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It would be a mistake to think all super-positions are negative. They can be dangerous if we are unaware of them, certainly, but where we are aware they can be helpful.
Indeed it is difficult to imagine art, religion and even science without super-position. It is a fundamental dimension to our imaginative life. Our ability to hold two mutually contradictory truths together is something that marks us out as human.
The debate between atheists and fundamentalists about whether or not God exists, demonstrates their mutual agreement that everything has one meaning. Both believe God is something to be proved. Neither see the need to layer realities, so we are not projecting our preconceptions onto idols but at the same time perceive meaning by seeing things as simultaneously mundane and divine. For the fundamentalist, the divine and the mundane collapse into one. It is impossible for the fundamentalist to see the puppet and the creature it represents at the same time.
Note I am not saying fundamentalists don't do super-position. I am saying they do it without awareness. They start the debate with a fixed idea of what God is. Bizarrely, atheists seem to surrender to the fundamentalists in this matter. It is a sort of Punch and Judy show, where both beat one another with their sticks of complete certainty. To argue for or against the existence of God you have to be completely certain you know what God is. If you don't, how do you know you have proved your point (either way)?
Deep down the fundamentalist approach is deeply cynical. It is impossible to conceive of a good that is anything other than absolute. It has to be just so. The alternative is humility. Simple acceptance that it is not possible to know everything, to prove everything. There is no need to collapse the super-position into one simple belief.
I think this is what Karen Armstrong means when she writes about mythos and logos. It's not so much that we have to choose between them but we can live with a super-position of both. Why can't the trees of the field clap their hands?
So, did God create the universe? Yes. Did the universe start with the big bang? Yes. Are these mutually contradictory? Don't care. Life is better when both are true. At least in seeing the contradictions, don't fool yourself into believing you know all the answers.
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