Like I said last time, I think that wanting to prove something is pretty much an exercise in futility.
I’m having a hard time knowing where to start with this one. The idea of proving something to be true is so basic, so intrinsic to my world view that when I consider challenging the whole premise I go a bit blank.
Lets start with an assertion; if I am completely unwilling to be swayed by your arguments, then you cannot convince me of anything. It is only when I am willing to be convinced that my opinion can be changed. As an example; to me the picture to the right is proof that I reached the summit of the Grand Teton because I took the picture at the summit. For you this picture probably means nothing and if you won’t believe that I took the picture and believe me when I say where I took it, it proves nothing to you.
All right, lets go deeper; if I don’t agree with you about what a thing fundamentally is, then you cannot even communicate with me about it. So, if I see a cow as a walking meal, I won’t comprehend why you are concerned that it be treated with kindness. If I am convinced that gravity is the hand of god holding all of us on the earth, I will not be able to understand how launching a satellite isn’t basically asking god to hold another thing in the sky.
Nothing is proved until we are convinced that it is true. This means that the act of proving something to me is really something that I do to myself in response to the evidence you have provided. Before I can be convinced I must agree to the framework in which your proof is couched, be it the scientific method or a creationist paradigm. To come into agreement with your frame of reference, I must be able to admit that I was wrong.
So here’s a secret. It is really difficult for us to allow ourselves to be wrong.
Here’s another secret. The more we resist being wrong, the harder it is for us to learn anything. I suspect this is why children have a much easier time learning – they haven’t experienced the fallout for being “wrong” as much, and so they aren’t as resistant to it as an adult.
What does this have to do with proving what I wanted to prove last night, that cooperation is a survival mechanism?
I was thinking about how religion and science have been butting heads for a couple of hundred years. I was thinking about how religion, misunderstood and unchecked, brought the crusades and how science, misunderstood and unchecked, brought the Holocaust and World War II with it’s horrifically scientific ending. Our faiths in both religion and science have been repaid by our being turned against our fellow travelers and yet both are espoused by countless, well meaning people.
And it seems to me that part of the problem is our insistence that either is right. What if both religion and science are focused on illusions? If the truth is not complete, how can it be true? What if we’re paying attention to the wrong questions? Hey, what if the most beneficial way of being and thinking is hidden in plain sight all around the globe in millions of hearts and prayers.
What if love is the answer… and the question? What if connection and wholeness and oneness and rightness with the world are waiting for us to reach out and make them, but we’re convinced that the real question is how we can make other people wrong so that we can be right?
I believe that if we are willing to learn a new frame of reference, a new way of making sense, we can change everything. You see, I believe that love is real. I believe that we can create paradise in our lives, but I can’t prove it for two reasons. First, I don’t know the language of love. I was raised speaking the languages of religion and science. I need to accept that I am wrong, my thinking is flawed, and that what I need to understand isn’t how to be right, but how to speak the language of love. Second, If you need me to prove it then you don’t know the language of love either. Thus, even If I knew the right things to say, what you would be hearing would be about the rabbit apple’s walking purple.