okieinexile
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How do you know
By Bobby Neal Winters
Before this year, I’ve never answered a political opinion poll in my life, and this year I’ve answered two. There must be an art to it, because in each case after I told who I was going to vote for there were follow up questions regarding what would change my vote.
“Would you vote for him in a box?”
“I would not, could not, in a box.”
“With a fox?”
“Not in a box, not with a fox, not here or there, not anywhere.”
I can appreciate the pollsters trying to extract each nuance of my opinion from me because I teach a statistics class or two each semester, and the one thing I teach my students that they know for sure is that when you are working with statistics your answer will be wrong. You give yourself a margin of error so that there is less chance you’ll be wrong, but there is always a probability that you’ll be wrong even beyond your margin of error. Such is the life of a statistician.
However, the rest of us aren’t even as well off as the statisticians because at least they know how bad a shape they are in. The question the philosophers ponder is, “How do we know anything at all?”
The other day before going out to lunch I was standing next to my car waiting for my friend to come along. It was a particularly cloudy and humid day, and there was lots of dew. This started me thinking how the Bible says that in the Days of Noah, it never rained, but everything was watered by mists coming up from the ground. There are parts of the world like that, where it hardly ever rains but the moisture is left by dew as it passes over the mountains or in snow left the same way.
Even though I am not a fundamentalist, I do believe the Bible is true when interpreted in the sense it was written. It is the collective experience of a people, as they interacted with God, as strove with Him and were striven with by Him. While inspired by historical events, the main intent of some of the stories is to convey a truth larger than the particular story.
Any how, as I was standing there in the mist, I began to wonder if the story of Noah might tell of a people who’d lived a place where it never rained, and that was all the world they knew, but after the Flood, they were forced to move to a place where it did rained more frequently. They would never have known any different. New experiences brought them things they’d never even known about before.
There is a computer game called Alpha Centauri that I used to play when I had more time. The idea behind the game is that you are on a spaceship that crashes on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, and you know nothing about it. The computer screen is a map of the planet gridded off into squares and at the beginning all of the screen is black except for the square that you crashed in. As you the game continues, the screen is filled in as you explore more and more squares. The screen goes from darkness to light, which is another great Biblical metaphor, by the way.
In the course of exploring the planet, sometimes the map shows a piece of ground between bodies of water which could be a peninsula that barely sticks out into the water, could be an isthmus that connects to an island, or could be a land bridge that connects to another continent. You never know unless you actually look.
The state of things for us on this planet is the same for us. Experience is our teacher. For instance, experience has taught me there are some things I don’t want to experience directly. My experience with electricity has taught me I don’t want to know what it is like to connect my tongue to jumper cables.
There are things I believe because they were experienced by others in whom I have placed my trust, things in the Bible, things in science books. Many of these things I’ll never know for sure, and maybe I am just plain wrong in some of them, but such is the state of the human being.
By Bobby Neal Winters
Before this year, I’ve never answered a political opinion poll in my life, and this year I’ve answered two. There must be an art to it, because in each case after I told who I was going to vote for there were follow up questions regarding what would change my vote.
“Would you vote for him in a box?”
“I would not, could not, in a box.”
“With a fox?”
“Not in a box, not with a fox, not here or there, not anywhere.”
I can appreciate the pollsters trying to extract each nuance of my opinion from me because I teach a statistics class or two each semester, and the one thing I teach my students that they know for sure is that when you are working with statistics your answer will be wrong. You give yourself a margin of error so that there is less chance you’ll be wrong, but there is always a probability that you’ll be wrong even beyond your margin of error. Such is the life of a statistician.
However, the rest of us aren’t even as well off as the statisticians because at least they know how bad a shape they are in. The question the philosophers ponder is, “How do we know anything at all?”
The other day before going out to lunch I was standing next to my car waiting for my friend to come along. It was a particularly cloudy and humid day, and there was lots of dew. This started me thinking how the Bible says that in the Days of Noah, it never rained, but everything was watered by mists coming up from the ground. There are parts of the world like that, where it hardly ever rains but the moisture is left by dew as it passes over the mountains or in snow left the same way.
Even though I am not a fundamentalist, I do believe the Bible is true when interpreted in the sense it was written. It is the collective experience of a people, as they interacted with God, as strove with Him and were striven with by Him. While inspired by historical events, the main intent of some of the stories is to convey a truth larger than the particular story.
Any how, as I was standing there in the mist, I began to wonder if the story of Noah might tell of a people who’d lived a place where it never rained, and that was all the world they knew, but after the Flood, they were forced to move to a place where it did rained more frequently. They would never have known any different. New experiences brought them things they’d never even known about before.
There is a computer game called Alpha Centauri that I used to play when I had more time. The idea behind the game is that you are on a spaceship that crashes on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, and you know nothing about it. The computer screen is a map of the planet gridded off into squares and at the beginning all of the screen is black except for the square that you crashed in. As you the game continues, the screen is filled in as you explore more and more squares. The screen goes from darkness to light, which is another great Biblical metaphor, by the way.
In the course of exploring the planet, sometimes the map shows a piece of ground between bodies of water which could be a peninsula that barely sticks out into the water, could be an isthmus that connects to an island, or could be a land bridge that connects to another continent. You never know unless you actually look.
The state of things for us on this planet is the same for us. Experience is our teacher. For instance, experience has taught me there are some things I don’t want to experience directly. My experience with electricity has taught me I don’t want to know what it is like to connect my tongue to jumper cables.
There are things I believe because they were experienced by others in whom I have placed my trust, things in the Bible, things in science books. Many of these things I’ll never know for sure, and maybe I am just plain wrong in some of them, but such is the state of the human being.