Saturday, August 11, 2012

We Don't Know . . .


We don't know whether God exists.

We do know that social bonding rituals are strong.

We do know that group coherence is a primarily important feature of future human generations and survival generally.

Role playing (specific designated functions) are also highly necessary, and specialization creates fields of expertise that take years to understand and learn.

It is intuitive to think that, above the structures of specialization that we've created, someone, a boss maybe, a super manager, must be watching, and that such an entity by default has more perfect knowledge, because only that entity has access to all the information.

The ideal of an all-knowing systems manager is behind assertions of God's truth.  But we are partial imperfect knowledge knowers, so we by necessity, cannot know whether God exists.

That doesn't stop most of us appealing to the notion of grand authority, and because group dynamics are strong, doesn't stop groups from causing conflict with other groups who hold different conceptions of authority.

The problem: human-created authorities are endless.  Hence towns of only 3000 with 7 denominations to worship in come Sunday.

The secondary problem: if there's not a grand systems manager up there, however abstract, the meaning for our role-playing as well as we might isn't quite as crystal clear.

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