Making Sense of Things

Journal Entry: 1-6-2012 All of the philosophers over these thousands of years have tried to make sense of deep things. Each has not shilly-shallied but has constructed a whole worldview built upon axiomatic first principles, stated carefully in clear language, with terms well-defined. Coherent chains of reasoning link all the pieces of this ideational edifice together as a whole structure. Their glorious failures may get closer and closer to the ultimate truth about things as the centuries proceed going forward. In the meantime all we can do is live, conclude and behave based on the information and current systems of thought available to us. Our real need to justify our existence as best we can is a positive reason for assembling edifices of thought to explain things, to make sense of things, and to give us an explanation for how we live as we do. Those edifices are based on faith, intuition, tradition, empirical research, experience, history, reasoning and religious sources of sacred authority. We are rational animals. God wants us to reason, speculate and dialogue, and expand upon our hunches. This efforts and their byproducts allow civilization to grow and progress, benefiting all concerned.