A FEW WORDS ABOUT WORDS I believe in duality. I see it everywhere. Up and down, here and there, this and that, yin and yang, male and female, positive and negative and so on. There is one particular kind of duality, however, that (I have keenly noticed) some people have a bit of difficulty with. It is the duality inherent in words. There are two basic kinds of words, abstract and concrete. Abstract words are what I call pure words. I call them that because words are really all that they are. Concrete words, on the other hand, are more than just words. The word "water" is a concrete word. It points to something we can sense. Water would exist whether we had a word for it or not. In that sense, you could say it exists outside of words. If we are able to sense something, it means that we can do more than just talk about it. You can feel water, taste it, even (God forbid) drown in it. That makes the word "water" more than just a word. It is a definite pointer. All words are pointers, because they all point to something. Abstract pointers target abstract things, i.e., things which we can not physically see or hear, or in any other way sense. The word "time" provides an apt example. You can't say the word and point to anything in such a way that someone could see what you're pointing to. In other words, time does not exist outside of words in the way that water does. Water is more than a word, but something like time is a word and only a word. If a word cannot point to anything definite (detectable by the senses, or what we might call outside the word itself), it is an abstract word, and everything it points to is an abstract thing, usually referred to as an abstract idea. One of my favorite abstract ideas to talk about (other than Time) is God. God is a word, an abstract word that points to something that no one has ever seen. Even the Bible says so:
... whom no man hath seen, nor can see ... (I Timothy 6:16)
Paul says that no one can see God. I'd say that that definitely makes it an abstraction. (Please don't misunderstand. I am in no way suggesting that Paul is any kind of authority on the matter. I only quote him because so many Christians accept his authority.) Now I'm sure that you are well aware that God's purely abstract character doesn't keep a whole lot of people from still believing in IT, and I don't have a problem with that. As long as they're using the word "believe." I do have a problem, however, when they start using the word "know." You'd be surprised at the number of Christians who actually say they know that God exists. Trying to explain to them the difference to them (between believing and knowing) is like beating your head against the wall. The concept is not that difficult. If you cannot sense something, in any way, that something is abstract, which means it is beyond the realm of knowledge. You may believe in it all you want. But you cannot have knowledge of it. Knowledge is directly related to sensory experience. We can have knowledge of air, water and dirt, of certain actions that we may have witnessed. We cannot have knowledge of God, time, numbers, love and so on. The only thing we know is what we feel, and the only thing we feel is what we sense. When I say "feel" I am not talking about emotional feelings, as in when you like something. But even then, the feeling is usually based on a prior physical sensory experience. You can see someone (a physical experience) and say you like them. You could argue that that liking is something you feel but can't sense. You would then be using the word "feel" in an emotional way. So there is physical feel and emotional feel. (Actually, we probably need another word to describe this kind of feeling, a word other than the word "feeling.") I know (i.e., am aware of) what I feel. That is all I know. I do not know what you feel. I do not know time. I hear a lot of people talk about it, but I have never seen it. So I don't know whether or not it exists. My position on it will be one of faith. Personally, I do not believe it exists. This belief is also a feeling, an emotional feeling, not the physical kind, because there is nothing physical to associate with it. Something similar may be said of God. I do not know God. It is beyond sensory experience. I am forced to adopt an emotional feeling about It. Like time, I feel that there is no such thing. I say that I do not believe in God. Many Christians confuse what they believe with what they know. The abstract idea of God induces a strong emotional feeling in them, which they easily mistake for knowledge. They may indeed know that they have the feeling, but they do not know (i.e., they have no knowledge of) that to which the feeling is pointing. They have no knowledge of the thing itself, only their strong feeling about their own idea (or perception) of the thing.
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