Skip to main content

A Pretence of Knowledge

The story is told of an Indian sitting in a plane next to Albert Einstein. To pass the time, Einstein proposed that they play a game. “I will ask you a question, and if you can’t answer it, you pay me fifty dollars. Then you ask me a question, and if I can’t answer it, I will pay you five hundred dollars.” The Indian knew he was no match for Einstein but figured he had enough philosophical and cultural knowledge to be able to stump Einstein sometimes, and with a ratio of ten to one, he could manage to stay in the game. Einstein went first and asked the Indian how far the earth was from the moon. The Indian was not sure of the exact number and put his hand into his pocket to give Einstein fifty dollars. Now came the Indian’s turn, and he asked, “What goes up the mountain with three legs and comes down with four legs?” Einstein paused, pondered, finally dipped his hand into his pocket and gave the man five hundred dollars. Now it was Einstein’s turn again. He said, “Before I ask you my next question, what does go up the mountain with three legs and comes down with four legs?” The Indian paused, dipped into his pocket, and gave Einstein fifty dollars. 
Ravi Zacharias in his book Jesus Among Secular Gods notes that many of us are like that Indian man because we often ask questions that are manufactured to trip up the other person, while having no answers to the question ourselves. I think this pretence of knowledge also manifests itself in the debate over public policy e.g. climate change, Covid-19. The side that is pushing the forward the "orthodox" view always seem to hold its position without any humility that they may be wrong in their analysis. The lack of a popular competiting alternative is always taken as a validation of the argument they are advancing. Like that Indian man, what seems to matter to them is not whether they in fact know the truth, but whether their opponents can prove their ignorance. 
Copyright © Chola Mukanga 2020
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Do Not Be Anxious

Do not be troubled if you are poor - Christ Himself had no place to lay His head. Do not let the prospect of future hard times make you anxious about how you will endure, for "you will not be ashamed in evil days, and in times of famine you will be satisfied." God has said (Psalm 37:19) therefore, you must believe it. Do not be overly concerned with securing provisions for old age, for by all appearances, you may not live to see it. It is more than likely that you will reach your journey’s end sooner than expected. Your body is frail - it is already declining, greeting decay as its mother before it has even fully entered the hall of this world. The supports of your earthly tent are being loosened little by little. Take courage, O my soul, for soon the devil, the world, and the flesh will be crushed beneath your feet, and you will be welcomed into eternal mansions.   But even if the Lord prolongs your days to old age, He who brought you forth from your mother's womb will n...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

The Wound of Sin

Bless the Lord, O my soul, that when you were playing with the bait, unaware of the hook like so many others, He opened your eyes—allowing you to see your folly and danger so that you might flee from it. And now, be careful that you do not grasp at any of the devil's temptations, lest he ensnare you with his hook. For though you may be restored by grace, it will not be without a wound—just as a fish sometimes escapes the hook but swims away injured. That wound may bring sorrow and take long to heal. And you have already known this to be true. THOMAS BOSTON  ( Source : The Art of Man-Fishing) A sobering truth from Thomas Boston. Sin always damages. God always restores His children when we fall but it is never without the wounds. We often carry the scars of our sins. This is another m reason for us to avoid sin altogether. Sometimes in our presumption of His grace, we tend to be antinomian. Boston is warning that such an attitude is foolish since sin always damages. It always leaves ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

Incarnation and Modernity

[The Bible] resituate modernity's prejudices within a wider context from which they were originally wrenched, showing them to be reductive heresies of a more complex biblical reality. So whereas modernity privileges an unchanging a-historicity, in the incarnation God enters history at a particular moment to gather a people to be with him not in a Greck eternity of unchanging timelessness, but in a biblical eternity of never-ending and ever-renewed intimacy and relational richness. Whereas modernity subordinates the particular to the universal, the Bible perfectly marries the universal "image of the invisible God" together with a particular first-century Palestinian Jewish man. Whereas modernity seeks the abstract over the material and finds itself painfully akimbo between the twin idols of materialism and immaterialism, in the same gesture the incarnate Christ validates material reality and prevents his followers from ever worshipping it. Finally, whereas modernity secks ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →