I once got this fortune in a cookie: “It was when you found out you could make mistakes that you knew you were onto something.” It’s not the most eloquent fortune ever, but it is a lesson worth remembering.

There is a planet in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books that couldn’t see the stars, and their understanding of the world didn’t include the rest of the universe. When they finally flew out of their dust cloud and saw the stars, they were confronted with something that didn’t fit in their worldview, and they responded simply, “It’ll have to go.” The whole rest of the universe had to go, so their flawed worldview could persist.

I suppose you could understand this as some commentary on simple-minded religion. But I think it touches my own life more nearly as I observe one of my most logical and beloved friends confront the possibility that the theories he has had about some of the most important aspects of life are just plain wrong. Will he decide to favor real-world experiences, flexibility, and tangible application of his principles in the actual situation of his life? Or will he walk away from mountains of information and things of great value for the sake of preserving a theory that will probably never line up with real life? (He doesn’t read my blog, but I guess this is sortof dedicated to him. I hope it helps others like me and my friend.) Becoming an adult looks a little different for each of us. We must learn who we are, and how our greatest strengths can also be our greatest weaknesses.

Today’s entry is for the abstract thinkers:

At some point in our lives we must all realize that real life is not abstract. The real people around us are not abstract. Our real job, our real homes, our real opportunities and obligations are not abstract. The person we marry is not a generic “wife.” She is a unique individual. Models may help us conceptualize the world, but if we live as though the model is actually reality, we will look insane and hurt people and be quite bad at life. (“First, assume a spherical cow.”)

Unfortunately, contemporary society has separated people from the realness of their lives. I have a friend who sometimes says that social norms are very important because it is unfair to ask everyone to think through how to react to every situation from scratch. Not everyone is inclined to think seriously about the consequences of their actions. So if the elite class say to everyone, “Just do what seems best to you,” some people are better equipped than others to figure out what’s best. But social norms provide everyone with a set of expectations that they don’t have to think through from scratch. In previous decades, for example, folks found it easier to get married. It was like getting a job. You had to do it, and the process was much less mysterious: that girl you’re such good friends with? Marry her! Done. Happy for seventy years. Move on to actually constructing an adult life together. These days, everyone is left trying to figure out that process from scratch, without the help of being surrounded by a particular culture with expectations.

Expectations benefit those of us who are more impulsive, those who don’t like to think, those who aren’t so bright. But there’s another group who really can’t cope without social norms and expectations. And moreover, when they finally find themselves confronted by those helpful cultural expectations, they basically implode, because they’ve been stuck in their own heads too long:

The abstract thinkers.

The trouble with being an abstract thinker is that, in the absence of social norms to follow, when they are left to fill in the gaps and start from scratch, they go overboard. They run the risk of doing all the work in their own heads, at the level of theory, so that they can end up with something totally inappropriate for the real world.

They may be more inclined to trust their own reasoning and their own mash-up of ideas pulled from other theoretical sources than they are inclined to trust anyone’s actual experiences. Not their own, not those around them. They’ve used theory to form a set of rules, but those rules are necessarily simplistic. The real world requires a lot of flexibility that theory cannot account for. Go read Antigone and ask yourself if you are the character Creon.

Abstract thinkers are at risk of jettisoning massive amounts of data for the sake of preserving their theory and rationalizing their erroneous worldview. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve done it.

Well, so far, this has all been quite abstract. I can’t make it less abstract right now without telling long stories. But learning this lesson has changed my life, and I hope it can change yours.

One God:

 

We all worship the God of Abraham

 

A question for adherents to any of the world’s monotheistic religions: Do you believe that we are all worshiping the same God by different names? 

A lot of people say “yes!” Allah is just God in a different language, not the name of a different god! That much is true, and I’d love it if everyone could get past that particular elementary hurdle. In a way, because Islam, Judaism, and Christianity all claim that there is only one God, they cannot be worshiping different gods. 

Monotheism is a doctrine of God which states that there is only one God, or, put another way, that God is one. That subtle difference in phrasing is meant to highlight the idea that if there is only one God, that being, since it is absolute, cannot be a predicate. Or put another way, there isn’t a man-made definition of “God” and we’ve only found one being which fits that definition, but rather God precedes any descriptions, being God first and described second. As my favorite professor of Medieval Theology puts it, “We know there is a type of thing which we call a dodo, and at some point in history there was only the last dodo left. One dodo. monododoism? But, there isn’t a type of thing which we call God, of which there is only one.” Rather, the singularity of God is a predicate to God’s existence.

Anselm of Canterbury suggests that God is “that than which nothing greater can be imagined.” Logically, then, God must be one. First, imagine a being as great and as powerful as you can, say an omnipotent being. (Nothing is more powerful than an omnipotent being.) Now, add a second one. Two omnipotent beings? Nope. It’s logically impossible (sorry Star Trek, I don’t buy the Q). Each being’s power is bounded by the other being’s power. So, anything worth being called “God” would have to be unique. 

If God exists, there can be only one. If there can be only one, then all monotheistic religions are, in a sense, worshiping the same being. 

On the other hand, it may be contended that this one being has whatever particular attributes it has and those who know it according to those attributes know the being, and everyone else knows only a fantasy. If I say the One True God has red hair and you say the One True God has black hair, and the One True God in fact has black hair, then you worship the One True God, and I worship nobody. There is no such being as the one I imagine (a One True God with red hair).

Not One God:

I want to try out an analogy. I’d love feedback.

I argue that a religion may be defined as a system of beliefs and practices which aims at conquering, somehow, the problem of evil in the world, whatever that evil is understood to be. We will allow that, for the most part, religions are internally consistent. They make sense on their own terms. One such term common to most religions is that of exclusive possession of absolute or salvific truth. The claims we make about God affect the ways we interact with God and pursue “salvation.”

The Analogy:

Imagine we are playing an arcade game: one of those where we throw little basket balls at a distant hole. Imagine that there is a partition between us and the hole, so that we cannot see it. Imagine that we have a choice of objects of different shapes and sizes to throw at it. Only one type of object will fit into the hole; and when we pay for the game, we must choose a type. The hole is of a definite size and shape.

I believe the hole is big and circular, so I choose to throw beach balls at it. You believe the hole is small and square, so you choose to throw little blocks at it. We agree there is a hole beyond the partition. We believe in the same hole.

But in some ways, we don’t believe in the same hole, and our beliefs about the hole cause us to act in different ways, because winning the game depends on throwing the appropriate shapes at the hole. We believe in different holes. Our differences matter a great deal.

Someone will come along and say, Why can’t there be a hole big enough to accommodate all the things we might throw at it? All analogies have their failings. But that isn’t what I’m discussing above. I am discussing three monotheistic religions, each of which claims exclusivity. There is a separate argument to be had between universalist pluralists (such as Buddhists) on the one side and all exclusive religions (whether or not they are monotheistic) on the other. Another day.