What I don't know

There’s an expression ‘to know’, as in Abraham knew his wife and she bore him a son, such that up until some point in history if I had said that I knew this or that particular woman violence might have ensued. Now we might think that we have moved beyond this kind of linguistic confusion, but we really haven’t.

Every idea that each of us holds is a mixture of faith and empirical reality. When we say we ‘know’ something, we are really saying that we believe something – albeit with the backing of varying degrees of information that we have attempted to empirically verify.

Reality appears to be hard. But every idea we have of reality is soft. Although, once again, some ideas seem softer than others.

My point is this: we can’t avoid religious disputes. Even when we think we are talking about solid things – science, for example - our direct access to empirical information is limited.

It might seem simple to say that we now know that the sun is an enormous nuclear reaction, a ridiculous number of hydrogen atoms too small to be seen individually fusing into slightly bigger helium atoms. Each of these particular atoms is still not visible to the naked eye, but in this process of fusion, stupendous amounts of energy are released - heat, light and other radiation and such. And, we might go on to say that all of this is happening at a location in space an amazing distance away and, of course, that the ball of blazing gas is also speeding along in the universe at an unbelievable rate of speed because of an initial large bang and gravity and such.  And so we go on to blithely speak of a host of other supposedly demonstrable facts mixed in with some imagined ideas and some concepts passed down from people who say that they know.

But if I come up to you and say that it is fine if you want to believe all that, but I believe that the sun is really simply a giant flaming ball of metallic gold that has been lit on fire by celestial beings with powers we can’t comprehend and is pulled across the sky by teams of reindeer too small to be seen by the naked eye - your science wouldn’t have a prayer.

In other words, if you think that if I truly believed my theory of flaming balls that I couldn’t then also come up with an answer to every objection you could raise to my theory, you clearly haven’t been paying attention to reality.

And by reality, I’m talking now primarily about the people in it. We are all, more or less, religious nuts. We throw around expressions like ‘I know you,’ and ‘you don’t know as much as you think,’ as if we are making sense.

People used to say that even a broken clock is right twice a day. But that was before digital. Still, even if only by accident, we can concede that some of us might be right about something.

But here is my point, again: belief and faith must always be considered in human discourse. And talking, that is, trying with words to bring hard reality to bear in our considerations without beating each other up seems to be smarter than the alternative.

But whatever you and I believe, however well we think our ideas are established, in the end each of us will do what we do.

Reality seems to be objective and vast in space and time – though some people will question this - and in all of this, we individual humans are barely visible to the naked eye and are here for a only a limited time, so it seems reasonable to me that each of us would go ahead and act on what we know, however incomplete our empirical knowledge. Some of us will be wrong. What we actually know, however, in any sense, biblical or otherwise, still relies heavily on faith, and for all of our tools and repositories of tested facts, what any of us really ‘know’ is still barely visible to the average individual human eye, so we can only anticipate many more stupid religious arguments.

But arguments about what we believe are still better than the alternative lethal altercations - so long as we can indeed limit ourselves to verbal battles over words and ideas. I think the sun is a flaming ball, and I’ll leave it at that, for now.