Like a fish in a fishbowl sees the world through the distorted filter of water and glass, our perception of the world is similarly limited in scope and ladened with all of our presupposed notions about how reality occurs. But the difference is, that the fish doesn’t labor under the ridiculous presumption that he has any understanding of it. This can be a hard concept to wrap our heads around, given that we aren’t even fully aware of just how many layers of context go into our own perception – but even so, we are relentlessly tempted to trust our own knowing of things . . . without question.
Our default setting is to think of knowing as an accumulation of information that is either known or unknown to us – so when asked about something, we either have the information or we don’t. A more sophisticated appreciation of knowing realizes that information is like the water in a fish bowl – information is everywhere, but its ubiquity doesn’t explain its meaning. Which means there is yet another layer of knowing required for assessing the value and significance of all the data (information).
Then there’s a philosophical framing of knowing that recognizes that being a fish in water, complicates a true understanding of water . . . because as a fish we couldn’t imagine any other context for which to make a comparison. So inescapably, our knowing is trapped in the fishbowl of our own contextualized understanding. Therefore the water and all of its contents, including the fish, become a circular reference point – reaffirming a knowing we have already been conditioned to accept. So how confident do you feel about what you think you know, now?
In the creation narrative of Genesis, God establishes himself as the one true arbiter of what is good and what is not. God pronounces all that he has created as being tov (the Hebrew word for good), then he sees man alone, without woman, and pronounces that not tov. But between these two pronouncements we find a warning “. . . but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:17). So what are we to make of this warning? It most certainly seems to be a pronouncement of not tov . . . though it doesn’t follow the same template as the other pronouncements.
It’s always struck me as counter-intuitive that the fall of man would turn on a desire to know the difference between good and evil – in the same way that God knows it. Isn’t the whole point of morality to know how to make this distinction? Consider Cain killing Abel, the first recorded murder, a murder fueled by jealousy — now there’s a sin worthy of getting things started off on the wrong foot! But there were no laws regarding murder, Cain was only “doing what seemed right in his own eyes” . . . a phrase that would come to exemplify all of human knowing, assuming that our own knowing is all that is required.
When Satan came along to tempt Eve – what does he actually tempt her with? Does he not appeal to her own sense of knowing, based on her own limited self-referencing understanding of the world? So before she even picks the fruit, she had already pronounced it tov – when up to this point in the narrative, no one but God had made such a pronouncement. Therefore, even before the act of sin is committed, sin was found crouching at the door of her presumption to know.
Ever since, thinking that we know, has basically been the incubator of every sin known to man — all of the evil and harm we visit upon one another. O, that we might instead choose a more humble path, willing to confess just how little we really know — to freely accept our limitations. So I say, let us pray that God would simplify our hearts and minds . . . that we might finally discover the beauty and bliss found in not needing to know.
This song, written and performed by my brother Garrison, reminds us that in a complicated world — the simplest truths are always the best.
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