Seemingly absolute truths can be absolutely incompatible. How can we make sense of this, do we simply have to make a choice of one over another? The issue may be our partial understanding; human perception grasping only fragments of a  larger reality. Rather than choosing between paradigms we should hold them in tension as a method to try to deepen understanding. 

I have wrestled with this in my struggles with belief because at the same time I do believe that Christ said he was THE way to life, yet Buddhism for example predated him and is also A way to life. How so? Do we have to make choices, for instance between science and religion?

Consider the following concepts from scientists and philosophers, which appear to be internally consistent, but mutually exclusive : 

• Granularity or Continuity: Reality behaves as both discrete, granular particles (supported by Tim Palmer’s rational quantum mechanics *1) and yet as continuous waves (supported by Milo Wolff’s Wave Structure of Matter *2).
• Or..Flow : David Bohm *3 and Alfred North Whitehead *4 argue the universe is an ongoing, emerging process rather than a collection of fixed, static objects.
• Or..Relational : Thinkers like Einstein *5 , Buber *6 , and Merleau-Ponty *7 emphasize that reality is understood and created through relationships and participation, rather than existing as a self-contained absolute.

The poetic concept of “Incarnation,” as explored by T.S. Eliot in The Dry Salvages *8 , offers a way to reconcile these granular, wave-like, processual, and relational views. Eliot frames Incarnation not as an escape from reality, but as a union where opposing spheres—such as the finite and infinite, or time and eternity—are held together without losing their underlying tension. Just as quantum theory proposes that is our act of observation that crystallises infinite potential in this particular concrete reality. Ultimately, as Eliot illustrates with “the still point of the turning world” in Burnt Norton, opposites like stillness and movement are not contradictions to be but rather point toward some richer understanding.

The two poems, Dry Salvages and Burn Norton, are part of Eliot’s “Four Quartets”. These are a meditation on time and existence, where it is Christ who allows opposites to meet. It is through a seemingly impossible fusion where “tongues of flame are unfolded into the crowned knot of fire” that the “fire and the rose are one”; and thence release existence where “all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”.

It is in this way that I resolve a personal contradiction that I have struggled with. Christ said “I am the way the truth and the life, except by me shall no person come to God”. It has always seemed to me that this must necessarily be wrong. What then, about those before his birth, or who struggle toward light within other religious traditions. There is truth – I believe – within Hinduism and Buddhism. A Christian faith built on exclusion seems incompatible with the essence of my experience of Christ.

Perhaps though Christ is BOTH “the way to truth and life” AND “a way to truth and life”?

*1 Tim Palmer (Rational Quantum Mechanics / Invariant Set Theory): Palmer’s framework models quantum mechanics using fractal-like invariant sets in state space to resolve quantum measurement problems locally and deterministically. Explore his core research paper, Invariant Set Theory on arXiv, and his academic research index at the University of Oxford Physics Department.

*2 Milo Wolff (Wave Structure of Matter): Wolff posits that subatomic particles like the electron are not discrete solid spheres, but rather standing wave centers formed by converging and diverging spherical scalar waves. Read a summary of his wave-based cosmological equations on the Natural Philosophy Wiki entry for Milo Wolff.

*3 David Bohm (Wholeness and the Implicate Order): Bohm proposes that the universe is an undivided flux (“holomovement”) in which static objects are merely temporary explicate projections of an enfolded implicate order. Review the Wikipedia Summary of Wholeness and the Implicate Order and an architectural breakdown on Closer to Truth.

*4 Alfred North Whitehead (Process Philosophy / Process and Reality): Whitehead argues that the fundamental constituents of reality are not fixed material substances, but interconnected “actual occasions” of becoming. Read the reference guide in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Alfred North Whitehead and the structural outline of Process and Reality on Wikipedia.

*5 Albert Einstein (Relativity of Spacetime): Einstein established that space, time, and mass do not exist as absolute, static backgrounds, but as dynamic relationships defined by speed, gravitational fields, and reference frames. Read about these conceptual developments in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Early Interpretations of General Relativity.

*6 Martin Buber (I and Thou / Philosophy of Dialogue): Buber differentiates between the objectifying relation (I-It) and reciprocal, participatory encounters (I-Thou) through which genuine identity and reality are realized. Consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Martin Buber and the overview of I and Thou on Wikipedia.

*7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Embodied Phenomenology): Merleau-Ponty asserts that reality is never perceived from an abstract, detached exterior, but is continuously co-created through the body’s active participation in the world. Read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

*8 T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets: Burnt Norton and The Dry Salvages): Eliot uses the concept of Incarnation and “the still point of the turning world” to articulate how timelessness and time, movement and stillness, intersect without canceling each other out. Read an summary of the poetic structures in Wikipedia’s Four Quartets overview and background notes in the Barbican Guide to Four Quartets