Though it is commonplace in discussions of science and religion to make the distinction between scientific explanations of how and religious explanations of why, the distinction does not hold up under close examination. In recent discussions of big bang cosmology, scientists are more and more addressing of the questions of why, particularly in discussions of the role of symmetry in contemporary physics and in debates about the relevance of the anthropic principle.

This essay returns to the Azande tribe of Africa, discussed by Polanyi (in Personal Knowledge) and others, in order to rethink the issues of rationality and irrationality and of essentialism and relativism, and to consider what these issues mean in our actual lives as daily we make epistemological and moral judgements.

Our culture and tradition, including our theories and our language, act as subsidiaries by which we attune to resonances between outselves as convivial beings and the world. These resonances afford us our senses of reality and illustrate the impossibility of a correspondence theory of truth. We select between theories and versions by learning to sense the deeper and deeper resonances which they evoke in our communal selves.