The Feld-Blog

The 'Pious' reason away human inadequacy by attributing anything we cannot currently understand to God. If we cannot understand it, then we must not be meant to understand it. They couch their irrational rationalizations in romantic tones --  we were created in God's image; The Garden of Eden; Love thy neighbor as thyself. These ideas are appealing to many and they allow the clergy to fill in whichever intellectual conundrums baffle us today with a simple wave of their hands. It is an arbitrary answer without any particularly compelling raison d'etre. Belief, based on nothing more than that "someone told me so," or worse, "a book written two thousand years ago told me so," has lost its appeal to modern-day logicians. 

And so, 'Skeptics' arose, combatting religion with the cold hard bludgeon of logic. But skeptics, too, have their fallacies. They believe humans invented God. To them the death of the construct of God necessarily implies the apotheosis of man, but this cannot stand. Science is no less infallible than God. Our reliance on the force of logic is founded entirely on the idea that everything must function logically -- a shakey foundation at best. No amount of scientific research or logical induction will allow us to conclude that everything must obey the laws of science or that everything must function logically. To believe that everything must follow force of logic simply because logic dictates it is no more rational than believing the world bends to the will of God simply because someone wrote that down. 

Instead I believe we must learn to revel in human inadequacy. We do not know everything, and in all likelihood we never will. Even given an infinite amount of time, it is possible -- even likely -- than much of our world is simply beyond the capacities of human comprehension (appropriately enough, this so far includes the concept of infinity). This idea rang particularly true for me in the words of a fictional character. Saul Steinberg, himself a construction of Kurt Vonnegut's, once said, "What you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations," and this rings true for me. What I respond to in humanity is our struggle against our own limitations. We struggle to rationalize our world, to codify and quantify it despite our best intuitions that this effort necessarily has no conclusion. Humanity seems to be simply inadequate for the task it has assigned itself, and hence the creation of the deities of God and Science, within their respective eras, to calm our frustration. Then again, maybe that's not it. I don't know. :)