Replies

And, since I have thought about it a bit more, I will add this:

There seem to be a few who comment on these threads who insist that even though something is not known, it is understandable.

I have thought about this for a great many years, and it was with great reluctance I finally admitted that there are things I could never understand.

There are things which are not known and are not understandable.

Certainly you both agree that there is at least one thing that is known but is not understandable:

Faith

regards,
djf

Thank you so much for your post!

There seem to be a few who comment on these threads who insist that even though something is not known, it is understandable. I have thought about this for a great many years, and it was with great reluctance I finally admitted that there are things I could never understand. There are things which are not known and are not understandable. Certainly you both agree that there is at least one thing that is known but is not understandable: Faith.

Indeed. Moreover, God Himself cannot be fully known or fully understood. On this point I agree with the Eastern Orthodox folk around here that He is infinitely incomprehensible and incomprehensibly infinite. Nevertheless, He has revealed some of Himself – in the Scriptures, in Jesus Christ, in the indwelling Spirit and in the creation itself.

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. – Psalms 19:1

But the language of the universe is not English or Latin or Greek, but mathematics. Betty boop used this quote from Galileo in his book II saggiatore (“The Assayer”) to make that very point:

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these one is wandering in a dark labyrinth.

So, as you described in your example at post 909 on this other thread - the meaning of the creation declaration by God is in the “eye of the beholder” – or more specifically, in the language one understands and his willingness to receive the message.

The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.

Einstein's speech 'My Credo' to the German League of Human Rights, Berlin, autumn 1932, Einstein: A Life in Science, Michael White and John Gribbin, page 262

There are things which are not known and are not understandable.

Granted, djf, that like you, I understand that there is a virtually limitless number of things that I do not understand, some of them already known to me; but considering all there is to know, most of them not. We call this: the human condition. I share and have to live by the same rules as you and anybody else in this regard.

Still, we all have to get along as best we can in a state of contingency and partial knowledge.

And so I do not agree that there is but “one thing” that is known but is not understandable: Faith.

Faith is something that can definitely be understood, or “known” – by any human being willing to consider the foundation of his own ideas. And faith is not only eminently understandable, but necessary to the integration of human personality. Here I refer the reader back to the ideas of contingency and partial knowledge and suggest that these must and do affect the conduct of a rational, just, honorable human life. In the end, we all seem to need more than we can supply for ourselves. Then perhaps we might recognize that the needed “completion principle” comes from outside of ourselves. I like to think it is the special province of the Holy Spirit, “at large” and very active in the present world – as ever.

Perhaps Isaac Newton would agree with that “observation.”

Thank you so much for writing!