“Oh, of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that he exists. Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars. Everything that seems real, is merely part of the illusion.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
I don’t know if God exists. I think he might, maybe, in some totally different way to how anyone thinks He does. But I don’t know. I do know, however, that I used to think I knew. There was a time when I was convinced he existed. And another when I was convinced He didn’t.
But this isn’t a post about God. Rather, about what He represents. What we think we know. What we believe. What we are sure about.
And we are all sure about something. Each of us—whether we like to admit it or not—has a truth that we will never admit to anyone. Things we believe that influence our lives in one way or another.
Superstition is a great example. It’s easy to be superstitious because the barrier to belief is so low. For me, at least, I justify the belief with a simple risk-reward scenario. Breaking a mirror is objectively bad. In such a case, I will no longer have a mirror, or that I will have tiny shards of glass to clean up. But deep down, there is a part of me that simply believes that it’s bad luck.
This isn’t an intellectual belief. I know that, as far as my conscious mind is concerned, it’s bullshit; there is no way that breaking a piece of reflective glass somehow triggers a punishment from the Universe. But, outside of that, there is the feeling it might. It doesn’t have to make sense—it can’t—but it’s there. As clear as the reflection itself.
That’s not to say there isn’t an intellectual case for things that may sit outside of the order our society has collectively imagined. There is. And it’s a lot harder to grasp than one might think.
We need to start with things that are a little bit easier to comprehend. Law is a good example. It is something that we made up. A fabrication — an important one, no doubt— that enables us to work together. It lays a framework of what is accepted and not accepted so that we can extrapolate the world’s most important commodity. Trust.
Laws are an agreed framework within which we can conduct business and progress as a society. Without it, the costs of working together are simply too high to be able to move forward at any meaningful pace. It is a completely necessary paradigm that slowly adjusts to society as it needs to. Easy.
But what about mathematics? Surely that’s not so easily passed off as fiction. We use it every day for very important things. If it was a fiction, how would we be able to make planes consistently fly? Or be able to push the sciences forward at all?
Well, it is fiction. A beautiful fiction and, indeed, a useful one. But it’s a fiction nevertheless. Not quite as easy right?
It describes something that is real though. And that’s the critical difference. Mathematics is a made-up language used to describe the inherent order of the Universe.
The thing is, almost everything in our society is a fiction. A created mechanism that we use to navigate the world. It has to be. Because they are built upon abstractions. They may be close to real, but they will always be one layer away from reality. Why? Because we can only interpret reality through senses that have undergone millions of years of editing.
Our vision has evolved to see more shades of green than any other colour. This was an evolutionary advantage when spotting prey or predators in the wild. But that’s not to say that there are more shades of green than other colours. We just see more. Our hearing has an audible range. We hear far less than dogs.
And even our instrumentation is limited by our understanding of the Universe, which is most definitely not complete. There exists so much more than we can detect.
Our consciousness will always be a limiting factor. We will always only be able to conceive just that much less than what exists. Because we are a part of it. Our understanding is like space itself, expanding into an impossibly large void with the promise of infinity. But never the realisation of it.
Keeping an open mind, then, is imperative. Because things change, as do perspectives. What seems real now is only an insight away from being unreal, and only a realization away from a lie. What seems impossible is only a discovery away from possible, and only a consensus away from the truth.
It makes sense, then, to entertain possibilities rather than reject them. And to clutch our beliefs loosely. Because, if we don’t, we might just miss out on something important. We might miss the puzzle piece that makes everything else make sense.
We need to stay fluid, for God’s sake.
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