Of Solomon and the Ant

So ants talk, and butterfly larvae can communicate with them – successfully enough, in fact, that “living M. rebeli larvae are rescued in preference to ant larvae when a colony is disturbed,” and “nurse workers kill and feed their own brood to the social parasite if food is scarce”.

And so ants talk, and Solomon can understand them – enough so that their concerns about his army bring a laugh to his lips.

And the overlap between those two ideas – one scripturally based and dating back fourteen hundred years, the other a product of recent science – is of the kind that provides confirmation for believers of their belief along these lines:

the Qur’an says that ants speak, now science has shown this to be literally true… and this provides additional evidence that the Qur’an is Truth.

4.

Here, then, is yet another use of the “overlapping concepts” notion that I’ve explored in posts on Ada Lovelace, and more recently Nancy Fouts, Walter Benjamin, and the confluence of Hamlet and the Heart Sutra in a poem of mine…

Arthur Koestler affirms in The Act of Creation that such intersections are to be found at the heart of tragedy and catharsis, humor and laughter, and discovery and eureka: here we find them providing confirmation for religious belief.

5.

Such intersections can in practice be read in two directions, as Bernard McGinn notes in the article on Revelation he wrote for Robert Alter and Frank Kermode‘s Literary Guide to the Bible – here’s his comment on Martin Luther‘s interpretive process:

Earlier interpreters, such as Joachim (but not Augustine), had also claimed to find a consonance between Revelation’s prophecies and the events of Church history, but they had begun with Scripture and used it as a key to unlock history. Paradoxically, Luther, the great champion of the biblical word, claimed that history enabled him to make sense of Revelation…

When the overlaps are between scientific knowledge and scriptural statements, believers tend to read science as an empirical support for scripture – they don’t read scripture as supporting the findings of science.

When it comes to prophecy and fulfillment, however, the danger exists that current events will be forced into the Procrustean bed of scripture – as when JF Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama have each in turn been accused of being the Antichrist…

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The bullet image above is available from Way 2 Worship as wallpaper for your computer screen. The verse below it, James 5.11, is the verse the bullet “cites”.

Comedy, tragedy — or inspiration?

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