Comparing God, Science And Imagination, By Wendell Berry

“God, Science and Imagination”, by Wendell Berry, criticizes Professor Steven Weinberg’s essay “Without God” to state Berry’s belief go the coexistence of both science and religion as well as their mutual connection to imagination. “Strange Creatures”, by Susan Blackmore, argues the ability of imitation is what distinguishes human beings from other creatures and animals and thus presents the ideas of memes. The two authors illustrate faith in either imagination or the theory of memetics and support one of them to be the ultimate explanation to most questions in the world. Two two concepts of meme theory and imagination seem irrelevant, but somehow they have several close correlations. Meme theory could include imagination as part

Blackmore says in her essay that “when [people] imitate someone else, something is passed on … that something is named meme” (Blackmore 34). They way how Blackmore defines memes implies the key property of memes as how they are constantly passing from one object to another. In addition, Berry explains imagination as “the power to make us see, and to see, moreover, things that without it would be unseeable” (Berry 25). This illustrates that according to the author, imagination helps people to see more and thus inspires people to expand what they see through imagination or create more of the unseeable things. In order for a meme to pass around, the message have to be created first. Usually, the prototype of the idea or an action needs to be came up with by a person or invented by someone. All of this beforehand precesses go back to one word—imagination. For example, religion, as a meme that gets around world for centuries, is based on imagination of God and other spiritual power. Also, all religions have to be imagined or created by someone or some random group of people. After one religion is created by imagination, the spreading process of from people to people or by multiple other mediums would make that religion a meme. Berry mainly argues in his essay that imagination is related to both science and religion, also

Blackmore mentions Ricard Dawkins’s “The Selfish Gene” and Dawkins demonstrates “scientific ideas that catch on and propagate themselves the world by jumping from brain and brain…and religion as memes with a high survival value, infecting whole societies with belief in a God or an afterlife” (Blackmore 36). Blackmore uses Dawkins to introduce her thoughts and studies of memes and thus indicates that her agreements with Dawkins’s ideas. The concepts of science and religion which Dawkins explains in his book exemplifies the definition of memes and proves the link among meme theory and science and religion. Likewise, Berry writes about “imagination in the highest sense seems allied less to science than to religion” in his essay (26). He points out that both science and religion are linked to imagination in some vital ways. The mutual connections that imagination and memes share with both science and religion show how imagination and meme theory could fit together and thus coexist to explain several problems on the world. On the one hand, from Berry’s point of view, instead of the stereotype that science only acknowledging evidence while religion only including faith as well as sacredness, imagination plays a vital role in both science and religion. He criticizes those fundamentalists of religion and science