About The Beginning of Heaven by Heinz von Foerster
The concept of Heaven and God could be easily defeated by the alternative interpretation of the meaning of the words. Under languages that are so vague and it used to refer to something we could potentially link to (as Whitehead wrote, âIt is one function of great literature to evoke a vivid feeling of what lies beyond words.â) it will has no meaning to continue this debate or critique of the scriptures as the reader is intentionally not trying to link with the underneath meaning of the passages, and itâs a passage from thousands of years ago where the writer lived under a completely different society and time.
To communicate something thatâs just heavily important, an ignorance of the level of details of the wording is necessary.
In order to express something so important and abstract, the pursuit of details on the surface of language is ignored for the sake of efficiency. Unlike the sciences, the nature of scripture is such that the more detailed and descriptive the text, the less precise it becomes sometimes. But in order to acquire knowledge, to understand what others are saying, readers ought to read different texts in different ways, and make it clear in mind what the author is communicating in the first place at the level of their minds, so that we do not fall into shallow critiques of God and heaven, such as the following passage:
âWell, Iâm going to play God now. First God/Heinz would have to invent sight so that light can be welcomed in. God/Heinz would invent ears so that sound can be heard, for there is no sound. There are only moleculesâ apparentlyâthat move at a terrible speed. Itâs only when they first happen to knock against the eardrum that you hear something. There is no music, just as there is no coherent light. Electromagnetic waves, the physicists claim, are swinging through space. But that has nothing to do with light. I can see light only when I have something that produces light perception when confronted with electromagnetic waves. Sight comes before light. We can carry out experiments to show that all colors are an invention of the brain, an invention of the eye. We can do experiments and show that no colors exist at allâand yet we âseeâ colors. But I get what youâre driving at. Dear Heinz, youâre thinking, now youâre fleeing into excuses: Let there be sight, and there was light. Then where does sight come from?â
Here the author completely, and intentionally ignores what the Bible is attempting to articulate and frames it within the framework of science, knowing that it will be unquestionably defeated by science under its critical standards.
As the author states later:
âThe question of the beginning is one of the fundamentally unanswerable, undecidable questions, and from the way it is answered all I can learn is to which cultural milieu, which language milieu, which personal milieu, which belief milieu the person with whom I am discussing the question belongs.â
He ignored the universality of humanity and the universality buried in our ccommunication based on that cornerstone. I donât think what we talk about is only decided by where we come from - that bases the depth of humans, made us into creatures that are only affected and educated by the environment, whereas the environment itself is also degraded into a simplified formed factor. But everything is linked together, in the basis of our life and our patterns of behavior, thereâs something that is universal, so that we experience similarly and even form our culture similarly. And here I am, pointing at the roots instead of the leaves. I think that is what scriptures trying to communicate, and we should believe in the knowledge that we think has an opportunity to be exchanged, with all those deviations and flaws we carry.