“Education is a progressive discovery of our ignorance.” Will Durant

“Education is that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.” Oscar Wilde

“Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mankind’s thirst for knowledge has unveiled a paradox. ‘The more we learn, the more apparent our ignorance becomes.’  But we esteem education and have even devoted a scholarly discipline to its study, epistemology, a quest into the origin, nature, methods and limits of knowledge.  It is an enterprise devoted to determining whether or not there are good grounds for believing something with certainty.

Our knowledge is continually being expanded through a process of amassing data and refining it.  This began with prehistoric tribes who passed knowledge from generation to generation verbally.  They established folk histories in the form of legends and fables that etched in the tribal member’s minds what had taken place in their past.  With the advent of human migration and commerce, different tribal cultures traded their histories and the seeds of a troubled future were planted.  Certain tribal histories contradicted other tribal histories.  Tribes disagreed about how and why they originated and who or what was responsible.  They also disagreed about their inherent rights to the earth and their disputes turned into skirmishes and eventually full-blown wars.

Much later in our history philosophers began speculating as to why things are as they are and suggested different ways to think and act towards each other and the world we live in.  They also failed to reach a consensus, however, and competing “schools of thought” emerged.  In time those schools splintered into factions, religious systems, political parties, ideologies and cults, all claiming to have the answers. Of course the bickering and wars continued.

“Authorities” appeared on the scene, people who specialized in certain fields like religion, economics, philosophy or science.  They fulfilled certain formal requirements and became “official” authorities with letters behind their names like MA, MD, PHD and THD and this qualified them to sift information, add to it as their research dictated, and tell the rest of us what portion of the total we should believe.  But they also differed with each other.  Two authorities with degrees from prestigious institutions might disagree about how and why complex language skills first originated within Homo Sapiens but they would both insist on telling the rest of us their version as if it were fact.

What are we to make of all this?  It doesn’t breed a lot of confidence in the convictions men hold so dearly.  Most of us have become increasingly cynical about what we read and hear.  We decide what we need to know in order to survive at a level that suits us and temper our beliefs accordingly.  Our belief systems are shaped by pragmatism and things related to survival, like earning a paycheck, fixing a roof, mobilizing an army or cultivating an edible crop. We filter out that portion of knowledge that best serves our needs and mold it into a world-view.  We even become pragmatic about subjective concepts like good and evil. We are mistakenly seduced into believing that if it works for us, it is inherently good. The determination of good and evil becomes an individual thing. With thinking like that, it is not surprising that the very concept of “truth” becomes distorted. Societies like present-day America emerge in which it is not uncommon to hear statements like - ‘It works for me, therefore it is truth for me’. 

Authorities are also vulnerable to this trap but because we esteem their accomplishments in a given field we allow them to tell the rest of us why we should behave in a certain way or adopt a particular world-view.  Sometimes they get into positions of great power or influence, however, and believe themselves to be so righteously aligned on the side of truth that they encourage their followers to forcefully convert other men who are followers of a dissenting authority.  We wind up slaughtering each other over ideas with names like communism, democracy, Islam and Christianity. But we can’t ignore religion or the social sciences because there are diametrically opposed views.  We have to find out who’s on the right track or we’ll eventually annihilate ourselves with the grandest of human epistemological endeavors to date, atomic energy.  The question is – how do we determine who’s on the right track, that is, how do we establish whether or not someone has really offered truth?

Pontius Pilate asked Jesus Christ, “What is truth?” The question surfaced during an inquest into the weightier matters confronting mankind, such as guilt and innocence and the existence of God. They were not debating how best to feed a population or build a bridge. Anyone reading the accounts of Pilate’s encounters with Christ realizes his query about the concept of truth was not in reference to triviality.  His comment ushered him into the realm of logic, the world of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle. It is a world that says if truth exists at all, then untruth must exist as well. In other words, God either exists or not.  Atheism is either true or false. The point is, some forms of truth claims are not validated simply by what we believe or whether or not they work for us or whether or not they make us feel good.

Another profound either/or statement can be made about our universe. It either had a beginning in time or it stretches infinitely into the past. Believing “truth” to be represented by one viewpoint or the other, and then working out a philosophical or religious behavior system founded upon one or the other, could result in convictions on good and evil, guilt and innocence or the existence and nature of God that are based upon wishful thinking.  Evidence should decide the matter, not wishful thinking.

So how do we resolve truth claims that really matter?  How about simply believing the authority with the most letters behind his name and take him at his word, especially if he has a very high IQ.  In other words, we find an Einstein in the field we are struggling to understand. That doesn’t work. Towards the end of his career, Albert Einstein admitted that he made a mistake by integrating a numerical value into one of his equations on relativity, a “cosmological constant”,  in order to make it harmonize with his philosophical persuasion.  His ideas in the field of science were moderated by his personal agenda.  Einstein had an ulterior motive, possibly subconscious, when he doctored his professional opinion on relativity.  In his case, his theory on relativity indicated a beginning for the universe but this didn’t jell with his particular metaphysical belief system, one that was founded upon “discomfort” over the presence of evil. He said this about it. "My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."  An infinitely old universe melded better with the impersonal entity he thought of as God.  He allowed wishful thinking to force a particular interpretation of evidence rather than allowing the evidence to speak for itself and influence his perception of truth. But Einstein is certainly not the first authority in his field to forge his conclusions about reality from his views on origins.  In fact, the topic of origins, specifically ours, is the single most fertile breeding ground for mankind’s views on just about everything that could be categorized as truth that matters. The philosophies we support with fierceness and brutality are rooted in what we believe to be true regarding the initial cause for man’s appearance, whether it was the intent of a supernatural entity or the result of purely natural forces.

The very first man believed certain things about how he became what he was.  He either acquired those beliefs on his own or he acquired them from his Creator. Everyone has an opinion about which option is closer to the truth and some people claim that their opinion should be given greater weight because they are authorities in the field of origins.  They are scientists, theologians, and philosophers with letters after their names and books in print.  But their books rarely agree.  This tells us that many authorities have written books presenting world-views rooted in a specific belief about man’s origin, and they are wrong.  If one authority says “nature” is all there is and another expert says nature is an expression of the will of God, one of the authoritative opinions is mistaken because the two views contradict each other.  So if one authority can be wrong, does that mean we should be skeptical of all authorities?  Yes, at least to a degree.  We should be wary of the motives behind their ideas, not only remembering Einstein, but also recognizing the entire phenomena of authoritativeness for what it really is. Today’s authorities are simply experts in a given field.  They are specialists in an ever-increasing academic and professional environment of specialization.  So any claim by an authority in the field of origins should be scrutinized with a very skeptical eye because there simply are no authorities in the field of origins.  No one can know it all because there is too much to know.  Only parts of the whole are known, by specialists, with any degree of comprehensiveness.

The origin of man involves cosmology, astronomy, biology, physics, anthropology, paleontology, archaeology, linguistics, psychology, information theory, organic chemistry, molecular chemistry and many other disciplines, all highly specialized.  Physicists are quantum physicists or nuclear physicists.  Biologists are molecular biologists or endocrinologists or some other kind of specialized biologist.  This means that a quantum physicist, if he intends to use information from the field of molecular chemistry to support his opinion on the origin of spiritual expression within mankind, for example, as he promotes his metaphysical belief system publicly, has no real intrinsic advantage over the rest of us because of his expertise in a particular field. He must rely on the opinions and writings of other specialists.  So there probably isn’t a big difference between a quantum physicist, a history professor, an investment banker or an architect offering metaphysical truth, as none of them have “preferred access” to the general knowledge pool.  The thing we must be wary of is that their version of truth may have been influenced by a world-view that was adopted through wishful thinking rather than evidence. And there is something further we should consider when examining the metaphysical truth claims of a recognized authority in a given field.  Why is he telling the rest of us what he believes and how much of his “soul” – how much of himself has he invested in his belief system prior to making his opinions public?  What would he have to sacrifice or lose if he were to change his beliefs?  Would it be money or prestige?  Would he suffer humiliation or ridicule at the hands of his peers?  Would a lifetime of work go down the drain?

As to the question of how metaphysical truth can be discovered, that is the reason for this book. The book outlines a search for truth utilizing a specific method. It is similar to that used by the old TV game show - What’s My Line?  The players asked a series of yes or no questions designed to narrow their search for the “truth” of a guest’s specific occupation and ultimately name it. The question behind this book is: What happens to us when we die?  A series of questions is asked and based upon a yes answer to the first, we proceed to the second, becoming more specific. We first ask if there is a God, and look at evidence presented by specialists indicating yes. If the evidence had indicated no, then the answer to our foundational question would be that when we die, we return to dust – period! The game would be over. The book doesn’t end that quickly, however, so the first answer is yes and from there the following series of questions is asked and answered in the affirmative, with evidence presented by specialists supporting the answers. Here are the series of questions.  They form a summary of the book.

Can philosophy or science tell us if there is a God?

If there is a God, has he revealed himself?

Can we know for sure whether purported revelations from God are legitimate?

If we find one that is legitimate, does it tell us what will happen to us when we die?

Does what it says have any immediate bearing upon our lives?