Mike Dryden
1/3/09
Theology III

The Three Most Important Ideas From Faith, Reason, & Revelation

I have learned quite a bit over the past few months, most of it concerning myself. This makes most of what I learned the “most important”, but there are three specific things that I learned that I have utilized more often in my daily life. The first idea is the idea of self-reflection that stemmed from the “Right Speech” Experiment. We cannot go through our lives making whimsical, on-the-fly decisions; we need to reflect on our choices and why we do what we do. In this way we learn a lot about ourselves; are we more inclined to make decisions based on moods? Physical condition? Or do we just not care? We need to examine ourselves in order to avoid mindlessly making important decisions only to regret them later.


The second important idea I learned from the previous semester was the grouping of arguments for the existence of God. I always had a gut feeling that the intricate design of the universe, and the arguments from science that were taught this past semester only reinforced that gut feeling. These arguments included the Golden Ratio ( a ratio that consistently appears throughout nature and the universe) and the Anthropic Principle ( the argument that the universe is so intricate and diverse that there has to be a Creator; it did not happen by chance). I look at everything around me a lot differently now; this idea, of a single Creator, seems to be the only rational explanation (at least for me personally). It flows with my gut feeling that I have had for a while.


A third important idea that was discussed this past semester was Plato’s allegory of the cave and all of the lessons about truth that accompanied it and were a result of it. It puts a lot of things in perspective about our lives and our experiences as humans; as far as we have come in technology, morality, and understanding of ourselves and the world around us, we are still chained to rocks inside a cave, staring at shadows on the wall. We cannot truly know everything; it gives a sense of humbleness that we cannot ignore. It then causes us to naturally seek out someone who does know everything – God.


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