It is my general direction to encourage people to believe they’re not quite as dumb as they think they are. I remind my philosophy students that Immanuel Kant was just a man who put his pantaloons on one leg at a time. They needn’t fear to challenge him. He’s just a slob like one of us. In like manner, the work I do in apologetics follows the same line. I even find myself helping unbelievers come to understand that they are not as dumb as they think they are. That is, when they claim that there is no truth, and therefore they don’t have any, I remind them that “there is no truth” is itself a truth claim. From there I help them understand that there are many other truths they know, even if they don’t like them all.
That faux humility that drives relativism is no humility at all. It is in fact a claim to have universal knowledge. One must know all there is to know to know nothing can be known. That, however, doesn’t mean humility has no place in our thinking and our knowing. Sometimes I have to push in the other direction, encouraging people to believe we’re not quite as smart as we think we are. Real humility looks at the fifteen pieces of the 1000 puzzle piece puzzle we have and says, “Yeah, I’m not real sure what this is part of a picture of. Whatever it is it has some blue and some yellow, but beyond that I just can’t say.” Real humility says this when your best friends have created a “Of course it’s a Dutch windmill picture” Facebook group that snickers at the dopes over at, “No,it’saparrotonapirate’sshoulder.wordpress.com.” It’s great that social media allows us all to have a take. It’s horrible that social media requires us all to have a take.
We birth a thousand non sequiters from every true fact we actually have. We string together supposition upon assumption upon motives magically discerned in order to reach the ridiculous conclusion that we have honorably walked our way to the prejudiced conclusion we began with. If we don’t like person, politician, pastor or policy X we stand ready to pronounce them guilty at the drop of an insinuation. If we do like person, politician, pastor or policy x we stand ready to pronounce the accusers guilty of slander not just while the jury is still out but before the bailiff has first bid us “All rise.” We find it all too easy to believe what we want to believe because we want to believe it.
“Maybe” is often our friend. “I don’t know” is faithful. “I’m not close to having enough information to reach any kind of conclusion. To do so would be utterly unfair and reckless” is wisdom. Opinions are like flaws and blemishes- we all have way too many of them. Let’s tweeze, pluck, prune the ones without sufficient roots in the truth, and embrace the bliss of ignorance.