Something to think about

For most of my life, I took human intelligence for granted. It never occurred to me that our intelligence, extraordinary as it may seem to us, might not be all that remarkable in the grand scheme of things.

This “discovery” came about as I made inquiry, in recent decades, into certain areas of metaphysics, cosmology and anthropology: specifically, the nature of God, the nature of time, and the nature of man’s much-too-common inhumanity to man.

Encountering several, shall we call them, unsolved mysteries in these fields, I finally realized I had simply assumed that we humans were about as smart as it was possible to be. In fact, I came to understand, it wasn’t necessarily that these mysteries or problems were unsolvable, but more that it was likely our minds were not capable of the types of formulaic thought required to deal with them. In other words, I concluded that our brains were simply not adequate to the task.

“How can this be?” one might ask. To which I would answer: what conceit of human beings would expect it to be otherwise? Do we actually think our minds are of infinite capability? Actually, that type of expectation would tend to point up our limitations.

I do not mean to suggest that we humans have reached the limits of our abilities to determine the answers to any specific questions, but rather that our minds were not expressly designed to deal with all such issues, nor is it realistic to expect our mental processes to be without limit.

I’m just saying: something to think about.

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