Spiritual Square?...More Like a Spiritual Hole

I was commenting back to a, if you will, 'blogger buddy' many of you know as Mark and became so immersed in the topic at hand that I couldn't help but make my comment a blog post. Thanks Mark_W.

I've only met one Christian in my lifetime to allow me to question his rationality on god with complete acceptance of my questions and dare I say even likes to ponder them. It seems to me he has never gone about it from a nonbeliever's point of view and he seems to like the challenge. However, debating with him is like trying to pinpoint where he comes up with some of his 'wild' beliefs that have no bases in the bible. It's like unraveling a mess of cords so that you understand where ONE electronic device's plug is so you can unplug it to fix the device's dysfunction safely.

Jean Piaget, as I am sure you know, was a developmental psychologist who theorized cognitive development into 4 stages. It is interesting to note stage 2 (2 to 7 years of age) of his theory, Preoperational thinking, in which the child uses symbolistic type of thinking. Wikipedia describes it best, "They use intuitive rather than logical reasoning." In the subcategory of this stage, "The intuitive stage is when children start employing mental activities to solve problems and obtain goals but they are unaware of how they came to their conclusions (wikipedia)." To illustrate this type of thinking I will try to reiterate a class I had one day long ago. We had watched a video in which they conducted an experiment with many children using a measuring cup, 2 different sized drinking glasses, a large shallow baking dish, and a pitcher full of water colored blue. All the experiment's supplies sat on a table and each child would sit with the experimenter in front of the table. Before the child sat an abnormally tall and skinny glass filled with exactly 2 cups of water and a fat and short glass filled with exactly 2 cups of water. The examiner asked the child to tell him which glass held the most amount of water. Some children pondered for a moment but every last child that sat in front of that table pointed to the tall and skinny glass of water to have the most amount of water. The experimenter then asked the child, "How do you know this glass (the tall glass) has more water than this glass (the fat glass)." It was obvious that each child was not prepared to be asked this question but every answer, though somewhat varied in their logic, approximated there was more water in the tall glass because the water rose above the other glass' water. Without telling them that their thinking was plain illogical the experimenter continued onward. Next he pulled out 2 measuring cups exact in make, height, and width. He looked at the child and asked them if the one measuring cups was just like the other and could hold no more or no less than the other. Each child closely examined the measuring cups, careful not to be tricked, and each child agreed that indeed, each measuring cup was just like the other. The experimenter then poured all the contents of the tall glass into one measuring cup and all the contents in the fat glass in the other. He then asked the child, "How much water is in this measuring cup?" The child replied, 2 cups. The experimenter went over to the other measuring cup and again, the child replied two cups. The child didn't even think about what had just transpired just minutes earlier. He was too enthralled to see where all this was leading. So to remind the child, the experimenter pulled the two drinking glasses in front of the child and asked the child to tell him again why the child thought there had been more water in the tall glass than the fat glass. Again, the child answered that the water in the tall glass was the obvious choice because the water was higher in that one. So the examiner looked at the child and asked the kid if he (the experimenter) had heard the child correctly, "This measuring cup has the same exact amount of water as this measuring cup." The child replied, "Yes." Then the experimenter asked to make sure that he understood that the tall glass held more water, again, "Yes." "Ok, if this cup has the same as this cup then if I pour it in these glasses, they should look even?" "Yes," the child concluded. So the experimenter poured the 2 cups into the fat glass and then...poured the other water into the tall glass. The child's jaw instantly dropped!

I know that was a long illustration but I think you can see where I am going. I hope you can bear with me a while longer because this concept is kind of hard to communicate in terms that will make sense to another reader, but here it goes.

There is no way for believers to go through a kind of spiritual growth and development because they cannot tangibly interact with an invisible environment nor manipulate the objects in it. This comes as no surprise as there is no such environment for one to possibly be able to participate in basic fundamental tasks necessary for development. What I mean to say is that their spirituality is only an inner knowledge of their beliefs. It's not an outside entity for which they can objectively see. When they make a mistake or make correct conclusions in their spirituality, they cannot observe or measure their mistake or correctness. For instance, it's like the child sitting in front of a plastic box with different shaped holes with matching blocks made to fit within them: a star, a square, a circle, a triangle, etc. They can try to fit the square in the circle but it will never work and they will eventually discover that it can absolutely never work. We've all seen this; they'll keep plugging away at it until they just give up and pick up another block, and plug at the same square hole with, say, a triangle this time. They keep doing this until they fit the square block into the square hole. However, come the next day, their doing the same nonsense. It isn't until they've been working at this toy for so long that they finally get the idea that a square shape goes into a square shaped hole and eventually their able to do it with ease, get bored, and move on to the next challenge. Yet, finally mastering this seemingly small task, you can only imagine the vast amount of effort and time that child had to put into memorizing, hypothesizing, correcting themselves, adjusting their thinking, the frustration, and the strength and fine tuning their muscles undergo to finally just be able to put a square block into a square hole consistently and without fail every time.

Getting back to the idea of a spiritual growth and development, a believer and god can never go through the above stated undertaking because god is, of course, not there tangibly to interact with. If that child had to cognitively think about how to put that square block into that square hole, without ever laying their eyes on the square block or hole, could the child do it? It seems absurd to think that they could. Even if by some magical chance this child had an adult understanding of language, with no other cognitive ability other than their current stage of development, would any amount of telling and explaining to this child, "Somewhere out there is a square block with a matching hole and I will tell you all about it," would the child ever be able to fit a square with a square. I associate the same concept with believers. They can do a lot of speculating. But what in the hell is a square in the first place, what the hell is 4, what is a side, what is a cube, what's a hole? Who knows what this child's imagination might conjure up? I can almost guarantee you though, if that child was caught shuffling about in his toy bin and coincidentally pulled out the block/hole toy, he'd have no clue what he was playing with. The same goes with theists. With absolutely no physical form, god's followers only have their imaginations left to figure out who and what the hell god is. To me this is interesting because, if you think about it, imagination can only be used to manipulate or tweak reality, i.e. a lion with eagle wings, an alien—a roundish triangle with 2 black pointy like ovals for their eyes, etc. They do not have the opportunity to test out their god hypothesis objectively. The only thing they DO have is contradiction of thought. If one imagination contradicts another enigma then they have to "squarely" imagine something up to heal the dissonance of the nonphysical imaginative alter reality.

Need I remind them that the very notion and concept of the term, "Contradiction," initially comes from understanding contradiction fundamentally—i.e. black and white. To further illustrate this point, one can not know what the number, "Two," implies until someone sits in front of them, for example, two apples. "Here's one apple Timmy and here's another apple, you now have two apples."

All that digression to finally get to my point which is: a believer stays in a stage of intuitive and illogical thinking pertaining to matters concerning faith because without the opportunity to manipulate their environment/god growth and development with god cannot occur. They can imagine it to occur but all they have available is their imagination to test another imagination. Whatever imagination makes most peace with the other imaginations stays…and in cycles we go. Though philosophically speaking, if god is the creator of everything and he created our minds in this fashion of G&D then did god intend us to ever be able to know him at all!?

It is a challenge debating with people of faith, no matter how intelligent they can be and are. Trying to prove factual evidence to the contrary is, I can only describe, like breaking THEIR law of how they imagine the science of the supernatural work. If you can't figure out how they have arrived at their current conclusion, nor they, then communication becomes null--the tall and skinny glass will always and forever contain more water than the short and fat glass. Though I must confess, they provide the oppurtunity for me to own up to my own irrational thinking to myself. Which we all know is a rarity for me to have any irrational thinking ; P