A Glass Darkly

Here’s a weird thought: I can see other faces directly, but not my own. In a mirror, or in a picture, yes—but, directly, face to face—never. And that’s because my face itself is doing the looking. It’s an anatomical manifestation of the self-referential paradox, which does to logic what an autoimmune disease does to the body.

Take the following line: “This sentence is false.” If so, and the sentence is false, then it must be true (because, as it says about itself—it is false); if the sentence is true, however, then it must be false, because that is what it says about itself: it is false.

Is the sentence, then, true or false? (Good luck on this one.)

This paradox was likely behind these lines by Dru Johnson: “Alfred Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica (volume 1) is one such attempt. Over the course of a 700-page book, they attempt to deductively justify that 1 + 1 = 2. Alas, Whitehead and Russell were not ultimately successful.”[1]

Not ultimately successful? This doesn’t mean that 1 + 1 = 2 is not true, but only that we can’t prove it. And if we can’t prove that 1 + 1 = 2, which we know must be true, then what about other truths, somewhat less a priori than 1 + 1 = 2, that we know are true but can’t prove, such as the existence of God? 

The Limits of Human Knowledge

The world doesn’t give us easy access to it, does it? I mean, if we can’t see even our own faces directly, what else is hidden from us? What else don’t we know? Right now, depending on where you live, there might be hundreds, if not thousands, of cell phone calls or text message signals going not only around you but, likely, through you, too, and though they are as real as these words, you can’t see them any more than you can see, at least directly, your own face.

There’s so much we don’t know, even if every generation prides itself on how more knowledgeable it is than the ones before it. What the smartest in one age deemed true the most ignorant in the next know isn’t. It’s hard to imagine, for instance, the nineteenth-century intellectual buffoonery that ridiculed Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis’ suggestion that, perhaps, the high mortality rate of mothers after giving birth could be lowered if the attending physicians, having just conducted autopsies, would wash their hands before delivering the babies.

Or imagine those poor saps over the millennia who, looking up at the sky, actually thought that the sun orbited the earth—and daily, too. (Though one could wonder: How differently would the sky appear if the sun did orbit the earth—and daily, too?)

How many accepted scientific theories of the past (phrenology, physiognomy, palmistry, astrology) are now deemed foolishness? “My own father was alive and well,” wrote scholar Daniel Robinson in 2015, “when the best minds in physics regarded nothing as more certain than the aether. The same term today seems as if it were taken from astrology.”[2]

There’s so much we don’t know, even if every generation prides itself on how more knowledgeable it is than the ones before it. 

A young student in Germany, in the late 1800s, wanting to study physics, was discouraged by a professor who said that, except for a few details, everything had already been discovered. Ignoring the advice, Max Planck went on to uncover quantum physics, which started a revolution that, to this day, has derailed our most basic notions about reality and how the world works.

In the early twentieth century Albert Einstein dismantled humanity’s long-held notion of space and time as absolute and independent entities, coming up, instead, with “spacetime.” In this century, however, Scientific American has run articles titled “Space: The Final Illusion”[3] and “Is Time an Illusion?”[4] Space, an illusion? Time, an illusion? What’s next?

The Word Reveals What Science Can’t

Things like this make Solomon’s 3,000-year-old words come to life: “When I applied my heart to know wisdom and to see the business that is done on earth, even though one sees no sleep day or night, then I saw all the work of God, that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. For though a man labors to discover it, yet he will not find it; moreover, though a wise man attempts to know it, he will not be able to find it” (Eccl. 8:16, 17).

My point? Though our age prides itself on its knowledge, especially compared to earlier days, how much of what we know is wrong and—(however depressing the thought) if time lasts another 100 years—how much of what we know will be laughed at by our great-great-grandchildren the way that we laugh at what our great-great-grandparents knew? (Imagine the hooting and boisterous hilarity coming over Darwin and evolution.) It is an awfully big cosmos out there, and we’re awfully small in contrast; only God knows how much reality is beyond the reach of our telescopes, microscopes, particle-beam accelerators—our imaginations even. Having scratched surfaces (maybe?), we probably don’t even know where other surfaces are.

Were it not for the Word of God—which reveals realities that science, philosophy, logic, and art never could—we’d wallow in ignorance about the most important truths. Science might teach us how neurons fire, but not why we long for eternity (Eccl. 3:11); logic might lead us to a Creator, but not to the cross (John 3:16); philosophy might articulate our longing for hope, but can’t give it (Titus 2:13); and art might graphically depict death, but never defeat its grip on us (1 Cor. 15:26). Yet, thanks to the Word of God, we—who can’t prove that 1 + 1 = 2 or see our own faces directly—can still know what really matters.

[1] Dru Johnson, Biblical Philosophy: A Hebraic Approach to the Old and New Testaments, Kindle Edition, p. 60.

[2] Richard N. Williams and Daniel N. Robinson, Scientism: The New Orthodoxy, Kindle Edition, p. 30.

[3] Scientific American, Apr. 4, 2019.

[4] Scientific American, June 6, 2010.