Salvaging Some Knowledge

Good thoughts from Ed’s latest post:

One of the biggest problems I run into is this knee-jerk reaction that our cultural substrate is the human default. It seems nobody wants to understand that what we have today is an anomaly, an intellectual tradition more radically different from all others than any of the rest are from each other. With this faulty assumption comes a typical Western Christian attitude that the Scripture canon is the compendium of all there is to know about the things it addresses. It was never meant to be that. It was the narrative of one particular nation and reflected what they had to know for their own covenant with God. Some of that narrative trumps all others, but not every bit of it.

So while I have a big objection to introducing Lilith into the Eden narrative because it changes the entire meaning of the story completely, that doesn’t mean every item of external mythology is relentlessly evil. You shall know them by their moral fruit, not so much by their words. Labels are fungible; the moral character of God is not. Our Western heritage has elevated the meaning of “truth” to some self-existent deity equal to our Creator. We tend to think language is objective, too. The folks who gave us the Bible would snicker at such nonsense.

One thing I may clarify about what I think he’s talking about here—and he may not agree with me—is the relevance of objective vs. subjective truth(s). I would argue that though God is an objective truth (and I would argue the only objective truth), and we as humans can only apprehend God subjectively, i.e., we can only experience Him, not “know” Him in the same manner we know our own name.

The only person who knows the objective truth about God is God. And this reflexively makes categorical sense: God, as perfect being, would necessarily have perfect knowledge of Himself, and as the only perfect being in existence He would also be the only one with the ability to apprehend Himself as an object, as a noumena proper. The fact that God is an object is really irrelevant in a practical sense, then, except for the bit of knowledge we can glean that He is ultimately unknowable, which also means He’s infinitely experienceable: there is no end to our experience of Him.

I’d be better at this in some respects if I knew my Kant a little more thoroughly—who does, though? The man probably had a brain tumor. Words are going to fail at the end if we’re talking about a thing so abstract and barely conceivable. I’m just doing the best I can with the tools I have.