Every great civilization has simultaneously made breakthroughs in the natural sciences, mathematics, and in the investigation of that which penetrates beyond the mundane, beyond the external stimuli, beyond the world of solid, separate objects, names, and forms to peer into something changeless. When written down, these esoteric percepts have the natural tendency to decay over time because people tend to accept them too passively and literally. Consequently, people then value the conclusions of others over clarity and self-knowledge.

Talking about esoteric percepts decaying over time, I recently read about the 1981 Act the state of Arkansas passed, which required that public school teachers give “equal treatment” to “creation science” and “evolution science” in the biology classroom.  Why? The Act held that teaching evolution alone could violate the separation between church and state, to the extent that this would be hostile to “theistic religions.” Therefore, the curriculum had to concentrate on the “scientific evidence” for creation science.

As far as I can see, industrialism, rather than Darwinism, has led to the decay of virtues historically protected by religions in the urban working class. Besides, every great tradition has its own equally fascinating religious cosmogony—for instance, the Indic tradition has an allegorical account of evolution apart from a creation story—but creationism is not defending all theistic religions, just one theistic cosmogony. This means there isn’t any “theological liberalism” in this assertion; it is a matter of one hegemon confronting what it regards as another hegemon—Darwinism.

So, why does creationism oppose Darwinism? Contrary to my earlier understanding from the scientific standpoint, I now think creationism looks at Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection not as a ‘scientific theory’ that infringes the domain of a religion but as an unusual ‘religion’ that oversteps an established religion’s doctrinal province. Creationism, therefore, looks to invade and challenge the doctrinal province of this “other religion.” In doing so, creation science, strangely, is a crude, proselytized version of what it seeks to oppose.

In its attempt to approximate a purely metaphysical proposition in practical terms or exoterically prove every esoteric percept, this kind of religious literalism takes away from the purity of esotericism and the virtues of scientific falsification. Therefore, literalism forgets that esoteric writings enable us to cross the mind’s tempestuous sea; it does not have to sink in this sea to prove anything.

In contrast to the virtues of science and popular belief, esotericism forces us to be self-reliant. We don’t necessarily have to stand on the shoulders of others and thus within a history of progress, but on our own two feet, we seek with the light of our inner experience. In this way, both science and the esoteric flourish in separate ecosystems but within one giant sphere of human experience — like prose and poetry.

In a delightful confluence of prose and poetry, Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, wrote about the evolution of life in poetry in The Temple of Nature well before his grandson contemplated the same subject in elegant prose:

Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.

The prose and poetry of creation — science and the esoteric; empirical and the allegorical—make the familiar strange and the strange familiar.