Why would we need the Bible at all? That is a question in many peoples minds these days, including my own. I have struggled in the past with questions about the bible and how it is applicable to us today. For reasons such as the Bible was written over 2,000 years ago in times and cultures vastly different from our own today, it contains pictures of God that are not coherent with our understanding today from both scientific thought and philosophy and even developments in our understanding if theology. Yet again another reason to discredit the Bible is that it was in fact written by real people with their own understandings of God and their own interpretations, so why should I subject myself to the understanding of others? I have answered these questions in my own way and I will attempt to share with you why I still use the Bible today.
Truth is relative. Though this statement has a very negative connotation that people often label in a sneer as postmodern, it is never the less pretty accurate. Yes it is a post modern thought, but you know what, the idea that truth is not relative but absolute and concrete, that was a modern idea, you only believe that today because of the culture of modernism you were brought up in. It is not a divine commandment of God that reality and knowledge are absolutes. Those are man made concepts to explain the world around them. Inaccurate concepts I might add. We think today that reality around us is actually relative to the individual who happens to observe it. As Immanuel Kant would put it, we never experience anything in reality directly. Everything that we experience is an interpretation of our logical mind.
I have a very narrow view of the world around me. My eyes can capture about 260 degrees or so if I am lucky, once something leaves my peripheral vision, in my mind it is gone, I mighty be able to imagine it as still there, but if I cannot see it then to me it does not exist. I was sitting in the library studying the boring science of microbiology and inevitably my mind started to wander to more interesting subjects as I gazed out the 3rd story windows of the library. The cars where passing out in front of my vision and then disappearing behind the wall as the window ended. I watched as a runner ran down the street, so long as I could see her she was real to me, but as soon as she passed out of my sight she was no longer real but entered my imagination as I tried to imagine the trajectory she would continue to travel. Now, she didn't just simply cease to exist obviously, she has her own intellect and her own experiences, so she continued on existing inside her own frame of reference, but in my frame of reference she no longer existed.
That entire dialog might sound like a bunch of hogwash to you, and that's ok, it made sense in my mind, it doesn't have to make sense in yours. However, the experiment that first alerted us to quantum physics revealed for the first time how our perceptions of reality change by the simple action of observation. If you read the chapter in my book on quantum physics you can get the full story, but suffice it to say, in this experiment a beam of electrons was shot through a double slit and it behaved as was expected, as a wave, projecting on the film behind the slits as an interference pattern, then we decided to find out how the electrons can split themselves in two and still remain the same packet of energy, so we set up a detector to measure which slit the electrons actually went through, you know what happened? As soon as we pinpointed the exact slit the electron went through it instantly changed properties and behaved as a particle, showing a projection of 2 single lines as though it had gone through only one or the other slits, and not both. The profound understanding of this experiment was this, the very act of our observations of reality changes it's very nature.
Does this sound incredible and to strange too be real? Then you would not be alone, Einstein spent the rest of his life trying to disprove this experiment, but it has withstood thousands upon thousands of subsequent experiments while never being proven wrong. What it means for us is that yes indeed reality, and therefor knowledge, is relative to the individual. Humanity makes up their own reality, we cannot know if anything is actually the way it truly is because we have no way to know whether or not our own minds have deceived us in to thinking a certain way. So where does the Bible come in to this?
Humanities perspective as a whole is relative to our collective understanding, the individual is not isolated alone, we all have minds that are constructed similarly and it is important to have a collective mind to help point our logic in the right direction. The double slit experiment does not change from one person to the other, it is he same for each person that tries it, that is because as humans our brains are constructed in a similar maner. We all think more or less alike. So although everything is indeed relative, when it comes to the reality of humanity in general, things stay the same. Grass is green to everyone, music sounds similar to everyone, mountains look the same, logic works they same way, and reason leads to the same things. If this was not true then society would crumble around us as if we all suddenly spoke different languages and could not understand each other's sentences.
It is more than this however, we actually need each other in order to know what is truth. Here is the reason, reality I believe, is constructed by humanity as a whole, no person is in their own world, with arguably a select few individuals, but we usually put them in psych wards however. The human intellect operates as a collective whole, with each individual contributing to the understanding of the next. Granted some people, such as Kant, or Aristotle, or Einstein, or Mozart have contributed more than others, but each individual is needed for a complete understanding of reality to exist. We build off each other, no one man contributed solely to the knowledge of one idea. This is why I am very skeptical of isolated instances of miracles happening to single individuals alone, or on a more sever level, religions who have at their head a single founder that supplies their entire understanding. We need each other, not only that but we need those who came before as we will need the ones that will come after. This is where the Bible comes in.
I do not believe the Bible to be the express revelation of the word of God, but before you write me off, hear me out. Humans wrote the Bible as they were moved by their relationship with God, and if you keep up with my chapters for he next couple weeks this will be made clear. The Bible is important because it records humanities experience with God from the dawn of time. It reveals interpretations built on times and culture. It reveals the progression of truth, and I believe it holds the key to our understanding of God as we progress into a very confusing, very relative postmodern world. Not that the Bible is the end all of truth, we have found truth today not contained in the bible and we will find truth in the future that is not found in the Bible either, but as we review the trajectory of knowledge as it has increased throughout the centuries, we began to see a path headed toward a certain destination. What that destination is I believe I am just beginning to find out, but that is something you should study out for yourself.
The Bible, along with the theories and ideas of everyone that can possibly be studied, combined with your own logical mind and understanding, cannot help but lead you to a deeper understanding of the universe in which you live and of the God whom you claim created it. The Bible is special to me because it is the experiences of dozens of individuals spread over more than a thousand years. I do not hold it as an absolute, or as the final say in debate, but rather as one of the most complete and comprehensive works on God ever written. It is special because it reveals to me the trajectory of my own life as I grow in to an abiding relationship with the creator, the essence of Love, the one who's thought this universe is.
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