I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.
Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.
—C.S. Lewis
The Weakest Link in the Epistemological Blockchain is the Fallen Human Heart: Reflections on Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge
The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, by Jonathan Rauch (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021).I have such mixed feelings about this book. I so much want so much of it to be true and right. I hold a minority worldview in my society;...
What is this from?
http://bit.ly/ihHwbw
I was too lazy to check… but it came up quickly when I did.
Kevin Vanhoozer has an interesting take on this analogy in the first chapter of his book First Theology.