9.
I'm always faintly annoyed wearing an outfit with no pockets. I wander around all day feeling like I'm about to set my keys down somewhere and never find them again. There's just something I like about having a place to stash anything that might come up. With pockets, I move through the world keeping my options open. I like that feeling.
I attended a lecture last week by neuroscientist David Eagleman in which he discussed, among other things, the extreme polarization between religion and science, which has caused him to coin the term Possibilian to describe himself. He defines Possibilian like this:
"Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I'm hoping to define a new position — one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story."
He used the 2012 Hubble Extreme Deep Field view, a very small sample of the observable universe in which every speck of light is an entire galaxy consisting of billions of stars, to illustrate that despite our significant advances in science, we still know next to nothing.
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Not only that, no matter how much we learn, taken in the context of this photo it'll never be much.
He used another visual of a pier extending out into open water, explaining that science manages to add a few feet to the pier every now and then, but there is no horizon in sight. We are building a pier that will merely extend into the ocean forever. And I think he's okay with that.
I'm okay with that too. But I have a feeling there are people whose minds are not comfortable with that idea. There are people who far prefer having answers to having questions.
I think this has always been my difficulty with religion. Religion seeks to supply answers to mankind's most basic questions. The answers may provide comfort to people, giving them a place to direct their faith, their hope, and by extension, their actions. All of which is good.
But of course, we can only speculate. By the time we finally know, we are already gone and therefore it's too late to do anything with our knowledge. In our lives here on earth, anyway.
So in my mind, the point must not be knowing, but rather what we do with our not knowing.
This is why we're asked to have faith, right? I can understand that, but where I run into trouble is when I am asked to, as a result of having faith, surrender my questions.
I like to think that I can wear two pockets in my trousers, one for faith in a few key things, but also a much bigger one for questions. I derive comfort, and therefore value, from each.
This is where art comes in. Art is about asking questions, and isn't at all concerned with providing answers. Art encourages us to not only ask good ones, but to ask them collectively, repeatedly and well. Art allows us continual refinement of the questions we are asking, re-framing them in an endless variety of contexts and languages.
Art sits somewhere between science and religion. It's taking action in the face of the questions, but without seeking any specific answers. It's seeing possibilities in the questions themselves, and inherent value in the asking, and nothing more. Which is a place I'm quite content.
I don't know what this makes me, but the good news is, the older I get the less I care about the label. There are so many more important things to think about. Galaxies of them, in fact. And so little time to ask my good questions before I'm handed the answer to them. I intend to keep asking them all, right up until the moment the lights go out and then . . . on.
If I'm lucky and find myself somewhere with a big table, I'll be able to empty both pockets and sort, classify and finally understand the things I've spent a lifetime collecting in each.