Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

But Jesus immediately said to them: “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.”
“Lord, if it’s you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.”
“Come,” he said.
Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!”
Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?”

• Matthew 14:27-31

Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done.

• Matthew 21:21

When this had dawned on him, he went to the house of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark, where many people had gathered and were praying. Peter knocked at the outer entrance, and a servant named Rhoda came to answer the door. When she recognized Peter’s voice, she was so overjoyed she ran back without opening it and exclaimed, “Peter is at the door!”
“You’re out of your mind,” they told her. When she kept insisting that it was so, they said, “It must be his angel.”
But Peter kept on knocking, and when they opened the door and saw him, they were astonished. Peter motioned with his hand for them to be quiet and described how the Lord had brought him out of prison. “Tell James and the other brothers and sisters about this,” he said, and then he left for another place.

• Acts 12:12-17

But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.

• James 1:6

Be merciful to those who doubt; save others by snatching them from the fire; to others show mercy, mixed with fear—hating even the clothing stained by corrupted flesh.

• Jude 1:22-23

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

• John 14:6

“Pyrrho was born on the Ionian island of Elis. He was exposed to Asian culture while serving on Alexander the Great’s military campaigns, and was also the first noted philosopher to place doubt at the center of to his thinking. Pyrrho treated the suspension of judgment about beliefs as the only reasonable reaction to the fallibility of the senses, and to the fact that both sides of any argument can seem to be equally valid. Pyrrho left no writings, but he did inspire the Skeptical school in ancient Greek philosophy, which developed the idea that the suspension of belief leads to a tranquil mind.”

• Sam Atkinson (senior editor), The Philosophy Book, Big Ideas Simply Explained

Pyrrho (360BC-270BC? – give or take five years on both) was a Greek philosopher, born on the island of Elis in the Ionian Sea.  He accompanied Alexander the Great and Anaxarchus on Alexander’s missions of conquest.  Both of the philosophers became skeptics, before the birth of Skepticism.  Pyrrho felt that if we accept that our senses can fail us, what can we really know about anything?  Thus, the acceptance of eternal doubt leaves us with one less thing to worry about.  One of his basic principles in his philosophy was epoché, which basically means avoiding to draw a conclusion on anything, thus give yourself wiggle room in any argument, sort of.

I think back to my experiences in the military.  I had plenty of training exercises, but I never was in a real battle.  I served with a lot of people who did serve during Vietnam.  What these two philosophers saw was war at its most gruesome.  Alexander may have joined in some of the discussions, having been a student of Aristotle for three years.  War at its core is gruesome.  It would cause a thinking man to wonder if anything that he was taught would make sense in such situations.

Thus, both Anaxarchus and Pyrrho became skeptics, before skeptics were a thing.  Pyrrho questioned whether or not any of our senses could be totally trusted.  Indeed, if you saw an event, especially an event that elicits intense emotions, each eyewitness is probably going to give you a varied account of what happened.  Might Pyrrho have done that after a battle, and then questioned whether we could trust our eyes?

You could probably perform the same kind of study with each of the other senses.  An odd psychological discovery is that any meat that is foreign to you, never having eaten it before, is most likely going to be described as chicken, since chicken has the least distinct flavor of the major meat groups.  Of course, different spices can completely mask the flavor of the meat.

You can see where Pyrrho got the idea of not trusting one’s senses, but in each case, we can take the study further and discover why we got a false idea regarding the sense, like the Doppler effect with regard to sound, explaining the pitch of a steady tone as the sound wraps around a wall or other obstacle.

But then, Pyrrho creates his idea of a utopian state.  No one has any concrete thought about anything, thus no one has a point of view from which they must, honor-bound, to defend.  On the surface, that sounds like a nice way of avoiding an argument, but with Philosophy basically being the science of argument, you come to the point of why bother discussing it?

Maybe that is why his writings have not survived and we know of him through the writings of others.

But in ignoring our senses due to intermittent failures and avoiding a decision so that you have no real point of view on which to build a true thought, are you really devolving into a lack of thinking altogether?

You certainly would question how your senses display the wonders of God.  And without a concrete foundation, how would that relate to a moral system?  I have written before that the concept today of no subjective truth is very dangerous and Satan must be loving it.  Without objective truth, lies have equal value to truth and anarchy results.

And it is odd how these people with no objective truth get so angry when you do not follow their way of thinking.  In my mind, that is a clear contradiction to what they stand for, which is nothing, since objective truth does not exist.

See where this goes?  You pay a lot of money to a university to be taught that there is no way of knowing anything.

But there is Truth, and we find that Truth in Jesus Christ.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.