The Thing That Knowledge Cannot Eat

As I sit here, jotting out notes for a future follow up on “Debunking The Secret”, I realize that I can seem like a skeptical curmudgeon.

It’s not that I don’t believe there’s a great deal of mystery out there, because I do. I’ve had more than my share of odd experiences, some of which do defy my best attempts at explanation - but I prefer my mysteries actually be *mysteries*, rather than carefully crafted illusions or short-sighted thinking. So I’m not a curmudgeon, but a skeptical mystic who resents the insult of pseudo-science applied to poetry.

I don’t think skepticism and mysticism are mutually exclusive, or that science and faith are incompatible; each picks up where the other falls short. The trouble comes in because the line between them isn’t fixed. It shifts and moves as our body of knowledge and world view changes.

The more science discovers about the world we live in, the less we have to rely on religion to tell us how the world works — which is why the battle between science and religion heats up during any period of massive scientific growth.

When science booms, religions are threatened. Suddenly scientists replace priests as the people of knowledge, and text books replace sacred scrolls as the storehouse of wisdom. It’s easy to see how they end up seemingly at war, arguing over who controls the territory.

But they don’t have to be at war, if each will cede the territory it does not excel at controlling.

I reconcile the apparent conflict of science and faith with my most abstract concept of God: Mystery-with-an-upper-case-M. Mystery shifts, and changes, but never vanishes. There is always more, and each answer leads to more questions.

The best expression of the idea I’ve found is from Of Water and the Spirit, by Malidoma Some’. In the book, Some’ explains that in his native language of Dagara, there is no concept of “supernatural”. The closest term they have is Yielbongura , or “The Thing Which Knowledge Cannot Eat”.

To show you how it works, I’ll use the example of the Science/Evolution vs Faith/Creation debates — You can usually find an overview of them at http://scienceblogs.com/ but you really don’t need to be familiar with the specifics.

One of the tricky points in the debate is whether or not Science and Religion describe the same, or different aspects of existence - the core of that territorial war I mentioned earlier.

A possible solution to the conflict is to cede that science describes the physical, observable, natural world, while religion describes the spiritual, hidden, supernatural aspects of existence.

This doesn’t go over well with the Creationist crowd, because from their point of view, a literal reading of the Bible interprets Genesis *is* a description of the physical, natural and observable process of creation.

The Evangelical Atheistic Scientists don’t care for it either, because as the body of scientific knowledge expands, and methods of testable observations improve, more and more aspects of existence are being understood as physical and observable, and there’s less room for the “supernatural” label to exist. They don’t see a rational need for a “more than natural” label to exist.

From both perspectives, not only has the line moved, but science has expanded so far that there is no room left for the “supernatural”. With the advances in cloning and genetic mutation, even the old stand by of “but only God can make a tree”. Not only can we clone a tree, but we can create mutations and hybrids until we have an entirely new type of tree.

And that is where The Thing Which Knowledge Cannot Eat comes in.

It is not supernatural, it is not removed from this world. It is not necessarily beyond description or measurement — but measuring it will never take it’s “true measure”. Because no matter how smart we are, no matter how many things around us we can measure, or which aspects of our life and minds we can dissect and describe — no matter how many causes and effects and variations of equations we produce… some things simply remain outside of our intellectual knowledge:

The cliche but astounding miracle of birth. The intricate interdependence of our environment. The musical sound of raindrops against a tin roof. Love. Consciousness. Desert sunsets over vast canyons.

And trees.

We understand these things. We can measure them. We can even chart out why they affect us, down to biochemical and electrical equations. We can explain them, but we will never “grok” them through science alone.

To “grok” something means to drink the knowledge of it so deeply that you become one with it, a level of experiential understanding beyond intuition, beyond empathy, beyond telepathy. It’s a fictional concept, from the sci-fi classic Stranger in a Strange Land.

Because of the limitations of the human mind, we’ll never grok the mysteries of the universe completely. Not really. Not on the levels that matter, emotionally.

Because no matter how often or completely they are explained to us, they still feel miraculous, and no amount of knowledge about the mechanisms involved takes away that wonder and magic - or that occasional sense that it is, somehow, in some way, very personal.

And that, it seems to me, is the modern role of religion. Maybe we don’t need The Church to explain where babies come from, or how it happened to rain last Tuesday, or how and when life developed.

Maybe we no longer need to anthromorphize the wind and rain and chlorophyll to understand their natures. Maybe Science IS a better approach to many of these questions, and maybe science is a way of finding new questions.

But no matter how many new puzzles and solutions we find, we still have a deep intrinsic need to know “why”.

Not on an evolutionary level, and not on a cellular scale, but on a personal level, a level that means something, that moves us, that motivates and satisfies and inspires.

So while I may find it amusing to debunk The Secret, and liberally apply skepticism towards outrageous claims, I remain a mystic at heart.

The answer to that “Why” is the thing that knowledge cannot eat. It is Mystery. It is God.

MindTWEAK: Even if we know the answer is 42 - the question remains a puzzle. Grok what I’m saying?
Measuring does not tame Mystery; He is not a tame lion.