Let us suppose that in your living room is a fine chesterfield armchair. You have grown to love it, maybe it was handed down to you by a relative, or maybe you saved for it and brought it new. In my case it was one that someone else was getting rid of. A friend comes around one day, and you show them your chair, and they tell you they cant see a chair. You are stunned. Its right there in front of you. They give you a long and convincing argument proving beyond all reasonable doubt that the chair does not exist, not only has there has never been a manufacturer of chesterfield chairs, but there is no such thing as a chair at all. You invite them to try it out – to sit on it, but they maintain that there is nothing to sit on. You sit down yourself – and they respond by saying you are just crouching, there is nothing under you but air.
At this stage there are two possibilities, either your friend is right, there is indeed no chair, its something your over active imagination has created, and your friends arguments are correct, or despite how logical your friends arguments are you are correct there is a chair. His arguments do not make the chair vanish, and however convincing they are the chair still exists as it always has.
It seems to me that for the most part I have felt this way about faith. My belief in God can be seen in the same way as my belief of the chair. That someone might give an argument showing that the chair does not exist has not bothered me, its there – I can speak from experience. Yet recently I have tried to sit down and found myself on the floor. The question I am now faced with is – did I attempt to sit in the wrong spot – or was my friend right – did I imagine the chesterfield armchair?
My initial response to this problem has been to examine that arguments of the person who says there is no chair, to see if I can find a flaw in them. I will continue to attempt this approach – but at the same time, I will keep trying to sit down. As of yet I have no idea how often I will need to find myself sitting on the floor before I give up on my belief that I didn’t imagine the whole thing.
Personally, I'm persuaded by the friend's arguments. We then have two options. We can either draw the conclusion, as the friend does, that the chair doesn't exist. Or we can change our understanding of what the word 'chair' means. Perhaps it doesn't refer to a physical support for one's arse but is a way of talking about what supports one spiritually, what gives one's life meaning. Since we could never fully understand something which supports life's meaning, because it is itself beyond all human grasp, we think of if as a 'chair', a physical support. We know, deep down, that it can't really be a physical object, and that our friend is right, but we think the word 'chair' has another meaning that our friend can't see. If the friend did understand the word as we do, he might agree with us that the chair's real, even if it doesn't physically exist.
ReplyDeleteWe ARE crouching on the floor. Would it be too cheesy to say that some of us are looking at the ceiling?
Hope that wasn't too tortuous...
I love this description and Monsoonmalabar's response. I will keep looking at the ceiling, I guess.
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