The Importance Of Imagination

Imagination encourages the diversity of religious beliefs, but may lead to the conflicts between people with different religious beliefs. The conflicts may be diminished if knowledge and imagination are integrated. Imagination allows people to understand unknowable things and encourage religious beliefs. Many people believe that things, as a whole, needn 't have been just as they are. Rather, things might have been different in countless ways. According to Alison Gopnik, “Even very young children constantly think about future, past, and present possible worlds”. History, from the very beginning, could have unfolded quite other than it did in fact. The past, present and future, no matter how things had gone, are going on, and will happen, are

As the word imagination itself suggests, it is the power to make us see, and to see, moreover, things that without it would be unseeable”(Berry, 25). Because of the limitation of human intelligence, people cannot explain many things using their knowledge. They use their imagination, a way of knowing things that can be known in no other way, to explain the mysteries. The society, the culture, and the personal backgrounds are key factors in shaping thoughts and imagination. Consequently, different people imagine and understand the numinous in a way different from others. For instance, though Catholics and Christians do share many of the same beliefs, their emphasis on other matters differs. Even though they are reading the Bible composed of the same words, their interpretations and imaginations vary. Exposed to ideas every day, people certainly do not imagine things exactly the same way as others do. As a result of the diversity of the imagination, the religions are transformed or created when encountering different peoples with different imagination. However, imagination may serve as a source of conflicts as well. As mentioned, the scripture consists of the same words can be

Gopnik asserts that “Often, people treat knowledge and imagination as if they were different, even as if they were necessarily opposed to each other, but the new work on causal maps suggests just the opposite.” Imagination is referred to as the faculty of forming new ideas of external objects not present to the senses. Knowledge on the other hand is defined as facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education. They seem to be incongruent, but they indeed go hand in hand. knowledge checks the validity of imagination, whereas imagination checks the ambits of knowledge. knowledge is actually what gives imagination its power, what makes creativity possible. It is because we know something about how events are connected in the world that we can create possible worlds. The relationship between science and religion is similar to that between knowledge and imagination. Berry claims that science and religion keep pestering each other because they need each other, “If in fact the fundamentalist scientists were as smart as they think they are, and if the religious fundamentalists were as secure in their belief as they claim to be, then they would (except for issues of justice) leave one another in peace.” Even though the realms of religion