Jen sent me this quotation the other day and it was one of those things that make you go Hmmmm. In the cozy, narrow little world I grew up in, the philosophy of men (read, humans) was highly suspect, and still is, which is too bad because it's not all blather. Philosophy isn't one of those things I studied in school or read now, but I know a fair amount of basic theology, orthodox and otherwise, and I have to agree with the following:
The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.
—Soren Kierkegaard
Obviously, this is something of an oversimplification, but the idea is sound. It's not easy practicing what you preach—or even just what you believe, no matter how simple the principles.
The Bible's a very complex book, but the underlying principles in it aren't. The Ten Commandments and Mosaic law can all pretty much be boiled down to love God, love each other, love yourself but not too much, and that's the main message of the New Testament too. The rest is explication of the Plan in simple if somewhat symbolic language. And yet scholarship is always trying to muddy it up, asking any number of irrelevant questions about the infamous number of angels on the point of pin. Scholarship, Biblical and otherwise, employs logic and reason to decipher ideas and beliefs that aren't very logical or reasonable, but nonetheless true.
The older I get, the more I realize you can't use logic and reason to explain all the precepts of faith, which bugs the hell out of many scientists. Science and religion are two separate disciplines, two separate approaches to the world, and they intersect and sometimes overlap, but they're not congruent. This is where people get into trouble and end up with overly simplistic ideas like Creationism, or dismissing totally out of hand an idea like Intelligent Design. Denying scientific facts, like the place of the sun in the solar system, just makes faith look gullible; relying solely on the physical manifestations of facts to explain phenomena deprives science of an avenue of inquiry. Sometimes asking why is as fruitful as asking how.
Humans have this drive to explain everything and tie it all up in neat packages. We also have a much better opinion of our own intelligence than is probably warranted. It's good to remember that we don't know everything yet, and probably never will. In the meanwhile, it's good to keep in mind the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald:
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
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