What can we know

by Pepper Marts

The first Lesson appointed for The Great Vigil of Easter might well have been translated like this:

In the Beginning of creation when God was making the heavens and the earth, the earth was a vast waste. Darkness covered the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the surface of the water. God said...

"Let del dot D equal rho, and let del dot B equal zero, and let del cross E equal minus the partial of B by t, and let del cross H equal I plus the partial of D by t" and there was light.

These possibly unfamiliar words are a set of partial differential equations developed by the English physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). They describe the relationships among measurable entities that allow us to predict how the time-varying electromagnetic fields light, radio waves, gamma radiation will behave.

That such a description is possible, I interpret to mean that God has made the created order in such a way as to be understandable to those with the necessary wit and drive to investigate it. Although that understanding is and will be imperfect, we can describe much of the physical world and make predictions that subsequent experience confirms.

We have not the same facility either to describe the human psyche and soul or to understand the actions of human beings. Psychologists and psychiatrists, sociologists and historians, have much to offer of data and conjectures that provide insights to the mysterious inner realm, to our interior state. But there are no partial differential equations. Instead we depend on our perceptions of what we believe others have done in the past, our imagination of what their motives might have been, and then we guess. From start to finish the endeavor is clouded.

Sometimes we further obscure an already murky process by our desire for a particular outcome. Sometimes we may identify so strongly with an individual's position on an issue that we are blind to the uncharity of which that person is capable. Similarly, we may find a person's position on an issue so distasteful that we cannot see the honest search for truth that lies behind it. May God preserve us all from such errors.

[COVENANT, Number 20, April 2005]

Pepper Marts is a writer, reporter, and essayist. He edits Network News, an alternative publication in the Diocese of the Rio Grande. He and his wife Linda live in Albuquerque, NM, where they are members of St Michael & All Angels Episcopal Parish. He retired from the US Air Force in 1979.