I recently found myself trapped amongst the sweaty, irritable riders of a crowded city bus, and having been put into this situation as a result of poor planning, I also found that I was without any source of personal distraction. So I instead looked to my bus-riding compatriots for entertainment. What I ended up stumbling upon, rather, was an intriguing concept. Across the aisle and two seats up from me, two women were loudly (fortunately for me) discussing an infamously difficult topic to explore whether among friends or strangers. That is to say, one woman was impatiently demanding of her companion how she could possibly go through life believing in God. Meanwhile, the other woman was just as vehemently insisting that it was foolish and even sinful to suggest that there was any other way. From their volley of sometimes profound, often incoherent arguments, I gathered that the first was a scientist of some philosophical persuasion and that the other was some variation of the stereotypical pastor's wife. They eventually exited the bus and went their separate ways, the discussion discarded and forgotten.
But it stayed with me. As the bus ride resumed, now in silence, questions and possibilities swirled around my head. The foremost question; what is knowing? Where, in the great bubble of perception, do the lines blur and faith merges into knowledge? On one end of the spectrum, you have the naive and obvious theory that your brain works directly with the real world. We know that we do all our thinking with our brains, and any information we receive is input from our eyes, ears, and other sense organs. But that's where this theory stops. Say for example, that I point to an apple and say to you, "is that an apple?" and you look at it and reply, "this apple?". I see you seeing it and having thoughts about it, and I conclude that it's really there, just as my eyes and fingers present it to me, and that when I think about it I'm thinking about a real thing. You see why I call it obvious? And at the opposite extreme, you have those in out modern biosphere of thought that will tell you that everything we think we know about the world outside our skulls is an illusion. Can we knowingly say that that's wrong, not really. But it doesn't make sense. And the other attitude is too blunt and restricting. There has to be a middle.
When we think about the world and almost anything in it, what we are really thinking about is a bunch of data, or givens, that have reached our brains from our eyes and ears and so forth. To go back to the apple, I am given a visual image of the apple and I am given a memory of what it felt like when I touched it, but that's all I have to work with, as far as that apple is concerned. It is impossible and unthinkable for my brain to come to grips with the actual, physical apple in and of itself because my brain simply does not have access to it. All that my brain can ever work with are the look and the feel, givens piped into our nerves.
That being said, the concept of 'knowing' understood, how do we classify the information we have regarding whichever greater being we believe in? We say that God is everywhere, for example, but at the same time say that He is more than just a tree or highway or a mountain. Otherwise, to worship God would be to worship nature and that completely defeats the purpose. But if we know that our brain cannot actually "know" something without information sent from the eyes, tongue, fingers...then what do we call our ideas about God or similar concepts? What the heck is believing? How did that all come around? I don't freaking know. I'm not promoting or persecuting any beliefs anybody out there has. I'm not even gonna spring a new idea on you. This isn't a persuasive essay. It's merely what I've been getting at this with this blog. Thought. Think about it.
From me to you,
- The Sad Blogger
