Believe Differently

I am an out and out relativist. I am absolutely convinced that I cannot be certain about anything – so much so, I must confess, I could be wrong about this one thing too!

I am convinced of our situatedness, that all the knowledge we have of our world and reality can only really be expressed in relative terms. We live in a world of free floating metaphors; everything is “like” something else. There is no one thing upon which we can take our stand and build a solid foundation for knowledge. Descartes tried with his cogito ergo sum but even that sure foundation was found to be wanting.1 There simply is no place, no position from which we can stand and know our world for what it really is.  We are the artefact in the experiment; we are part of the reality we are trying to fathom. All knowledge can only be expressed in terms of other knowledge as words in a dictionary are expressed as other words in the same dictionary.

Truth ebbs and flows on the tide of human ideas. We invent myths and stories, theories and philosophies, which enable us to predict and comprehend aspects of our world - ideas born in language and constructed in the human psyche – but forget where they ultimately originated and become certain of their content.

This is true of all we try and fathom. Everything must be like something. Truth cannot exist in a vacuum. I am saying again what I said at the beginning, it must be relative to something, something I have already experienced, because unless it is, I will not be able to comprehend it.

This holds no matter the field of human enquiry; and is no less true of the scientific enterprise. Sir Arthur Eddington is quoted as saying that “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine”.2 And here lies the problem. How can we imagine what we do not already know? How is it possible for us to dream, philosophise, or conjure something within our imaginations without the seed for it being present in something we have already considered?3

This is never more so the case when we speak of theology. Ultimately it is our context that both resources and inhibits our ability to think. It is our traditions that shape our thoughts; our situation shapes us more than we can possibly imagine. And it is against this backdrop of ideas that we attempt to do theology and figure out God.  What is God like? Well, he (she) cannot fail to be like something we already know: a father or a mother, a shepherd, a king or a god. If we cannot connect him with another idea – myth, story, philosophy, theory – we cannot speak of him.  God must be like something or we must give up any attempt to understand him (her).

But here is the rub:  we must never forget, especially when we think of God, that we reason in metaphor. He (she) is more than can be imagined. From this perspective we must recognize our best theology to be lacking. He (she) maybe like something I can already intuit but he (she) will always be more and different.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum [↩]
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Stanley_Eddington [↩]
3. Sure our imaginations can be truly creative and we can conjure some truly fantastic ideas - in our mind’s eye we can create three headed monsters and horses that fly – but the seed of such thoughts grows in soil already fertilized with pre-existent ideas. [↩]