In the movie Contact, based on the book by Carl Sagan, Jody Foster plays Dr. Ellie Arroway an astronomer obsessed with finding extra-terrestrial life. Ellie doesn’t believe in God but she does believe in aliens. Her persistent search for aliens ultimately pays off when she finally picks up radio signals from outer space. Through a series of events she is chosen to be the one who will travel through the cosmos to meet them in person. She enters a spacecraft designed by the aliens and sets off on her journey. The beauty she encounters along the way reveals a universe she could never have imagined and which leaves her speechless until she mumbles the memorable line, “… they should have sent a poet.” A stunning admission by an atheist who believes science to be the arbiter of all truth.
Science can quantify but it doesn’t have the tools to wax poetic.
And God said…
Since God spoke the universe into being it makes perfect sense that a poet would be the one best suited to catalogue His work. Sadly, materialism requires us to check our artistic credentials at the scientific door and bars entrance to anyone who is a card carrying member of an artistic guild. The materialist feels that poetry is too much spiritual baggage for a strictly chemical world to carry. As an intensive care physician, I recognize that medicine can help me in my battle with diseased chemicals but it abandons me when I encounter broken spirits. How many times have I entered a room to tell grieving parents that there was nothing more I could do for their little baby and thought to myself, they should have sent a poet.
“Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens, It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens in his head. And it is his head that splits.” (GK Chesterton)
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