Older, but no wiser
Andy Borrows' musings on life and all its confusion, contradictions, richness and opportunities
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
Truth
AKMA got me thinking about Truth. Not just simple truth but absolute Truth. The kind people are sometimes willing to die for.
I'm still struggling to put into words how I cope with the conundrum of my own faith in one God, and my acknowledgement of other faiths. If I'm right, aren't the others all wrong? And if I'm not right, then why do I bother? AKMA puts it so much more clearly than I can, but here in my clumsy and half-baked words is my contribution, originally posed as a comment in AKMA's blog:
I have a feeling that the human perception of what we call Truth is rather one dimensional. Let me try and explain – not easy, as the point I’m ultimately going to make is that the explanation is impossible to understand!
When trying to explain dimensions greater than three to a non-mathematician, the analogy of a one-dimensional world is sometimes used. Suppose we were a one dimensional people living in a one dimensional world. (Ignore for the moment the difficulty of actually having any physical substance to our being other than a point or a line). The concept of space would be, well, inconceivable. The whole of existence would be a linear continuum with nothing able to change its relative position to anything else (unless perhaps quantum-mechanical tunnelling operates in this hypothetical one dimensional world). The range of possibilities would be restricted to say the least.
I think our human ideas of Truth are in some way akin to this. We can only understand truth in the context of the universe we inhabit, and our understanding of how it works. The whole of human knowledge, thought, philosophy condensed down as it were into one dimension.
What if, while we remain one-dimensional, God is three-dimensional? We discuss and argue what goes on in our little linear world, without the faintest notion of what its *really* like in that three dimensional universe. How can the language and thought processes of one dimension possibly reflect 3D Truth?
This to my mind is what Paul wrote of in his famous letter to the church at Corinth: “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known”.
But, for now, we remain one-dimensional, so as I said at the beginning, my hypothesis remains incomprehensible.
I'm still struggling to put into words how I cope with the conundrum of my own faith in one God, and my acknowledgement of other faiths. If I'm right, aren't the others all wrong? And if I'm not right, then why do I bother? AKMA puts it so much more clearly than I can, but here in my clumsy and half-baked words is my contribution, originally posed as a comment in AKMA's blog:
I have a feeling that the human perception of what we call Truth is rather one dimensional. Let me try and explain – not easy, as the point I’m ultimately going to make is that the explanation is impossible to understand!
When trying to explain dimensions greater than three to a non-mathematician, the analogy of a one-dimensional world is sometimes used. Suppose we were a one dimensional people living in a one dimensional world. (Ignore for the moment the difficulty of actually having any physical substance to our being other than a point or a line). The concept of space would be, well, inconceivable. The whole of existence would be a linear continuum with nothing able to change its relative position to anything else (unless perhaps quantum-mechanical tunnelling operates in this hypothetical one dimensional world). The range of possibilities would be restricted to say the least.
I think our human ideas of Truth are in some way akin to this. We can only understand truth in the context of the universe we inhabit, and our understanding of how it works. The whole of human knowledge, thought, philosophy condensed down as it were into one dimension.
What if, while we remain one-dimensional, God is three-dimensional? We discuss and argue what goes on in our little linear world, without the faintest notion of what its *really* like in that three dimensional universe. How can the language and thought processes of one dimension possibly reflect 3D Truth?
This to my mind is what Paul wrote of in his famous letter to the church at Corinth: “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known”.
But, for now, we remain one-dimensional, so as I said at the beginning, my hypothesis remains incomprehensible.
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