How Can We Know God? Part 1: Truth and Possibilianism

David Eagleman is a writer and neuroscientist. I'm very fond of his work as he writes extensively on the brain's relationship with the afterlife and death. Most of his stuff is fictional, using short stories and parables to unload some of the most complex science that's out there.

He has a respectable humility as a scientist and claims that we're not at a place where we can understand much of anything about the universe - at least not enough to make many absolute claims.

I just want to expose this quote of his, which appeared in the New York Times back in July 2009:

"Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I'm hoping to define a new position -- one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story."

This quote by Eagleman is a common claim in today's academic and non-academic circles. But there is a huge problem in committing to something like Possibilianism.

The problem with saying that you are not fixing to any belief or claim is that the statement just made is actually an absolute claim. Possibilianism and other stances similar to it, make the mistake of dismissing truth claims with a truth claim.

See the problem with Eagleman's claim? He is "comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind," and is "not interested in committed to any particular story."

But he IS committed to a particular story. He's committed to his story, to this newly defined educated pluralistic agnosticism, which he calls, "possibilianism."

Singular truth is unavoidable. You cannot go on saying you're noncommittal to particular truths, as you have just then committed to your particular truth. And you can call it whatever you want.

I've been trying to figure out this quote from Lewis forever and all of a sudden it seems appropriate:

"But you cannot go 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' thing for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too?…a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things i the same as not to see."

-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, pg. 81

Committing to not committing can only take you so far. I believe there can be a beautiful area of grey, where the mind is accepting of the unknown and committed to a story that has not ended yet.

Christianity gets hated on for claiming truth in order to get power, but so often the criticisms are in themselves truth claims in an attempt for power. Truth exists, so let's begin asking not, "can there be truth?" But rather "what is most true?"