What’s Out There

“For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing, because our days upon earth are a shadow” (Job 8:9, KJV).

“And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3).

A friend told philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that the ancients believed the sun orbited the earth because it “obviously” looked as though it did.

“Well,” replied Wittgenstein, “what would it have looked like if it looked as though the earth was rotating?” 

The sun appears to circle the earth, which sure looks, feels, and acts as if it were motionless. After all, why don’t birds in the sky lag behind as the ground slides by below? Or why doesn’t a ball thrown upward veer westward? This, however, is crawl stuff compared to the earth’s (67,000 mph or 108,000 km/h) orbit around the sun, its (500,000 mph or 805,000 km/h) loop around the center of the Milky Way, and its (1,500,000 mph/ 2,414,000 km/h) ride along the expanding universe. Yet our senses no better reveal to us these dizzying speeds than they do the barrage of forces that move not only all around us but right through us, and at much faster speeds, too. 

Such as your neighbor Ralph’s Facebook post about his recent hip replacement (or, if you don’t have a neighbor Ralph with a new hip, then someone else’s Facebook post, email, text, or phone call about whatever) zipping through you at speed c, the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second (299,792,458 meters per second), though you hear, see, or feel none of them even if they’re as real and as close (perhaps?) as your own consciousness.

That’s just human-made stuff. Outer space continuously showers down millions, billions, trillions of subatomic particles (muons, neutrinos, cosmic rays) onto us, even if we are as oblivious to them as we are to our immersion at the bottom of a magnetic field that arises out of the earth and—like neutrinos (100 trillion per second) and Ralph’s Facebook post—passes right through our bodies.

Body Works

And speaking of our bodies, they are 37 trillion (give or take a trillion or two) cells, each a hubbub of movement, collisions, vibrations, creation, destruction, recycling, and messaging. Yet we no more sense this messaging, recycling, destruction, creation, and movement that compose our very being (as he was dying, atheist Christopher Hitchens said, “I don’t have a body, I am a body”)¹ any more than we can sense a dust storm on the exoplanet Wolfe 1061C. Besides, even if the dust storm on Wolfe 1061C began “right now” (not really a cogent idea in this context), it would be 14 years before that reality interacted with our senses to begin with.

And a lot of good that often does anyway. Besides deceiving us about our supersonic trek through the cosmos, as well as leaving us clueless about the barrage of forces from all directions around us and in us, our senses flutter and flounder before brute matter itself. It’s almost cliché to talk about how matter feels (solid, continuous) to us, even though atoms are mostly empty space—like a pea (the nucleus) in a stadium (the electrons orbiting it). Yet that model is too simplistic, perhaps even wrong. Many quantum physicists believe that, instead of existing in a single place, with a definite position, a subatomic particle should be understood as a “probability wave,” smeared out over a larger area, and then, only when we measure it, does the wave collapse into a specific place as a single particle. In the quantum realm, our senses don’t merely retrieve what’s out there; they help create it.

Meanwhile, what’s “out there,” in the macro realm, is radically transformed before entering “in here,” that is, in our heads. Our eyes can’t see any more than telescopes or microscopes can. They are mere conduits for capturing light waves reflected off of whatever before us is opaque enough and big enough to reflect the shards of light that our two peepholes can absorb. Which, in contrast to the spectrum of light waves out there, is like a single weave in the canvas of Picasso’s Guernica, compared to the whole work of art itself (in fact, it’s not even that much, not even close). These third-person light waves are, then, translated into a mix of chemicals and electricity that neurons supernaturally (how else?) convert into first-person consciousness.

Earthly and Heavenly Things

So the question is: How much is lost, twisted, bowdlerized, etc., between what’s out there and what we—fallen, corrupted beings 6,000 years from the tree of life—experience of what’s out there? And in what ways does that difference distort our understanding of truth?

“But since we are who we are,” writes Thomas Nagel, “we can’t get outside of ourselves completely. Whatever we do, we remain subparts of the world with limited access to the real nature of the rest of it and of ourselves. There is no way of telling how much of reality lies beyond the reach of present or future objectivity or any other conceivable form of human understanding.”²

Despite our fallible sensory gear and the limits of our logic in interpreting what our fallible sensory gear delivers to us, the edifice of our Adventist faith remains strong.

Sure, Paul was expounding on love, not on epistemology, when he wrote, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). The word for “dimly,” ainigmati, means mediated, not fully understood, like an enigma, a riddle—certainly an accurate depiction regarding our knowledge about truth, including, maybe even especially, spiritual truth. As Jesus said: “If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things?” (John 3:12). Yet Jesus also said: “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3). Knowledge, even about God (“heavenly things”) is, obviously, possible, however ainigmati we come to that knowledge.

Earthly things can be hard enough, thank you. “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.”³ It’s not that they don’t believe 1 + 1 = 2; they just can’t prove it, just as I cannot prove (“deductively justify”) the death and resurrection of Jesus. Please, a simple math equation—and the resurrection 2,000 years ago of one man from a tomb whose location we can only guess at? Hardly equivalent, to be sure. But still, neither can be deductively justified.

It gets worse. Logic itself—which helps us understand the distorted and limited experiences that our senses give us—cannot be justified, at least without using logic itself, the very thing under question. It’s like a scale weighing itself.

How “valid” (a term from formal logic) are the tools—i.e., inference, consistency, validity, soundness, the law of noncontradiction, the law of the excluded middle, the law of identity—of reason itself, the principles we use to try to understand what our senses so ainigmati, incompletely, and often erroneously give us, from the start? We don’t reason to these tools, we reason from them, which would be fine if we could prove them true, but the only way to do that is to assume them first—and assuming what we want to prove is not a particularly logical way to reason. (Oops! The meaning of “logical” is precisely what we’re seeking to define to begin with.)

Circles

How, then, do we get out of this vicious circle? (Even wanting out implies logic, which pulls us in more deeply.) We can’t, but don’t need to. We can believe in what we cannot prove, or even understand. We do it all the time, more in the secular realm than in the spiritual one. It’s called “faith,” which greases everything we do.

“The just shall live by faith” (Rom. 1:17; Gal. 3:11; Heb. 10:38). The unjust, the saved, the lost, the indifferent—everyone does. From stepping onto a Boeing 787 Dreamliner to trusting that our sins have been forgiven, we live by faith. Often that faith is justified; often, not. A lot more false teachings than true ones are accepted by faith simply because more false teachings than true ones exist out there. A Mormon who believes that the Garden of Eden was located in Jackson Country, Missouri, United States, does so by faith, as does the Seventh-day Adventist who believes that the dead sleep until the resurrection.

Despite our fallible sensory gear and the limits of our logic in interpreting what our fallible sensory gear delivers to us, the edifice of our Adventist faith remains strong. Though we cannot prove the existence of a Creator God, much less the truth of the three angels’ messages, we still have great reasons for believing anyway.

Sure, the earth seems motionless, matter feels solid, and logic appears rational. But seems, feels, and appears are not necessarily the same thing as is. Whatever we know, or think we know, about what is “out there,” faith is a logical part of the mix, no matter how much faith we put into that logic to begin with.