Theology 1: Egocentric Predicament

For the indefinite future I want to think about theology. I know a bit about what the church has believed as well as what my church believes. But there are any number of issues where I am not entirely sure what Christians have believed on an issue. That may mean the issue is not yet fully decided.

I hope to dialog with the church as I go along, but I am more just wondering for now. I want to think about things, hoping that the Holy Spirit will help in the thinking and feeling.

One thing theologians debate is where to begin a discussion of theology.

God is the best answer and the one most often given.

But unfortunately, we have also become acutely aware of ourselves as knowers these last two hundred years or so. The post-modern situation has fomented this problem to a crisis.

So it seems that before we can begin our discussion of God, we must clear the air about prolegomena, things that should be said before beginning.

I am stuck in my head. I do not see the world as it is. I see the world as it appears to me. I filter it through the "dictionary" in my head that defines so much more than words.

Mary Douglas once said that "Dirt is matter out of place." It's true. I draw lines around my world and categorize things into boxes. I am not able to hold all the data of the world together as individual data in all its relationships to all other data. I have to schematize and categorize.

In early 97 when I was in Sierra Leone, I found myself witnessing on an afternoon with some nationals. I remember a moment of puzzlement when in the middle of a collection of houses, I suddenly found a hut. This was in the middle of a city, Freetown. House, house, hut, house. It was as if I were suddenly up country in a "primitive" village.

As we approached the hut, two girls returned from school. They both had uniforms on, like you would wear to a parochial school. I watched these girls stoop and enter the hut.

It was just weird to me. I couldn't put my finger on why but my surreal alarms were going off.

In retrospect, I believe what was wierd about this moment was the fact that my paradigms were in conflict. My brain was searching its files for the right category and it came up wanting. My paradigm of the city and of civilization was in conflict with my paradigm of the "primitive" and African village.

Clearly this was not a conflictual matter for any of these individuals.

Now I believe reality exists. I believe this by faith because I don't think I can absolutely prove anything other than "I think therefore I am" (or to be even more accurate, "thought" exists). In the evidentiary sense, therefore, I believe the world is real because this concept "works." I am, therefore, a pragmatic realist.

I evaluate the schemas that I bring to bear on the world on the basis of their use and ability to account for the data and to predict events. I believe the chair I sit on exists because my memory tells me that the things I call chairs have worked almost every time I've sat down (unless someone has pulled it back while I wasn't looking or unless I sat askance on it and fell off).

Therefore, from an evidentiary standpoint, I evaluate truth vs. falsity on the basis of 1. how well the truth proposal accounts for the data I have and 2. its ability to predict events or how well it corresponds to analogous events.

I must acknowledge, however, that I am stuck in my head. While I believe by faith that reality exists and that my mental schemas can correspond effectively to the world, my schemas are not absolute. They are "myths" I use to express the world, which must ultimately be consigned to mystery. These myths work and the better they are, the more precisely they predict events.

So I think the equation for distance in physics is distance equals velocity multiplied by time. Actually, that's a bad example. This equation is true by definition. If velocity is distance in relation to time, then by definition the time multiplied by the velocity yields distance.

This serendipidously leads me to a very important aside. There are a number of axioms about reality that I cannot prove but must assume to think logically. They are things like "any number times one equals that number." We should consider in a later entry whether the foundational nature of logic and number is a proof for the existence of God.

Anyway, by and large my schemas are exactly that, paradigms and mechanisms by which I process the world. I believe these can be better and worse. But ultimately they are more about me than about the world.

This is the starting point for discussing any "knowledge." I take a pragmatic realist position first: the greatest criterion for truth is whether that truth "works." Beyond that I affirm by faith a kind of "critical realist" position. I believe by faith that the world outside myself exists. I believe that my schemas of the world can adequately predict and explain the world, although they are ultimately functions of my head and not the actual reality of the world itself. The actual reality of the world must remain a mystery to me. And as Wittgenstein said, "Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent."

Of course that's never stopped me before... :)