We Are All Bedouin

We recently took a family trip to northern Kentucky to take in some attractions which could only be found in the Bible Belt, the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. I have never subscribed to a strict creationist reading of Genesis so I entered this trip with certain expectations; many were met but that didn’t stop a most profound insight.

I always understood the book of Genesis in the context of its original audience, a nomadic people not unlike the Bedouin of today. A relatively small geographical area in which their families for generations had wandered shaped their understanding of the world. Their experiences were limited and provincial to their immediate geography and their somewhat extended families. Never seeing the steppes of central Asia or the jungles of Africa, they wandered the lands between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean Sea and the Nile River. Numbers beyond the 1000’s, let alone numbers as large of million, or trillion, let alone quadrillion were part of their understanding of the universe. Certainly, they had no understanding of a light year. How would you describe the Creation event in a language which would be meaningful to them? Trying to conflate Genesis into a 21^st century “science” book is a guarantee of missing the far greater truths present. Anyways… that was my thinking as our trip began.

Towards the end of our excursion through the Ark Experience on the second day, as we rested our aged hips and knees and I nursed my headache caused by the unrelenting cognitive dissonance; it hit me right between my aching eyes! We are all Bedouins! And that is just fine! We are all shaped and limited by our experiences and understandings. Our “understanding” allows us to function in the world we live. While people today may certainly have the opportunity to experience life far beyond their immediate area and even take in all sorts of different cultures, it is still too much for most to fully understand even a small fraction of what they experience and come into contact.

As much as I marveled at the mental gymnastics and bending of the geographical record it required for the owners of these two sights to put on their displays, it is no different than the contortions modern scientist often preform to deny an intelligence behind creation. Today’s naturists may look at the most primitive cave drawing and say, “Yes, a mind made this.” But when they look at the genetic code, multiple orders of magnitude more complex, from which all life springs, a code so complex we are only beginning to unravel its intricacies, they conclude it could only be done by “chance.” (Sounds like an issue for the first commandment.) Little difference exists between these two groups, each bends reality and truth to fit their own limited and provincial understanding.

While Darwin’s theory has many shortcomings, even within its more modern formats, its unwillingness to address the origin of genetic material and its complexity is probably one of its greatest. And the Creationists insistence Genesis was written as a modern science text blinds them to the full revelation creation declares.

Many years ago I had a young man who worked for me during his summer breaks from school from the time he was 16 until near the end of his college years. He was very bright so our conversations were always engaging. However, one sticks out most in my mind; his fixation on the Chicago area baseball teams. One day, in a fit if pique, he declared his absolute hatred of one of these teams. It has been nearly 20 years, so I don’t remember which team it was, but there was no mistaking the vehemence to his feelings. I was at a loss for words, after all, this is JUST a game! As a friend of mine would comment at times of stress… little children aren’t going to die here! He went on to drive home his point about how much this team deserved to be hated. Since I cared nothing about either the team or the game, his arguments didn’t make much sense to me. But I do remember how hard he worked to rationalize his feelings.

Do you know where else I see this same behavior on full display by what I otherwise know to be sane and mature adults? Politics! If you react with anger and denial whenever your man/woman is called out for some misdeed/hypocrisy/or some other shortcoming, you need to ask yourself why you care so much. After all, 99% of what our politicians do has no direct bearing on your life. Yes, usually there may be one or two things every four years, but that is about it. So, why do we get so worked up into such a frenzy over something which is only slightly more meaningful than a random sports team? Do we really have that little to do and care about?

I do think we can all agree, most (I actually believe it is probably closer to 100%) of those who seek greater political control over our lives have serious personality and ethical flaws. This makes finding out those of the opponent so easy and justifying! So why do we get so invested in such flawed people? They are no more capable of solving the world’s problems than the last crowd which tried… (did they really try or did they just work to enrich themselves?) The prophet Samuel warned Israel about the danger of putting their faith in a man instead of God. Four thousand years later and that lesson still eludes us. But, we view the world in our own provincial manner, unable to understand how our neighbor could see things completely different. And instead of working for some common ground or mutual understanding, we secretly wonder if we might not be able to … you know… get rid of the problem… wink/wink. I am old enough to remember the late 1960’s, I also lived not far from downtown Detroit in ‘68 & ‘69. US history buffs will know what things were like then and there. The political violence which roiled our cities then has been returning once again, so maybe not so wink/wink.

If you have made it this far, allow me a foray into the confusing world of theoretical physics which, believe it or not, may help tie this meandering tale together. Let us consider the idea of dimensions. Years ago, while trying to wrap my small mind around the ideas coming out of string theory, I read an article outlining the ten dimensions some were postulating this theory might explain… yes ten, some even postulated eleven! String theory has since fallen into a bit of, if not disrepute, it is not taken as seriously lately. But, this idea of the different dimensions is worth exploring for a moment.

The first three dimensions we are all familiar with as they are embodied in our day to day life, length, width, and depth. After this things get… challenging for us of more… normal intelligence. I will dispense with the non-Euclidean fourth dimension since outside of the laboratory and theoretical space it doesn’t impact our lives. The counting of dimensions at this point begins to scatter in all sorts of directions, but for our purposes, the next one is what Einstein called: Space-Time. We experience our three dimensional world in the context of our movement through space time.

So what comes next? Well, that is the question. Whatever it is would exist outside of space time and would have a perspective over our own dimension without our being aware of it… directly. At this level, all of time could be seen as a singularity. All pasts, presents, and futures would be immediately knowable. From our perspective it could look like a type of foreknowledge, prophecy, or even predestination.

As with all the other dimensions, it might be possible to speculate how reality may look like at each higher dimension, it is impossible to see anything but in a mirror, dimly. Understanding this fifth, or for the lack of better understanding, God’s dimension is beyond anything we can imagine since our perspective is limited to our few dimensions. To speculate on how it is possible to know and experience all events simultaneously and whether we are acting with a “free will,” (whatever that may be in a world bent and broken by sin,) or if our actions and choices are predetermined as either a consequence of all other actions taken, or predetermined or predestined by our creator is an unanswerable question this side of time. John Calvin warned of this labyrinth, and I think it is a fair warning for we are trying to understand the Divine’s experience of our world which by definition is unknowable to us.

So, what is the point of these wild and varied observations? It is not that any of these ideas fully encapsulates the truth, that is impossible for us to know at this time. But it does show how our understanding and knowledge could be and likely are so inadequate; we need to be very careful in assuming we are right about nearly anything. It is important to recognize the limited and provincialism in our own thinking and our understanding of our neighbor and our neighbor’s neighbor. Your neighbor has knowledge and understanding you cannot even fathom. Quite naturally we start with the assumption we are always in the right. But, no one this side of God’s dominion is going to be anything more than fractionally right… and that includes first off myself.

In my last article I talked about picking up “Heavy Rocks” as a means to growth. Not learning and gaining in understanding can exacerbate this natural tendency to assuming one’s understanding is sufficient. But if you haven’t seriously engaged in learning in 10… 20… 30… or even 40 years, how is it possible that anything you know is sufficient, let alone complete enough to be “right?” When you consider the perspective from a fifth dimension, knowledge of all time and events as a singularity, it is complete hubris to cling to our petty and provincial understandings as infallible. This is not to say we should despair of knowing, but our understanding of knowing should spring from the soil of humility.