You may have heard the story of the man discovered one night standing under a streetlight searching for his keys. When asked where he had lost them, he pointed to a place in the dark fifty feet away. When asked why he wasn’t looking there, the man replied, “It’s dark over there, and I can’t see.”
Such a strategy is obviously flawed, but it points to our
tendency to focus—sometimes exclusively—on what we can observe instead of on
what is important. We have a tendency to celebrate—and perhaps model off
of—lives of people who are highly visible to us (movie stars, athletes, etc.),
when there are others who may be better life models but are not as visible,
their work showing up only in the shadows. Consider, for instance, Vasily
Arkhipov. Serving on a crippled Soviet submarine off the coast of Florida
during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he alone prevented his fellow officers from
launching a nuclear torpedo—an act that most agree would have touched off
nuclear war. His courageous stand may have saved the world from total
destruction, but no one knows his name. Ordinary people do extraordinary things
every day, much of which goes unnoticed. But it still makes a difference.
When assessing the effectiveness of an action or process, we
tend to focus on outcomes that are directly observable or have immediate
impact. But often the true value lies in something that is not directly
observable or not obviously important. In tennis or basketball it’s easy to
marvel at an explosive overhead smash or slam dunk, but fail to appreciate the
preceding play that made those shots possible. In business economics it is much
easier to focus on measurable revenues and costs experienced by the buyer and
seller, rather than on harder-to-measure externalities—costs and benefits of
the transaction experienced by third parties apparently not participating in
the transaction. These can be good, like when preserving a park enhances the
value of homes in the surrounding area and the homeowners benefit without doing
anything, or bad, like when products create pollution or waste, the cost of
which is not borne by the producers or consumers. In either case, these
externalities are important, but easily forgotten.
Our tendency to focus only on what we see can also challenge
our faith. Let me share my own experience. Each person has some peculiar
abilities. Somehow, I am able to touch someone’s forehead and know his or her
temperature within a half a degree. Somehow, I am also able to wake up in the
night and know what time it is—usually within a few minutes and often exactly.
Each of these is easily validated, but I don’t understand either. Likewise, I
can feel the presence of God in my life through a sensed purpose in apparently
random events and interactions with others that defy logic in terms of timing
and prescience. I am fully aware that things can happen by chance and that
improbable things are often more probable than they seem. But that kind of
thing happens to me ten or twenty times a day. At some point you have to think,
“Something is going on here”—and you begin to see the hand of God in little
things everywhere. (I talk about all of this more in the chapters on Faith and
Miracles, among others.)
I have an inner sense this feeling is true in the same way
as I know the temperature and the time. The only difference from those two is
that it is not easily validated. So the question is the same as it is for the
man looking for his keys under light: Does something being true require that we
can observe or validate it? Does something being true require that there exists
a logical argument to support it? I believe that it is important to try to
subject all ideas to observation and analysis and not to accept unexamined
dogma. But is it possible there are true things we will never be able to
observe? Is it possible there are true things for which we will never find a
logical argument?
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