The Good Book & The Big Bang

The Good Book & The Big Bang
by John Forster & Tom Chapin
© 2010 Limousine Music Co. & The Last Music Co. (ASCAP)

In the beginning was the word.
Then the word turned into data.
But the data and the scriptures disagreed.
So the battle lines were drawn
And the battle rages on
Between two very different kinds of creed.

Science gropes with isotopes
And spectroscopes by which it hopes
To explain The Big Bang to the people.
But it collapses in apses
Which perhaps is why
You never see a laboratory with a steeple.
Religion deals with faith and myth
And both can help us grapple with
The things we fear and why we're here,
The age-old questions.
But for a DNA pattern or a rocket to Saturn
The Good Book has very few suggestions.

The Good Book & the Big Bang.
Different games by different rules,
Different names and different tools.
The Good Book & the Big Bang.
Don't belong in the same pot,
What one is the other's not
But though they seem like oil and water,
They could be Yin and Yang.
The Good Book & the Big Bang.

Could we combine our categories
And put chapels in our lab'ratories,
Or put lab'ratories in our chapels?
Could we insert a few equations
On liturgical occasions?
Could we learn by mixing
Oranges and apples?

The Good Book & the Big Bang.
Could we put 'em in a room
And not have 'em go kaboom?
The Good Book & the Big Bang.
It seems promising to me,
Yet throughout all history
It's been a case of oil and water,
An endless sturm und drang,
The Good Book & the Big Bang.

With Science on it's high horse
And religion on it's knees
They can't see eye to eye,
They miss the obvious.
But to me it's a no-brainer
'Cause I know there's one container
That is big enough to hold 'em both - us!

The Good Book & the Big Bang.
Pour the mystical and skeptical
Into the same receptacle.
The Good Book & the Big Bang.
The one place they can be combined
Is inside the human mind.
Because we need both oil and water,
We need the Yin and Yang.
The Good Book and the Big…
The Good Book & the Big Bang.
Pour the mystical and skeptical
Into the same receptacle.
The Good Book & the Big Bang.
The one place they can be combined
Is inside the human mind.
Because we need both ways of thinking,
We need the Yin and Yang.
It's Good and it's Big
And it's Big and it's Good.
The Good Book and the Big Bang.

This song appears on Tom Chapin's Broadsides CD.

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