Tag Archives: Scientific Approach to Truth

The Freedom to be Approximate

Whatever we know about anything is approximate. What the human species knows about physics is approximate. What the human species knows about biology is approximate. The current state of knowledge in every discipline of learning is approximate. And our own personal knowledge about any of the disciplines of learning is approximate.

If English is our home language, our knowledge of that language is approximate. And if we also know Spanish, German, and a little Urdu, we still know only a sliver of the thousands and thousands of languages that have existed. And mathematics? Even if we have moved beyond arithmetic into algebra, solid geometry, the calculus, and differential equations, the world of mathematics is much bigger. The scope of mathematics compares with the scope of all languages. Mathematics, viewed as the ordering capacities of the human mind, is almost boundless. And art? Each of us knows only a sliver of the art produced so far by the human species.

In addition, recall yourself walking through your house in the dark of a night, when you cannot see your hand in front of your face. You still have a sense of space and of time. You can still feel your way. This is a form of intelligence, a form of vivid knowing that you share with the owls, the cats, the reptiles, the dinosaurs, birds, and fish. These pre-symbol-using imagination capacities have been and still are unbelievably vast. Our language-art-&-math formed sort of awareness has only begun to probe what consciousness can know in our pre-language ways. Our knowledge of Reality in its fullness is indeed approximate, open to better approximations, and never complete.

Nevertheless, the Profound Reality that we are approximating can happen to us, can encounter us in its Mysterious Wholeness as a calling to be open to ever-better approximations. This admitted uncertainty in our knowledge is both a negation and an affirmation. It is a negation, for we are all security addicts, who are especially committed to being secure in our current opinions. If, however, we trust Profound Reality enough to be curious about being more realistic in our living, we are volunteering to be insecure in all of our opinions.

In spite of this ultimate insecurity, Profound Reality is also supporting whatever degree of approximations of Reality that we currently enjoy. Herein is the positive side of approximate knowledge: it is an approximation of Profound Reality. This enigmatic awareness of having valid approximations of Reality is an affirmation of support for humanity’s disciplines of learning. Though these disciplines of learning are journeys toward truth, rather than the “end-of-the-road” of truth, they are “journeys toward truth.”

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Contemplative Truth

My best friend in high school was a fan of the President Harry Truman. He liked Truman because he talked bluntly and stuck with what he had to say no matter what others thought about it. Truman had a reputation for uttering hard sayings. “Give ‘em hell Harry!” was a popular saying going around at the time. Some interviewer asked President Truman what he thought about that saying. Truman replied that he thought the saying was a bit misleading. Here is his famous reply, “I only tell them the truth, and they think it’s hell.”

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