How do you know?

Ok, so this post will correlate with my previous post. If at any point you have no idea what I'm talking about, I've either done a terrible job of connecting some dots or you  need to read that post for context.

In this post I would like to discuss the fluidity of human knowledge, and how that fluidity leads us to limit both ourselves and our opportunities unnecessarily. As humans we seem to have a need to explain things. We try to assign causality to everything, most commonly after the fact.  This is seen frequently in sports, and since I love sports, I'll use this comparison. If a basketball game is tied and one team makes a half-court shot at the buzzer to win the game, what will happen? "If they had not left the guy open...", "If they had made their previous shot...", "If the coach had left player X in...", and on and on and on. We MUST find a reason to explain why our team lost that game. The other team, and the fans and coaches and pundits, though, seem to realize that they just got lucky with that half-court shot. They rarely go in, and this time they happened to be the beneficiary of some good luck.

We've all seen this happen, right? It happens. There's a problem with this thinking, though. We have NO IDEA what actually caused that shot to go in or what should have been done differently to produce a different outcome. Where are our recommendations coming from? Things that worked in previous games, things that "experts" tell us, probability equations, etc. Guess what, though, in a game with as many moving parts as basketball, all of our "reasons" for losing, are complete guesses and do no more to explain the loss than a fan sneezing during the second quarter.

Ok, so what's my point?

We humans have a need to explain. We love to "know" things. The problem comes when something happens that is contrary to our "knowledge."

The Titanic was unsinkable, before it sank. The laws of gravity would never let a chunk of steel fly, until it did. A human could never run a mile in under 4 minutes, until Roger Bannister did. The earth was flat, until it wasn't. It was impossible to find the instantaneous rate of change of an object moving along a curved trajectory, until Sir Isaac (or Leibniz depending on your school of thought) did it.

You get the point.

Let's take Mr. Bannister's four minute mile a little further. Why couldn't a human run a mile in less than four minutes? Because no one had ever done it. There was no evidence to the contrary. Herein lies a human fallacy. I will type two sentences that are too often used interchangeably, but are not, and have very different meanings and ramifications.



1) There is no evidence that a human can run a mile in under 4 minutes.
2) There is evidence that no human can run a mile in under 4 minutes.

Do you see the difference? It's slight, but it makes a huge difference. Far too often, we say sentence 2 when we mean sentence 1.  Please see the principle behind this. Just because we can't explain something, doesn't mean it can't be so.

I will liken this to dating. I was single for several years (and three times as many in Mormon terms). I fell into this trap over and over and over again, without realizing it, until one day I did. I would go on dates. I would put myself out there. I would buy girls flowers. I would walk them to their doors. I would open car doors. I would do everything that I believed would get a girl.  Everyone else told me it worked. It worked for them. Date after date, door after door, flower after flower, I did these things, yet I remained single.

1) There is no evidence that what I'm doing is working.
2) There is evidence that nothing I'm doing is working.

Which one was true? Sentence 1 was true. But I kept telling myself it was sentence 2. Do you see how different those are? Had I stopped doing the things that I was doing, I may never have found the love of my life. As soon as I found her, both sentences were false. There WAS evidence that what I was doing was working, and there was NO evidence that nothing I was doing was working. It only took one instance to change what I "knew". Again, just because you can't explain something, doesn't make it untrue.

So, as this is getting really long, and you're probably bored to tears, here's my point. Human knowledge is based on things that can change. Things that may seem true today may seem false tomorrow. Ultimately, though, we must choose what we believe. During that choosing, would it not be wise to seek advice from someone beyond this mortal realm? Someone who is not persuaded by human evidence or earthly phenomena?

I believe in a God because I choose to. I believe that He can see further than I can see, that He can see causality much more clearly than I can. I believe that He has given us principles and invites us to live by them because they will lead to happiness, both now and eternally. There are things I can't explain, and there are situations I wish were different, but that doesn't make those principles any less perfect. Just because I can't make every free throw doesn't mean He doesn't know the perfect form.