Philosophy Point of the Day

This was a point shared on a good friends Blog. I though the quote was interesting enough I Decided to do a good response. I personally love the response I wrote. I'm narcissistic. OR I've been doing an academic writing class... Tell what you think!

If I take a lamp and shine it toward the wall, a bright spot will appear on the wall. The lamp is our search for truth, for understanding. Too often we assume the light on the wall is God, but the light is not the goal of the search, it is the result of the search. The more intense the search, the brighter the light on the wall. The brighter the light on the wall, the greater the revelation upon seeing it. Similarly, someone who does not search, who does not bring a lantern with him, sees nothing. What we perceive as God is the by-product of our search for God. It may simply be an appreciation of the light, pure and unblemished. Not understanding that it comes from us, sometimes, we stand in front of the light and assume we are the center of the universe. God looks astonishingly like we do. Or we turn to look at our shadow and assume all is darkness. If we allow ourselves to get in the way, we defeat the purpose - which is use the light of our search to illuminate the wall in all its beauty and all it flaws, and in so doing, better understand the world around us.

From the thoughts of G’Kar



So, I’ve been doing academic writing in college right now. The following response is directly due to the influence of that class. At least I think this is cool !

"The lamp is our search for truth, for understanding. Too often we assume the light on the wall is God, but the light is not the goal of the search, it is the result of the search."

Since this is an equating sentence lets substitute the words that it wants to replace. If we just look at the components and how they are used in the analogy we find some gaping holes that remain unexplained. Lamp=search for truth. Light=??? What is a natural byproduct of a search? “Light” would be a natural byproduct but it remains undefined. The wall object is also undefined. He does say, undefined light on undefined wall is assumed to be God; which is a superfluous statement. We don’t know the nature of the two undefined objects to assume they are God. If we make rational assumptions about the objects, some things make more sense but still show holes. Let’s assume if the lantern is the designated quest (i.e. search for truth), and then light would be the efforts of our search. When our efforts discover something it is light reflecting off the object. The Object is itself, the wall might represent God (it could be many things -like surroundings- but he ties it to God with the assumption comment). How the analogy is worded makes it sound that we assume that discovering God is God. Humm… the ACT of discovery may not be God But what about that wall…? Let’s just redo the whole quote with my assumed substitutions. I’ll start after the second sentence and the wall will be changed to *Life. After reading it though again I believe he thinks the wall is Life event though it is NEVER designated that way. It only makes the most sense in this substitution. (I also tried *God and it worked pretty good as well)

“If I take a lamp and shine it toward the wall, a bright spot will appear on the wall. The lamp is our search for truth, for understanding. Too often we assume the efforts of discovering the *Life is God, but the effort is not the goal of the search, it is the result of the search. The more intense the search, the more the effort is discovering the *Life. The more the effort is discovering the *Life, the greater the revelation upon seeing it. Similarly, someone who does not search, who does not bring a search for truth with him, sees nothing. What we perceive as God is the by-product of our search for God. It may simply be an appreciation of the effort, pure and unblemished. Not understanding that it comes from us, sometimes, we focus our efforts on ourselves and assume we are the center of the universe. God looks astonishingly like we do. Or we turn to look at our lack of effort and assume all is lack of effort. If we allow ourselves to get in the way, we defeat the purpose - which is use the effort of our search to discover the *Life in all its beauty and all it flaws, and in so doing, better understand the world around us.”

Reading through it now shows the small funny contradictions as well as the statements that make sense. I believe the intent of the author was to say “What we perceive as God is the by-product of our search for God” meaning that God only exists because we search for him. What he doesn’t exactly cover is when we DO spot something- like a wall. On our search for God we may find our surroundings, ourselves, life or even gasp God! That’s the problem with the undefined wall. If that wall is God and he is found though searching our stronger effort does produce greater knowledge of him. The wall is not a byproduct of the search.