Samhain                                                        Thanksgiving Moon

Not often a letter to the editor makes me stop because of its literary quality. However, a letter by John Ball of Huntsville, Alabama to the Scientific American did.

Writing about the quantum world he said,  “We must remember that such representations (wave analogies among others) do not describe the true, alien reality of the quantum world.  We are like fish studying the stars.”

Such an important idea phrased in an arresting way.  The map is not the territory.  It applies, and we don’t often acknowledge this, to our knowledge of other people.  We see only a thin map of their on going narrative, a fluid process dynamic within them.  And we only see that through the filter of our senses and our understanding.

An interesting variant on this idea is our tendency to look for the real, the true nature of institutions with which we interact all the time.  Richard Rorty, an American pragmatist, said that the beginnings don’t matter.  What we perceive as the foundations don’t matter. What matters is how something works now.

Is the government making our lives better?  Then it’s a good government.  If not, it’s a bad government and needs to change.  Are the schools educating our kids?  Do businesses make our world safer, more secure?  If not, they need to change.  If so, let them do their, well, business.

Most interestingly you can run this same pragmatic test on religious institutions.  Does the church make our lives richer and fuller?  Then it’s a good church.  Does it make us guilty, self-doubting, naive?  Then it’s a bad church.  But notice the key move here.  The nature of the church’s foundations, that is, the Bible, its metaphysical claims about divinity and an afterlife, don’t matter.

In the world of religion we are like fish studying the stars.