Contingent Truth in a Blind Cloud of Witnesses

My last two essays wrestled with the ancient fable of six blind men describing an elephant and suggested that, in words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, "No generalization is worth a damn, including this one." 

Oliver Wendell Holmes contemplates a generalization.

         Generalizations, obviously, aren't useless. They convey useful information, but the fable of the elephant--indeed, the sum of all open-minded experience--argues that they aren't unconditionally true. A generalization true in one aspect is false in another, so much so that I doubt if universals exist; if any non-tautological string of words is true in all circumstances. Referential truth depends on contexts that recede from view like images in facing mirrors. Generalizations depend on clouds of cultural, ideological, and personal contexts impossible to make explicit because underneath each statement of context is another cloud of unstated contexts. 

We interpret generalizations using common sense, a nonsense-filtering faculty people use more-or-less naturally but that is hard to code into computers. With common sense, we situate statements in appropriate contexts, statements that would mean quite different things in other contexts. Of course, this doesn't always work. One afternoon, my wife asked, "Have you been drinking?" I understood this in the sense, "Are you intoxicated?" and was puzzled. I don't "drink" in the afternoon, and she knows it. She sensed my confusion and added context: she'd read that it was important to stay hydrated after a vaccination, and I'd recently had a "shot" (a really context-dependent word). In this new context, I went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water. 

Look at the multiple definitions of common words in dictionaries. Typically, a word's meaning in a sentence is not explicit, but contextual. Deliberately  using confusion of context to deceive is a type of lying called equivocation, a staple of sleazy political ads. The effect may occur innocently, but with personal trust, misunderstandings like the one with my wife are easily fixed. However, context kicks the verbal props out from under faiths that rest on verbal creeds or core doctrines. 

          True doctrines are true are true only if correctly situated in an ultimately ineffable contexts. Two parishioners in the same pew reading the same creed with perfect sincerity may say contradictory things. If both claim belief in God, do they agree? Without an elaborate exploration of context, there's no reason to think so. A God who acts how? Does what? Is related to in what ways? Sanctions what? Is best expressed by what text? What institution, if any? Some believe in an institutional Man Upstairs with rigid moral laws and weapons to enforce them. For others, belief in God is merely a vague assertion that the world has meaning, a basis for piety and trust. 

          I've discussed how Christian creeds, prompted by heresies, added layers of qualifiers until they grew into the three-page Athanasian Creed, which opens and closes by declaring that only those who believe all of the creed can be saved. But few Christians are likely to remember or understand all of its intricate paradoxes describing the Trinity (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/08/those-cryptic-creeds-history.html). If the Athanasian Creed is to be taken seriously, only a self-contradictory God exists. In every clear, self-consistent sense of the term--every common sense--God doesn't exist. The creed condemns to hell anybody who worships a mathematically consistent God.

Thus, the premise, God exists, is both true and false (or neither). It's an Oliver Wendell Holmes generalization not worth a damn unless situated in a cloud of context, paradoxical or not. If whatever is referenced by the word in one context exists, then in a some other context, it doesn't. God exists is simultaneously true and false. True believers seem to accept this. They assert that their God, the referent in their cultic context, is true, but referents in other cults are false. As John Godfrey Saxe wrote in his verse about blind men groping different parts of an elephant, disputants in "theologic wars," speaking out of different unspoken contexts, "prate about the elephant, / Not one of them has seen!" 

          Arguing about religion is like arguing about favorite foods, a good reason it's excluded from polite dinner conversation. For "favorite," there's is no objective correlate, no visible shared reality, nor is there for God. This doesn't deny that God exists can be true in important senses. Certainly, it is subjectively true. Individuals experience God. But in objective senses the proposition floats on a cloud of unspeakable qualifiers of qualifiers of qualifiers--numinous personal, linguistic, and ideological contexts. It's an offstage intuition, not an onstage thought. Language and the realities that language reliably communicates are like the white hill of an iceberg that floats silently in darkness below every surface, like dark matter between the galaxies--inevitably if we insist on real clarity, but especially when we describe the invisible.

Still, the invisible is real. Dark matter holds the galaxies together. Undersea ice sinks Titanics and drifts on unaffected. The cloud of unspeakable qualifiers, the receding mystery of context, is Blase Descartes' "heart" which "has it reasons of which reason knows nothing." The cloud of incommunicable qualifiers upholding my personal intuitive truths, because of its very diffuse complexity, must resemble yours in unspoken ways. 

One understanding of the invisible--and this is not just about religion but about all the artifacts of taste and culture that are simply given to us--is what the Biblical book of Hebrews calls a "cloud of witnesses." It's like the "communion of saints," a mystical bodily of unity under diversity. Under the cloud of contingencies, contexts, and qualifiers that (in the middle ground) dissolve into chaos, we may sense a background where they merge into harmony. If we allow the inky lines we have drawn around themselves to dissolve and admit our contingent existence, admit that we are defined by contexts echoing out to the edge of everything, we may become, like the nonsensical God of the Creed, simultaneously one and many. When differences become fragments of a contextualizing mystery, we are still blind, perhaps, but able to construct what it might be like to have vision.

Chapter 11 of Hebrews is an annotated roll call of Jewish religious heroes beginning with Abel, Enoch, and Noah and passing through Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Gideon, Barak, Samson, David, Samuel, and the prophets, all of praised for persevering in faith--a term that means, not only belief, but faithfulness in the sense of being a dutiful servant. In Chapter 12, the Pauline author pleads with Hebrew Christians to remain faithful in the face of persecution like their forefathers--the "cloud of witnesses" (nephilim martyron) who persevered even without the example of Jesus. The faithful deeds of this menagerie of forefathers--Abel's consisting simply of sacrificing meat, not fruit, and Samson's precipitated by unfaithfulness with Delilah--are all over the moral map, nothing in common but a vague family resemblance, a density at the center of the cloud where their differences overlap. It's the cloudy intersection of a Venn diagram of cumulus-like categories, anything but distinct. But maybe this is the only way elephants can be seen by blind men.