceptible to. Are we all in our own way paralysed within ourselves due to a deep regret of all that we’ve done? Are we exhausted with regret? Is the internal struggle between good and evil taken us seemingly upright, secure, beautiful, even ‘normal’ people to our limits of psychological endurance? That battle between our two selves, good vs evil, that which is knowing, intuitive, a pure form of consciousness; and that which is adolescent, cajoling, fitful and impulsive seems to have reached a fever pitch in modern life. We’ve never looked so youthful, even when youth has faded, so healthy, even when we are starved of real nourishment, so sophisticated, even when inside we are crying uncontrollably. We are at the peak of both our intelligence and our ignorance. Walking contradictions.
As sure as the battle between Good and evil in our nature persists, and so the resulting corruption inherited, we all I think look to day when a glimpse of a lighthouse is spotted over this raging sea within ourselves. We can endure, that is for sure. Anything. We can survive a lot of pain. Yet we are our own enemy. We allow ourselves to fall victim to the chasms in our own minds. We are, however, yet to glimpse our true nature, put aside the very notion of good and evil, and walk a new road, one where an understanding of ourselves precedes all doing.
The past returning with a vengeance, and with it a misery more than we can bare, I think is a sensation known to all, as I connected so strongly with to in the drawing. Yet the past must be conquered. There must be a redemption, a renaissance somewhere, sometime, a hope for freedom from the insecurity we harbour as to the truth of our nature. We will someday be free of our past, and the future will be our preoccupation, at the forefront of all we do, working for something other than ourselves, the catalogue of our past selves thrown far out to sea. Once science and religion, good and evil, faith and understanding can come together and explain our wretched selves.
Tags: good vs evil, human condition, science and religion
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