Thursday, March 25, 2010

Logic, The Known, The Unknown, and The ...

Logic cannot conclude about the unknowable. Logic moves into the world of the known; logic cannot take a quantum leap into the unknown.
Have you not observed it? Your mind can think only about the known. How will you think about the unknown? If it is unknown, there is no way to think about it. Thinking is based on the known. That’s why thinking is repetitive, it moves in a circle. Yes, it can go on refining the known – it can go on refining it more and more, it can go on polishing the known – but it can never come to know the unknown.
At the most, it can guess about the unknown. But guesswork is guesswork; it can never become a certainty. It will never give you faith, it can’t become trust, because deep down you know it is a guess: it may be so, it may not be so. It cannot become a rock on which the temple of life can be raised. No, it remains doubtful.
Every guess is rooted in doubt: perhaps it is so, perhaps it is not so. And there are three layers of existence. One is the known: a very small, lighted part; a lighted spot, very small, that we have come to know. Then surrounding it is the infinite unknown, a great night of darkness. But about the unknown we can have a few guesses, we can infer, because the known and the unknown are not qualitatively different. That which is known today was unknown yesterday, and that which is unknown today may become known tomorrow. So the known and the unknown correlate; they are of the same family.

Science lives in these two worlds, the known and the unknown. You base your reasoning, your guess, your inference, on the known, so you can deduct something of the unknown and you can reach into the darkness and make a little more territory lighted.
But there is something else, the third realm: the unknowable. Logic can function perfectly in the known; it functions only partially in the unknown as guessing; it cannot function in the unknowable at all. The unknowable is beyond logic, beyond reasoning, beyond knowledge, beyond the mind. And that unknowable is God.

Remember, God is not unknown. If God is unknown, then science one day will know him. God is unknowable. yes, God can be experienced and lived but cannot be known, cannot be reduced to knowledge, cannot be reduced to a hypothesis, cannot be reduced to a formula like H2O.
God remains a mystery. Even to those who have experienced him, God remains a mystery.
In fact the deeper you go into him, the deeper becomes the mystery. The more you penetrate into him, the more and more you disappear. One day, God is not known; on the contrary, the knower disappears. Just like a dewdrop slipping into the ocean, the knower dissolves.

In the world of science the unknown is constantly transformed into the known. And it is hoped that one day the unknown will disappear completely and all will be known.
In the world of religion it is just a totally different story, diametrically opposite. The unknown does not disappear, but the knower disappears. And one day ALL becomes unknowable, and the known also becomes unknowable. Then the mystery is total and absolute.

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