I have wrestled my entire life with epistemology. I hardly doubt that will change. I remember strange questions I would ask myself back in our little apartment in Venezuela, before I was five years old. But the strangest question, one that has come back to me in an endless repetition, first disturbed me on the beach.
I was digging about in the sand when one of my parents, which it was is not important, told me that it was time to leave. I thought to myself that despite the hour or so of beachy memories, the only thing I currently knew I was experiencing was the act of wrenching myself reluctantly away from what I had previously been doing. Perhaps, I thought, there never really was an hour of playing on the beach. Perhaps that was simply an illusion, or an implanted memory. I thought back to the fact that every good time I could remember had to at some point come to an end, and I thought a much darker thought: what if all the “good times” I believed I had experienced were nothing more than implanted memories. What if my entire life had been much shorter than I had been lead to believe; what if all that I had really experienced was just an endless series of wrenchings away from one thing after another? What if my life really consisted only of low-level psychological torture, being pulled away from everything the moment I began to enjoy it? If this was so, the memories were not cherished mementos, but rather cruel illusions which served the function of making me cooperate over and over and over, stringing me along with the promise of more good times to come.
I don’t think I was a completely normal child.
Variants on this basic theme exist everywhere. There are gurus who will tell you that life is an illusion. A book called “The Secret” promises that life is nothing but the sum total of all the things you mentally attract to yourself. And of course there’s “The Matrix.”
There is no logical answer to the illusion question. Sure, there are probably bazillions of logical-looking answers a variety of philosophers can speak very intelligently so that you can back yourself on the back and pretend that you’re a perfectly rational being. But at the bottom of any such argument lies an assumption that the world as you are experiencing it is basically real. And so all such consolations are truly empty.
You may even console yourself by congratulating me on my ability to produce hypothetical situations, but you might remind me that the probability of the illusion theory being right is freakishly low. But there’s no way to calculate such a probability. Any argument along those lines will, if carefully examined, lead back to a basic assumption that everything is usually about what it seems. So even dismissing illusion as improbable has no logical basis.
In the end the illusion question is unanswerable. We have nothing we can say to prove that we are not in a fake world, or even that we are probably not in a fake world. We have no more logical basis for believing that we are where we think we are, than for believing that we are all jelly donuts floating around a cosmic cappuccino machine with a penchant for wry jokes.
And yet we’re not all paralyzed by these problems of knowing. The fact is that each of us, at the end of the day, actually knows in some inexplicable way that we exist in what we appear to be existing it. We know in a way we cannot reasonably articulate (though we may be able to con ourselves into believing that we can reasonably articulate it) that this existence of ours is real.
For me, my God is the same way. I can ask all the questions I want. I can go down mental paths that lead to belief in him. I can go down mental paths that lead to belief in his non-existence. I can go down paths that lead nowhere as well.
But at the end of the day, such speculation is just as unanswerable as my five-year-old nightmare of endless endings. When the noise of argument fades from my weary brain, I am faced with the frightening and comforting knowledge that I know that he is, and that he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. Any attempt to get myself to think otherwise is nothing more than a mental attempt at running away. No matter how much I may play with the idea, at the end of it all I cannot escape the awareness I have.
Faith is the decision to be at home where we’ve been placed, living in the kindergarten of epistemology.
kindergarten epistemology
I have wrestled my entire life with epistemology. I hardly doubt that will change. I remember strange questions I would ask myself back in our little apartment in Venezuela, before I was five years old. But the strangest question, one that has come back to me in an endless repetition, first disturbed me on the beach.
I was digging about in the sand when one of my parents, which it was is not important, told me that it was time to leave. I thought to myself that despite the hour or so of beachy memories, the only thing I currently knew I was experiencing was the act of wrenching myself reluctantly away from what I had previously been doing. Perhaps, I thought, there never really was an hour of playing on the beach. Perhaps that was simply an illusion, or an implanted memory. I thought back to the fact that every good time I could remember had to at some point come to an end, and I thought a much darker thought: what if all the “good times” I believed I had experienced were nothing more than implanted memories. What if my entire life had been much shorter than I had been lead to believe; what if all that I had really experienced was just an endless series of wrenchings away from one thing after another? What if my life really consisted only of low-level psychological torture, being pulled away from everything the moment I began to enjoy it? If this was so, the memories were not cherished mementos, but rather cruel illusions which served the function of making me cooperate over and over and over, stringing me along with the promise of more good times to come.
I don’t think I was a completely normal child.
Variants on this basic theme exist everywhere. There are gurus who will tell you that life is an illusion. A book called “The Secret” promises that life is nothing but the sum total of all the things you mentally attract to yourself. And of course there’s “The Matrix.”
There is no logical answer to the illusion question. Sure, there are probably bazillions of logical-looking answers a variety of philosophers can speak very intelligently so that you can back yourself on the back and pretend that you’re a perfectly rational being. But at the bottom of any such argument lies an assumption that the world as you are experiencing it is basically real. And so all such consolations are truly empty.
You may even console yourself by congratulating me on my ability to produce hypothetical situations, but you might remind me that the probability of the illusion theory being right is freakishly low. But there’s no way to calculate such a probability. Any argument along those lines will, if carefully examined, lead back to a basic assumption that everything is usually about what it seems. So even dismissing illusion as improbable has no logical basis.
In the end the illusion question is unanswerable. We have nothing we can say to prove that we are not in a fake world, or even that we are probably not in a fake world. We have no more logical basis for believing that we are where we think we are, than for believing that we are all jelly donuts floating around a cosmic cappuccino machine with a penchant for wry jokes.
And yet we’re not all paralyzed by these problems of knowing. The fact is that each of us, at the end of the day, actually knows in some inexplicable way that we exist in what we appear to be existing it. We know in a way we cannot reasonably articulate (though we may be able to con ourselves into believing that we can reasonably articulate it) that this existence of ours is real.
For me, my God is the same way. I can ask all the questions I want. I can go down mental paths that lead to belief in him. I can go down mental paths that lead to belief in his non-existence. I can go down paths that lead nowhere as well.
But at the end of the day, such speculation is just as unanswerable as my five-year-old nightmare of endless endings. When the noise of argument fades from my weary brain, I am faced with the frightening and comforting knowledge that I know that he is, and that he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. Any attempt to get myself to think otherwise is nothing more than a mental attempt at running away. No matter how much I may play with the idea, at the end of it all I cannot escape the awareness I have.
Faith is the decision to be at home where we’ve been placed, living in the kindergarten of epistemology.
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