More Unfashionable Observations: Frames of Reference

In this final post before we take up the task of walking through the stories of Genesis I want to talk about frames of reference as well as make some disclaimers. After all, to paraphrase Marcus Brody, we are meddling with powers we cannot possibly comprehend.

Despicable people like philosopher John Gray and eco-fascist David Keith Orton argue against human exceptionalism or even meaningfulness in a world with such a vast reference of time and space. I don’t think I need

to put too much work into helping you understand why these intellectual lightweights and vicious sociopaths are painfully wrong, but I will give it a cursory go. If you see a baby abandoned, starving and crying in a snow drift near the side of the road and your response is “in a world of nearly infinite space and time a single baby crying in hunger in the cold is insignificant” then you are an idiot and a monster and your frame of reference needs adjusting. I really don’t think I need to elaborate any further.

Frames of reference are incredibly important and far too often neglected when we speak about the biblical library. In several ways we need to address this situation. The first is with what I have been calling epistemological epochs. Our current epistemological epoch is the product of the scientific and industrial revolutions and enlightenment era philosophy. In order to read the biblical stories we have to first acknowledge our current epistemological framework and then try to understand the difference in that framework from the one of the biblical authors. We need to take those differences into account no different than we do when we read something in translation and understand that the original language has aspects which likely did not transfer well. This is, largely, that subject-object distinction. The biblical authors were focused on the subjective lived experience of man while our modern thinking defaults to thinking about objective truths. In order to make this work we have to first acknowledge that these are not two antagonistic modes of thinking, they are just different and need to be accounted for.

Thinking of this as a battle between objective and subjective is a big part of the problem people have when reading these stories — both believers and non-believers alike. It is possible to understand that there are facts about objects independent of our perception that are true while simultaneously acknowledging that our subjective lived experience is also a real thing. It is merely just two different frames of reference….two different ways of explaining. The false notion that science and religion are incompatible is buried deep in a simple minded atheistic attempt to rob credibility from the biblical account by standing it up against the scientific one. The fact is, at most times the biblical and scientific accounts are just talking about different things and when they are talking about the same thing they are merely talking about it from different perspectives. The side of a coffee mug on your desk that you do not see is not false, it’s just not in your current frame of reference.

The work of reading the biblical stories seriously is, to a great degree, done in the mind of the reader. Consciously disconnecting yourself from the contemporary weltanschauung is difficult and requires practice. I do not know if it will work for you as well as it works for me, but for my part it is good to constantly remind myself while reading these ancient texts that it is about lived experience. I say this to my self frequently enough in the hopes that one day I will be practiced enough to not say it at all.

With all of this in mind I would like to make a disclaimer before my next post which will deal with the first lines of Genesis proper. Whatever these stories are they are not something which can be exhausted by a single analysis. That I believe my analysis to be accurate in no way is a claim that others, even ones which disagree, are not. It is more complicated than that. Immanuel Kant shrewdly understood and clearly explained the difference between the ding an sich, the thing-in-itself, and the thing as it exists in human experience. We cannot know what a pen is in and of itself. That knowledge is not something which humans have access to. What we can understand, for Kant, is the thing as it appears to us. They are not the same thing. Here I extrapolate that idea to God and say that whatever God is in and of himself is not capable of being exhaustively understood by us….we can only understand God as he is to us.

My training, interests and life experiences coupled with the way I think give me a frame of reference that is uniquely mine — just as yours does for you. I believe that my frame of reference coupled with my proclivity to take these stories seriously, gives me a compelling perspective and this, along with my passion for these ideas, is something I believe makes my frame of reference a compelling one that people might find interesting and as such I am writing these essays. I do not wish for any reader to think that it is a condemnation of their own ideas and frame of reference it is merely another facet on an infinitely faceted topic.

The books of the Bible are deep. What does it mean to be deep? People say it, but I do not think they often consider what it means. If you think of depth in literature you can think of it in terms of association. You cannot read every book ever written. That said, a play like Hamlet is a deep work of literature as so many works of literature after it rely on Hamlet as a source. If Hamlet is deep because of how many works of art are based on it, the Bible is the deepest set of books we have. Indeed, I believe it is nearly impossible to understand art in any of its forms without contending with the Bible. All art, all law, all history and everything else we have in the world is connected to the structural underpinning that is the biblical library. This is one sense in which it is deep.

Another way we see the depth of the Bible is in its self-referential nature. Nearly one hundred books written and edited and redacted and compiled over a thousand years manages to have a thoroughgoing plot and references itself sixty-eight thousand times. The number of paths of interpretation in the Bible is nearly infinite. You can study the Bible for your entire life and never scratch the surface. In this way, too, the Bible is deep.

Finally, whatever our stated beliefs on God and religion are we act out the biblical ethos every day. I do not believe that a person’s stated beliefs mean anything compared to how they live their life. Do you think that condemned prisoners have rights? Do you admire the courageous people who head into danger and overcome it? Do you believe your fellow man has some kind inherent value which means he needs to be treated with dignity? Do you believe that it is good to exist? These are all ideas that we walk around with every day in the west and they are incredibly unlikely ideas to exist. We take for granted the idea that a confessed murderer has inalienable rights that even while we punish him there are lines we don’t cross. That is not the obvious conclusion of man. That notion exists because of the biblical library and its impact on the west and regardless of your stated beliefs or lack thereof, if you are acting in that manner then you are acting out the belief in the validity of the biblical stories. The fact that the western world, even as it frequently claims the biblical stories are archaic superstition, live their lives in a way that conforms to the claims in the Bible….that the Bible is how we think even for those who deny it….make it deep.

With all this in mind we will take a break for a few days while I finish putting together the articles on the earliest stories of Genesis which we will get to next week.

Thank you for coming along on this ride with me.