Monday, 18 May 2009

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  Assumptions

  Many people have influenced my life, tweaked the shape of how I think, but since I reached adulthood, only my best friend’s fiancé had wrought a noticeable change to my vocabulary.  He’s almost completely eradicated two words from not only my speech, but also my thought and the way I view my own actions:  try and assume.  And really, to be precise, we don’t assume things nearly as often as we claim to (rather, we guess, conclude, think, or opine them) and we assume many more things than we really should.  For instance, the times when I have been most angry at a person have been due to assumptions in communication – eliminate the assumptions, ask questions, search out the root, the rhyme and the reason, and the problem itself is revealed to be a construct of conflicting inaccurate suppositions.  My ability to comfortably maintain assumptions as well as my use of the word has been drastically reduced to an infinitesimal fraction of what it once was.

  All the same, some assumptions are unavoidable.  For instance, I assume God.  I see evidence of His work everywhere, I am confident that He is real, that God is who the Bible says He is, but behind all the apologetics and arguments lurks the fact that God cannot be crushed into a box of cut and dried cases, He cannot be proven (or disproven) and while He can be experienced, He cannot be quantified.  When every thesis is stripped away and theorems are reduced to the form of proof, even the most self-evident truth is reduced to postulates.  Assumption:  God is.

  Science, some may claim, is logical.  It’s far more rational than faith because it needs none of those assumptions.  But it has premises as well: can you prove to me, using logic, that sensory observation is accurate? Science is based on what we can see, hear, touch, taste, smell, measure and observe.  At some point, you have to assume that those senses actually provide accurate data:  you have to assume that the world is real and not a construct of your consciousness.  The idea that the world follows rules is an assumption as well.  All the laws of nature, thermodynamics, motion, optics, magnetism, and gravity can only be discovered by inductive reasoning, which carries the assumption that certain attributes of the universe’s mechanism can be extrapolated from the way matter behaves.  Even though a ball released in midair falls to the ground 3,785,426 times, it still requires an assumption of the law of gravity to conclude that it will certainly fall to the ground the 3,785,427^th time (though a non-assumptive, perfectly logical deduction would be that there is a ridiculously high probability that it will fall to the ground again).  All to say, science has assumptions as well.

  Together, it reaches this point:  since you must assume something, pick your assumptions carefully.  What you assume determines your highest values, your deepest fears, you ideas of how the world works, your choices and desires.  What you postulate determines your naiveté or wisdom in facing the world, your understanding or frustration in relating to people, even the direction you take your life from this day forward.

  What do you assume that you probably shouldn’t?  What assumptions do you make that affect who you are as a person?

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