The Space in Us... the Final Frontier

There is a place in the heart that will never be filled

A space

And even during the best moments and the greatest times

We will know it

We will know it more than ever

There is is a place in the heart that will never be filled

And we will wait

And wait

In that space.

-Charles Bukowski, No Help for That

I read an article this morning about scientific investigation into why humans believe things.  It was long, and full of neat little facts about how we know things and why we process the world the way that we do.  According to the article, people are sort of wired to believe in things like life after death and a higher power.  Which is why there are so few true Athiests; most self-proclaimed atheists are simply people who do not care much for religion or the various versions of god that religions present.  The article quotes an actual avowed atheist who wrote: "Atheism may be psychologically impossible because of the way humans think."

This sort of thing takes me back to Emmanuel Kant, (but hey don't all roads lead there eventually?) and his discussion of noumenal versus phenomenal.  Bear with me please, I know for most people who even know who Kant is, the very name begins to cause one's eyes to glaze over, but this is a very old dialogue and it has has developed some very profound wrinkles.

It started with Plato and his idea that there was an archetypal and ideal version of everything we see, but that we only ever see the sort of projection of that ideal, at least during our mortal existence.  This Platonic scheme infiltrates and even saturates the world that early Christianity found itself inhabiting and so has become a sort of framework for our understanding of God and Heaven and life itself.  It's one of those tacit assumptions that Atheists and people of faith alike share on some very deep level.  Such a deep level, in fact, that it often goes un-examined and is therefore taken as a self-evident truth.

Kant called the ideal realm the noumena, and posited that all things exist in this realm of ding-en-sich or "things as such."  However, the world that we can perceive through the senses is the world of phenomenal things, things that can be seen, touched, tasted, heard and otherwise experienced through the senses.

Science is an obligate discipline of the phenomenal realm.  To science, if it cannot be observed and measured in some way, shape or form, it does not exist, and thus the entire reality of the noumenal existence of things is off limits to scientific exploration, except perhaps in the cases of peculiar lacunae (blank spaces between what we know).

Science generally leaves the consideration of these spaces to poets, philosophers and theologians.  The only data that can be collected regarding this sort of thing is an actual survey of what human beings believe.  This is rather interesting because, for most of our history, what we believe has been perhaps the most unscientific conglomeration that you could possibly imagine.  It is really only since the enlightenment (when modern scientific method and even thought were essentially born) that we were even aware that what we know in a noumenal sense ought to be actually verifiable in the world of phenomenological evidence.

But evidence will never fill up all the spaces.   As my buddy Bukowski says: "There is a place in the heart that will never be filled."  Poets get it, that's why we need to keep them around.