We human beings are unable to survive, and certainly cannot thrive, unless we can make meaning. If life is perceived as utterly random, fragmented, and chaotic -meaningless- we suffer confusion, distress, stagnation, and finally despair. The meaning we make orients our posture in the world, and determines our sense of self and purpose. We need to be able to make some sort of sense out of things; we seek pattern, order, coherence, and relation in the dynamic and disparate elements of our experience. —Sharon Daloz Parks
Inhabiting Reality
How, then, do we make sense of life and reality—of “the disparate elements of our experience”? What is reality?
In a word, reality is everything: all that exists, all that is true, and all that is real. It includes us (the persons asking the question), the world of which we’re a part, and the ultimate order-of-things (reality as a whole, and what it all means). In what follows, we’ll get an overview of reality in precisely those terms: an approach to reality from within.
Introduction
Given that we ourselves are part of reality, we’re going to explore it from within—through the lens of our experience in the world. It’s going to look a little different from the picture of reality we mapped in our last discussion, but we’ll see the same reality, only from a different angle.
Let’s break it all down into three main realms or domains: the existential (all that pertains to ourselves as individual persons and agents in the world), the situational (what’s going on in the world, the nature of things, and how the world works), and the normative (the ultimate order-of-things, or the larger Story by which we live our lives—whether that includes spiritual realities or not).
It is also widely recognized that reality is relational in nature, that everything is connected, and everything affects everything else. So we’ll approach our three categories in relational terms, breaking things down in terms of our relationship to ourselves, our relationships to others (and to nature), and our relationship to life itself and our place in the universe.
Life in Our Skin
Let’s start with the existential domain, which is our personal experience of life in all its complexity. It includes not just our experience, but also the actuality of everything that is part of me as an individual. Let’s call it life in our skin.
Life in our skin includes obvious realities like our bodies and all that goes on in our consciousness, but also more elusive ones like our sense of self and purpose. In this aspect of things, we ask everyday questions like: How am I doing? and Why am I feeling this way? But also bigger questions like: What do I want? and Who am I?
Notice the focus on our subjective experience, which is never left out of sight in this project, given our experiential approach. But our judgement on that subjective experience is grounded on clear understanding of objective realities: human nature (physiology, sex, health and fitness, language ability and creativity, mortality and spirituality), personhood (identity formation, gender, self-transcendence, sense of others), and human being (agency, freedom and responsibility, behavior and motivations, vocation, reality construction), all of which will be covered in the curriculum.
Life on the Ground
Another aspect of things is our relationship to the rest of the world. Let’s call it life on the ground. This is one of the largest parts of the curriculum and it’s quite comprehensive. It explores how the universe works, the emergence and history of life on Earth, models of society and civic engagement, culture, and interpersonal relationships.
In keeping with our experiential approach, we’ll engage this whole aspect of reality through the rubric of freedom and responsibility: the freedoms we humans have to pursue what we consider good and desirable, and the many responsibilities we share to protect and enable those freedoms in any given society.
In this aspect of things, we ask questions like: What can I expect of others? What do others expect of me? How are we doing? What do we want? Similarly with nature. We have a lot of power over nature, but we also depend on it. So, what sort of relationship should we have with it? What can we expect of it, and what should it expect of us?
The Priority of Meaning
At the risk of getting too technical here, let’s briefly address a question that might come up for some readers at this point: Why “freedom and responsibility”? Clearly, this isn’t the only way to approach life on the ground. We don’t have to talk about freedom and responsibility to talk about the stuff of life—much less about space, time and matter in all their particularities.
We’ll approach it this way because it seems the most promising way to explore reality from within, learning about the stuff of life and how the world works in the most meaningful way possible. Freedom and responsibility are this meaningful and this promising because they help us frame our lives in relation to the good—in relation to the ends toward which we live. Few things are more meaningful than getting clarity on that.
In a word, reality is everything: all that exists, all that is true, and all that is real. It includes us (the persons asking the question), the world of which we’re a part, and the ultimate order-of-things (reality as a whole, and what it all means). In what follows, we’ll get an overview of reality in precisely those terms: an approach to reality from within.
Introduction
Given that we ourselves are part of reality, we’re going to explore it from within—through the lens of our experience in the world. It’s going to look a little different from the picture of reality we mapped in our last discussion, but we’ll see the same reality, only from a different angle.
Let’s break it all down into three main realms or domains: the existential (all that pertains to ourselves as individual persons and agents in the world), the situational (what’s going on in the world, the nature of things, and how the world works), and the normative (the ultimate order-of-things, or the larger Story by which we live our lives—whether that includes spiritual realities or not).
It is also widely recognized that reality is relational in nature, that everything is connected, and everything affects everything else. So we’ll approach our three categories in relational terms, breaking things down in terms of our relationship to ourselves, our relationships to others (and to nature), and our relationship to life itself and our place in the universe.
Life in Our Skin
Let’s start with the existential domain, which is our personal experience of life in all its complexity. It includes not just our experience, but also the actuality of everything that is part of me as an individual. Let’s call it life in our skin.
Life in our skin includes obvious realities like our bodies and all that goes on in our consciousness, but also more elusive ones like our sense of self and purpose. In this aspect of things, we ask everyday questions like: How am I doing? and Why am I feeling this way? But also bigger questions like: What do I want? and Who am I?
Notice the focus on our subjective experience, which is never left out of sight in this project, given our experiential approach. But our judgement on that subjective experience is grounded on clear understanding of objective realities: human nature (physiology, sex, health and fitness, language ability and creativity, mortality and spirituality), personhood (identity formation, gender, self-transcendence, sense of others), and human being (agency, freedom and responsibility, behavior and motivations, vocation, reality construction), all of which will be covered in the curriculum.
Life on the Ground
Another aspect of things is our relationship to the rest of the world. Let’s call it life on the ground. This is one of the largest parts of the curriculum and it’s quite comprehensive. It explores how the universe works, the emergence and history of life on Earth, models of society and civic engagement, culture, and interpersonal relationships.
In keeping with our experiential approach, we’ll engage this whole aspect of reality through the rubric of freedom and responsibility: the freedoms we humans have to pursue what we consider good and desirable, and the many responsibilities we share to protect and enable those freedoms in any given society.
In this aspect of things, we ask questions like: What can I expect of others? What do others expect of me? How are we doing? What do we want? Similarly with nature. We have a lot of power over nature, but we also depend on it. So, what sort of relationship should we have with it? What can we expect of it, and what should it expect of us?
The Priority of Meaning
At the risk of getting too technical here, let’s briefly address a question that might come up for some readers at this point: Why “freedom and responsibility”? Clearly, this isn’t the only way to approach life on the ground. We don’t have to talk about freedom and responsibility to talk about the stuff of life—much less about space, time and matter in all their particularities.
We’ll approach it this way because it seems the most promising way to explore reality from within, learning about the stuff of life and how the world works in the most meaningful way possible. Freedom and responsibility are this meaningful and this promising because they help us frame our lives in relation to the good—in relation to the ends toward which we live. Few things are more meaningful than getting clarity on that.
Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. —Aristotle
Now, we’ll also engage in theoretical reasoning about matters of fact. But it’s clear that theoretical reasoning leads to beliefs about the nature of things and how the world works. Those same beliefs naturally inform our practical reasoning and our common sense, including the bigger questions of freedom and responsibility. And because it is meaning we’re after—not just isolated facts—we’re going to subsume theoretical reasoning within practical reasoning, allowing us to zoom-in to assess data as usual, but always in service of the bigger picture and our place within it.
The Big Picture
One way we’ll keep an eye on the big picture is by framing this part of the project within a Big History framework: the story of the cosmos, from the Big Bang to the present. Only we’ll do it backwards: starting with life as we know it, and seeking answers to our questions by going back in time to see how we got here.
Eventually this will lead to questions of origins (what came before the Big Bang, what caused it, etc.) which requires the next part of the curriculum, where we ask the big questions of meaning, faith, and God. We’ll call that aspect of things life in the world.
Life in the World
This aspect of reality informs everything else we believe and do. If life is a Story, then what’s the plot? What’s going on? And why are we here in the first place? Ultimately, it depends on where it all came from, on why there is something rather than nothing, and whether or not Someone made the cosmos, as some of our stories claim.
One Reality
Our approach here is to recognize and assume that reality is one, in agreement with both science and theology. This means that whatever we believe about the ultimate order-of-things needs to square with our experience on the ground. That is, we should be able to recognize in our experience of life that which we have come to believe through other sources about the nature of things. Let’s unpack that a bit.
Meaning and Ultimate Meaning
Because reality is one, we’re able to build our worldviews both bottom-up and top-down. We draw our beliefs both from what we learn through our own experience (bottom-up), and from what we have received through other sources about the nature of things (top-down)—be that philosophical or religious traditions, family and culture in general, or the schools we went to. The question is how well those sources help explain our experience. To the degree that they do, they help us be at home in the universe.
This distinction between bottom-up and top-down sources also helps to differentiate meaning (sensemaking in an immediate context) from ultimate meaning (sensemaking in light of an ultimate context): meaning we can draw bottom-up—and, in fact, we create meaning ourselves (that is the stuff of culture) —while ultimate meaning we have to receive from others (parents, religion, philosophy), which always requires a measure of trust. As such, ultimate meaning is always received by faith.
Worldviews are ultimately based on fundamental faith commitments from which we understand evidence, truths, facts, and all of reality. Presuppositions are like a base camp for the mind: where you start out in your exploration of reality, and the place you come home to. Your set of presuppositions is the most basic place you know from. At this level, worldviews are fundamentally religious. That is, they are types of faith: they deal with life at the level of deepest commitment. —Ted Turnau
Faith is the intuition that one is proceeding in the right direction. It is our conviction that the world is intelligible on our terms, and that truth is worth seeking. Faith is also trust in our own experience and powers of analysis. Even our capacity for reason requires that we have faith in its ability to arrive at the truth. —Bruce Sheiman
Faith and God
Since ancient times, humans have believed that the world is not just physical but that there’s a spiritual dimension to reality. Most have believed that there are spiritual forces or gods out there, and that they have a lot to do with what’s going on in the world. Many have believed that there’s only one God, and that he created all things. There are three major versions of that belief: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
If it is true that there are spiritual forces and gods out there, then who or what are they? And what do they want? And if it’s true that there’s only one God, creator of “the heavens and the earth,” then who is he? And what are his intentions for the work of his hands? What can we expect of him, and what does he expect of us?
Today many find it difficult to believe there’s any such thing as a spirit-realm, or gods, or a creator of all things. However, all the options available to answer questions of ultimate meaning have to be taken by faith. And that includes the possible existence of a spirit-realm as part of our ultimate context. But even if we’re atheists, we still live by faith, because we have to trust our theories about why we’re here, and such theories are philosophical in nature—certainly beyond the domain of science.
The God of the Bible
And what about the God of the Bible? Isn’t he said to show up from time to time and make himself visible, or otherwise reveal his existence through miracles and other supernatural phenomena (e.g., Gen 32:24–30; Exod 3:1–6; 1 Kings 18:20–39; Matt 1:23; Luke 1:1–4; John 20:30–31; Acts 5:12–16)? Actually, the God of the Bible remains a spirit (John 4:24), even if he’s said to have occasionally made himself visible. He’s still not something or someone we can empirically account for, as we do with the natural world. And as atheist Bruce Sheiman explained above, even our understanding of the natural world requires a measure of trust; so it naturally takes another measure of trust (on top of that) to believe in spiritual realities.
It does take faith to believe in God then, just as it takes faith to believe anything about the ultimate order-of-things. All we can normally do is look for historical evidence regarding the claims of the Bible, and see if that narrative-world might actually square with our experience.
Conclusion
As we have seen, then, we all live by faith to some extent. It is optional to believe in God, but it isn’t optional to believe something about the ultimate order-of-things.
This does not mean, however, that truth claims about God and the ultimate order-of-things cannot be subjected to rational investigation. Far from it. Just like all other knowledge, we judge our understanding of ultimate reality “in terms of the internal coherence of our truth claims and their external correspondence with reality” (Andrew Wright). In other words, faith need not be blind faith. At its best, it is based on evidence. And on the reasonableness of what we’ve come to believe.
Of course, we cannot approach metaphysical and spiritual realities as we do physical phenomena. Each field of inquiry needs its own methods and tools of investigation, according to the nature of its subject matter. But if reality is one, as we’re assuming, and our traditions and theories do reflect reality, then we should be able to recognize the universe they describe in our own experience of life.
In any case, these are crucial questions to ask. If we want to live intentionally and responsibly, making the best of life on the ground, we need to get at least some traction on this ultimate dimension of reality.
Our ways of being in the world necessarily assume basic beliefs, whether implicit or explicit, about our place in the ultimate order-of-things. Actions guided by such beliefs are causally efficacious: they necessarily impact, for better or worse, on ourselves, other people, human culture and the natural world. The complex morphogenetic interplay of causal mechanisms across different domains of reality activated by such efficacious beliefs need not detain us here. It is sufficient simply to note that, for good or ill, beliefs generate change. This being the case, there would appear to be a moral, intellectual and spiritual imperative to strive to bring our beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality and the meaning of life, and the actions that follow from them, into conformity with the way things actually are via an ongoing pursuit of truth and truthful living. Or, should we prefer existential rebellion against the ultimate order-of-things—as in Ivan Karamazov’s infamous decision to rebel against a God whose existence he does not question—to do so reasonably, responsibly and attentively. —Andrew Wright
In the end, though, there’s actually no way around it. Wherever we come from, we all have to answer questions of ultimate meaning—whether explicitly or implicitly, intentionally or not. And how we answer them determines how we deal with questions of freedom and responsibility. And how we handle our freedoms and responsibilities determines how well we live our lives.
Wayfinders by José Soto is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.