Dasein

From an essay by Roy Hornsby on Heidegger's thought:

By using the expression Dasein, Heidegger called attention to the fact that a human being cannot be taken into account except as being an existent in the middle of a world amongst other things (Warnock, 1970), that Dasein is 'to be there' and 'there' is the world. To be human is to be fixed, embedded and immersed in the physical, literal, tangible day to day world (Steiner, 1978).

I believe that H was on to something of profound importance in this concept: the significance of the concrete real world as the frame of our being (the world where you bump your nose if you attempt to walk through a wall and not a doorway). The creation account links that frame to God, the creator, in the account which must therefore also be denominated in the 'physical, literal, tangible day to day world' in its references, categories and relations. Once the creation account is un-linked from the world we are in, it is reduced to mere story (myth, fiction, or fantasy, it all amounts to the same thing); it breaks the link between God, his creation and us; and re-defines us as discontinuous with the creative will of God: no longer are we 'in God's image' linked by the chain of creative outcomes, but are linked to nothing and the materialist are right, in the grimness of the dust to which materialism reduces us all.