The World Grows Weary

“Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.” Voltaire.

You cannot know anything for certain.
To move forward you must think divergently.
The world grows weary of you acting as if you are certain about things you can’t possibly be certain about.
As is your heart.

Open your arms and let the winds of conflict tear at the clothes of knowledge that you fasten so tightly around you.
And you will see that you know next to nothing at all.

Breath.
Let go.
Your perceptions do not necessarily correlate with reality.
Your grasp of what is out there, your umwelt, is so unbearably small.
Your sensorium barely enough to get by in the world you find yourself in.
Information is infinite and unobtainable to you in its completeness; a horizon you can never reach.
Close your eyes.
Step into the uncertainty of myths and legends that show how narrative fragments in your past, present and future are of meaning.
Let your imagination open up a world of transcendence.
Feel your heart rise up and go deeper into the story: imagined possibilities of excitement and discovery.

If you feel you can’t do this, then it is because you either live in a world of dogmatic theism or you live in a world of factual certainty where you believe science and reason tell you everything.
And these two worlds love duelling with each other.

Which is sad - both sides claiming they have absolute truths, when they do not.

If you love science, as I do, then embrace an intellectual humility that accepts that what you know and what we know as the human race through science, is vastly outstripped by what we don’t know.
Science is amazing: an exploration into distant lands - but we know too little to commit to a position of strict atheism.

If you love God, as I do, then be honest that what we do know informs us that literal interpretations of religious stories are normally wrong. They just are. Rediscover the wonder of uncertainty and see your stories as myths that open your eyes to who you are, who we are as a people and who God is. Faith has been ensnared by literalism that bleeds away the power of narratives and renders you morally bankrupt when you judge others and leaves you intellectually floundering in the absurd.
Throw off labels and categorisations that seek to hold you within doctrinal walls. Allow for the possibility of belief and faith within your heart that is fluid. Avoid tribal identification which places a barrier between you and others.

“Try to seek comfort with having multiple narratives and uncertainty – an active exploration of new ideas. Live a life that is free from dogma and full of awe and wonder – celebrate possibility and praise uncertainty.” Dr. David Eagleman.

( With thanks to Dr. David Eagleman, who informed most of this article. Eagleman takes a position of Possibilianism which is a philosophy which rejects both the diverse claims of traditional theism and the positions of certainty in strong atheism in favor of a middle, exploratory ground.)

Imagining God

“It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

I’m reading Richard Kearney’s, Anatheism: Returning to God After God, at the moment. Only dipped my toes in so far but it is certainly interesting.

I like his belief that imagination, narrative and empathy are keys to experiencing God. And by moving away from dogmatic theism and at the other extreme militant atheism, we can step into an imaginary fictional space where we accept that thought and reason do not, on their own, define our existence. The great poet John Keats put it well when he said this ‘Negative Capability’ is, "When a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

I think when people defend religions like Christianity using thought and logic they forget that in reality we live within a closed system and cannot really understand things unless we can step outside of that system. Only God can do that and we would be foolish to see ourselves as Gods.

And when militant atheists also use only thought and logic to defend their position, they to forget that we are trapped within a closed Universe and whilst these are useful tools you can't use them to look in from the outside. And a life based only on reason forgets that reason is built from your experiences to form what you see as common-sense - ask any student of quantum mechanics and they will tell you the first thing they need to do in grappling with quantum mechanics is to discard what they believe to be reason.

So it is crucial for both sides to accept that we know far less than we would like. That really we know almost next to nothing about God other than by using our imagination and we know almost next to nothing about who we really are and the nature of reality using logic alone.
What makes us human?
What exactly is a consciousness, sentient being?
These are questions to which we have no answer other than by using our imagination to step into a space of uncertainty about who we are and who God is.

And it is there within our imagination, that I agree with Richard Kearney that, 'what disappears as literal comes back again as figural,' and, 'It may in fact be much more powerful and moving a presence precisely because of its return through absence.'