Okay. Because work let me go at 2, I am gonna wade right into this now, Maverick....
Right, I see where we're going, where the notion is "Absolute Truth," and we are working within the framework of logic -- which is a very good thing, in many ways -- and coming to the conclusion that any statement which posits anything can be either true or not true, and that in not being true, it is therefore false, and that, this being the case, we have proven absolute truth to exist. Now I also understand that we're doing this in the "logic capsule," i.e., in pure terminology, because if we get caught up in the details, we'll surely F up the underlying argument.
But I look as logic as limited, in the same way (for example) Newtonian physics is limited. Newton is fine from Virginia to Massachusetts, but if you're planning a trip to, say, Alpha Centauri, you really want Einstein involved (relativity vs. classical physics.) This is only to say that logic is most useful for many things, because it is a very satisfying model. In pragmatic terms, what we do is create and respond to models, or if you like, metaphors.
For example, if I say "bird", the word "bird" is not really the bird. We'll leave alone what is meant by "bird," in terms of the many kinds of bird that fit into "birdness." I mean only to specify that my term "bird" is not the bird itself. It is a metaphor for the thing itself, and when I describe these metaphors as interacting, the system is a model of the world, not the world itself.
These symbols, which we confuse with their real referents, are absolutely crucial to thought and language. The various categories, which consist of similarities we notice in or impose upon classes of metaphors (such as "songbirds," "verbs," or "habitable planets," create groupings of metaphors, which we can manipulate by assigning characteristics ("songbirds are usually under three pounds in weight,") or making predictions regarding their nature ("A habitable planet will become uninhabitable whenever it drifts 100,000 miles closer to the star it orbits.") When we have established enough such rules, sets, and characteristics, we say we know something... and in effect, we do. We know the results of actions we can undertake by accumulating and manipulating these symbols of our world. But we really know about our world. We know collections of symbols and operations.
So the mystic says, "see here. The symbol of the bird is not the thing in itself. One can only experience it by experiencing it; and even then, one only knows one moment's experience of birdness from one vantage point." Some add that all these vantage points are in fact illusory, while others claim they are all that matter. But not to get too deep in the weeds (or we'll never come out,) the point I am making here, is that the manipulations of the symbols derived from the world -- empirical data, such as the rate at which objects fall -- is the only kind of knowledge we can create via science. The "suchness" of the world -- the direct experience -- is left to poets and mystics. It may indeed be this "suchness of all that exists" that one can look at as the Divine -- although in the West we tend to insist the Divine think and act rather anthropomophically.
Perhaps this "All" is in some way conscious; perhaps God is creation, and "creation" as we think of it, is the result of conscious and cut-off minds experiencing separate vantage points of the "great thought." Perhaps, God is a verb.
By the way, I am convinced that no word precisely represents the thought it is meant to, and that in any event, any thought smaller than the All is illusory (but the best we can do, given the world as we experience it.) In that way, anything we say to one another is a lie. But these are good lies; they are the little, divided-off truths that make life worth living.
Or, as a far brighter light than I once put it,
"It is what it is."
PFnV
