Been doing a lot of pondering about what we can know lately. I’m convinced of a few things:

1. there is a real world out there
2. our grasp on perceiving it, understanding it, and articulating it is tenuous at best.

Brain Science

I’ve been reading a lot of brain science books over the last couple of years. The role interpretation plays in perception is almost controlling.

As I read these brain books, as well as some of what that those who wish to promote pervasive skepticism as an application of this learning, I wonder if they’re fully appreciating their own findings. Skepticism has a nasty habit of eating itself. Certainty regarding skepticism is unfounded by definition. 

Politics

There’s nothing like a bitterly fought national campaign to make you own how your set beliefs influence your perception. Who won the debate? Who’ll be the best president? People find evidence for what they already believe.

Paranoid Schizophrenics 

One of the amazing things about this disorder is how difficult these folks are to predict. You can predict chaos, but never the direction of the chaos.

What We Agree Upon Regarding The Living Crust

We live upon the thing crust of an insignificant planet orbiting an insignificant star. Travel 20 miles up, and you can’t live. Travel 20 miles down, you can’t live. Travel 20 miles horizontally, many of us do it daily without thinking.

We are concerned about climate change and IMHO rightfully so, but all of our models are small and short lived compared to a very old planet. We talk about cycles, but all such cycles are short lived given the fact that the trajectory of the universe is fundamentally linear. Consider the risks:

• An large asteroid strike would decimate human civilization
• How we escaped a significant nuclear exchange in the 20th century is evidence of the existence of God. Will we escape it in the century to come?
• Volcanic eruptions can alter the climate. There is evidence that the “dark ages” were really dark.  If we had a drop in sunlight how would that impact our capacity to feed the billions of people on the planet?
• How might a myriad of small things significantly destabilize the status quo? If you think the crust we depend on is fragile, consider civilization? The more crowded the planet gets, the more dangerous it gets.
• Look at the trend lines of petroleum consumption compared to known reserves. Higher petroleum prices are inevitable.
• Look at the rates of development in India and China and how that will impact the mad scramble for limited resources on a finite globe. Think we’ll be finding new resources in space anytime soon? Conflict is more inevitable.

Our World Belongs to God

Many think Christians are fools to put their hope in a God they can’t see. I’m not sure it’s better to have your hope in nothing at all.