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Simple-minded positivist vs. simple minded religionist

The first knows a little bit of science and is confident about the discipline's ability to reveal the truth, even when it flies in the face of our common sense convictions.  The second can quote scripture and is confident that the doctrines he finds therein will reveal all relevant truths.

The first does not know how science uses models.  Hence (s)he takes the planetary model of the atom as "gospel truth" and will object to the notion that, say, a table is solid because there is so much space between the marble-like atoms.

What the first needs to consider is the fact that the material substratum consists not just of particles that are smaller versions of the life world, but consists also (or trutly) of fields that aren't exactly here or there in the same way, say, a marble or billiard ball is here or there.  The model understood without the math is misleading.  The material substratum is beyond our imagining.  All affirmations thereof are necessarily paradoxical.

What the second does not know is how scripture uses -- among other tools -- metaphors. And how the analogies hidden in metaphor involve inherently paradoxical expressions.

Both fundamentalists fail to be mindful of the paradoxes that characterized their own disciplines, and look at the other discipline's paradoxical claims with suspicion.

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