You must be thinking, climates and religion? What in the world do they have in common?
Well, allow me to explain. I consider myself quite curious and over the past couple of years I’ve often found myself engaging with Christians from different places and denominations. One of my favorite conversations center around trying to understand where the other person is coming from and what forms the basis for their faith in a deity. While most of the folks use the same words and language and are able to meaningfully converse about ideas with some degree of certainty that they’re talking about the same thing, if you pay close attention, you’ll realize that a lot of them believe in quite different things.
Almost like local micro-climates. Just like how a single locality can have an overall climate, with distinct micro-climates that can be different from the overall climate, most people under the umbrella title of a particular denomination believe in different things when pressed on the details.
Here’s a little example. In my conversations, I was privileged to talk to a neuroscientist from U-Pitt who’s a card-carrying Christian. He was devoted to the faith and loved exploring the intersection of faith and science. Overtime I came to understand that he had found ways to reconcile his scientific understanding with his faith in god. To him, scriptural statements that claimed factual information about the world – statements that he believed were better explained by science – were meant to be taken metaphorically, perhaps a moral lesson or simply evocative imagery like that in all good books. All this while halfway across the world in my little hometown people of the same faith, people who read the exact same scripture would insist that these statements reflect the absolute truth. That there can be no mis-understanding or subjective interpretation of scripture.
Which one of them is right if only one of them can be right? How do you determine who is right or which approach is right? What’s the one reliable method to arrive at the answer? Is there such a method/tool?
Then there are those who suggest that it matters only that people agree on the core ideas or tenets of the faith. Interpretations of text that are not fundamental to a life of faith are immaterial to the faith and can be discussed and attempted to be understood but there is no need to worry about getting a concrete answer here on earth. Fair, but it seems like such low hanging fruit for what is supposed to be the greatest truth in the universe if it really is true. Why can’t it be crystal clear, sharp and glaringly evident for something that if true is essentially the most important truth?
It seems like we as humans just can’t escape subjectivity. Like money, it seems absolute, grounded and real if enough people agree to give it value and treat it like a fact. Or like human rights. Where are human rights written and who is writing them? Isn’t the reality that we all simply agree to believe that they exist, and the general course of history seems to prove that it’s been a good assumption that has tended to improve the general welfare of a large number of people. Or so it seems. Some people would say it’s up for debate.
All this leads me to believe that humans are simply condemned to subjectivity. We explain what we see and experience through the lens of knowledge that we have accumulated until today. Once upon a time St. Augustine viewed Plato’s theory of forms as the cutting edge of metaphysics. And so shaped much of our understanding of Christianity.
Every day, every year, every century we learn more than we ever knew before. Once upon a time it seemed that the sun revolved around the earth, and we found it to be in concurrence with scripture. Years later, along came Galileo who in a famous letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany said that god reveals himself through both nature and scripture. His contention was that if our interpretation of scripture leads us to a conclusion that is in contradiction with nature, then it is not scripture that is incorrect but our understanding that needs revision. Well put, but when will the revision end? Once upon a time people went on with their life with absolutely no clue that two whole continents that they didn’t know of existed across the Atlantic.
Then along came Christopher Columbus a brilliant and daring explorer and a class A moron all at the same time. Then there was even a time when people believed disease was due to “bad” blood and that you had to bleed yourself out to get better. Along came germ theory. It seems like the most accurate statement is to say that we’ve got almost everything wrong historically. It is also accurate to say that our understanding is getting better. Humans are condemned to be subjective simply because the pursuit of knowledge seems to be never ending and if it is never ending, if we can never say “Now I know and understand everything”, then the best we can say today is perhaps. Maybe. It seems as though
