On Thinking

Fewer and fewer people are undertaking the journey to uncover the relevant and essential truths of life. The temptation to let the mind stew in its own unsure and apathetic juices is overwhelming a great deal of the populace. What can I say but that I can hardly blame them. Just to pick a major in college is a staggering hurdle to scuttle over with the vast number of options and their implications towards the future that are offered. And then we are expected on top of that to wade through the mire of philosophical battlefields to come out the other side with our own well thought out, critically accepted ideas about questions pertaining to morality, purpose, existence, and the essence of the cosmos. Even worse, we must come through it all with the correct answer or the whole agonizing trip will ultimately have been a waste. Those people who disdain a thinking existence sound wiser by the second.

And yet, we know that we have to make strides in that journey or else run the risk of a useless life. The twitter of an unused mind must be irritating to our omniscient God. So delve into those cavernous books, bring out the pocket dictionary to understand Hume's Treatise on Human Nature , clear your schedule of anything for the next six years (although you will most certainly need more than that pitifully short amount of time). After I've asked all the hard questions and conjured up all the deceased great thinkers of the past to answer those questions, to whose argument should I lend my ear? The majority of them have done an impressive job of sounding remarkably clear and remaining befuddling enough to make me curl up on my couch like Andy Capp. We are all reasonable creatures, but how many of us possess the ability to think cogently and logically? How many times are we persuaded to believe an idea based mostly on either our respect for the speaker or the quality of his speech rather than relying completely on the rationality God has bestowed on us?

The goal is simple. Ask every question you can ask. But you must be more than Socratic about it. Ask for an answer that fits or, at the very least, doesn't contradict the worldview you have constructed. It is not enough to just accept the world as it is handed to us. Even if you are given all the right answers, it's nice to know about all the wrongs ones to appreciate the sheer beauty of true truth.