What Is "Useful" Knowledge?

"If the skill could not be practiced by anyone, anywhere, then it was useless knowledge."

I read that last week in Walking With Grandfather.

The quote is made in the context of survival skills.  It goes on to say:

"So, for example, there are over twenty ways to make fire depending on the terrain and weather.  Yet if you know two basic ways you can make fire in almost any circumstance."

So here, what qualifies something as true knowledge (contrasted with useless knowledge) is the applicability and perfection of a skill in such a way that it can be learned and effectively put to use by almost anybody (again, keeping in the mind the context of survival skills).  So knowledge is not necessarily "I learned 20 ways to make fire."

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I think Hardin would characterize the journey described in his book as one of knowledge. So it got me thinking more generally, what is knowledge?  What is "useless" knowledge?

Is knowledge synonymous with ideas?  The more ideas that one has - the more facts one knows, the more points of view that one can effectively understand, the more up to date a person is with current events - is that "knowledge"?

I don't think that the answers to these question are without ambiguity.  It can be yes or no, which tells me that there is something deeper and more fundamental to consider.

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Perhaps the more fundamental thing is the role that "knowledge" plays in a persons life.  "Knowledge" is in service to what?  What is it's end?  Is it it's own end?  That is, what does this knowledge imply about what it means to be, and in what way does it impact my being?  Does it draw me into reality, or away from it?  To what or to whom does it point?  Questions not easily answered.

More thoughts from Hardin:

"Later I would learn still other fears.  My entire existence was one lived in fear, except for books.  The world of ideas was not a fearful one.  Until I became a born again Fundamentalist, then fear came back with a vengeance."

"I had to keep my heart closed; it was the way I learned to survive.  Later in life I would use alcohol and drugs to mask my feelings; and when they weren't available I had "my books and my poetry to protect me" (Paul Simon, I Am a Rock).

"I liked living in my head.  Ideas were much better than feelings.  Ideas could change the world; feelings were just subjective states to which I had never been."

I hear echoes of myself in this quest for certainty and objectivity and the driving force of fear.  Questions about "useless" knowledge isn't about "mere" ideas (as if there is such a thing), or how practical something might be, or books, or extroversion/introversion, or being friendlier or nicer, or avoiding solitude as if it's a waste of time at best.  Far from it.

Rather, it's about the degree to which knowledge cuts us off, perhaps leading us to believe that we are neutral observers.  It's about the way that the pursuit can snuff out the flame of wonder, mystery, and gratitude, closing us within an intellectual box observing a life that we aren't really living, observing a world that we aren't living in.

Interestingly, the subatomic world calls into question this idea of objective observation, arguing for the connectivity of all of life.  Sounds new-agey and dangerous?  Perhaps I'll explore that in a future post.

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There are a multitude of ways of speaking of knowledge within the scriptures:

We know that "We all possess knowledge." But knowledge puffs up while love builds up.
--1 Cor 8:1 NIV

But there is also:

In whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
--Colossians 2:3 KJV

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The Love of God And The Law of Gravity?

Science Mike just put out a special episode of his Ask Science Mike podcast specifically about the recently confirmed existence of gravity waves. 

Listen to it here.

Being that this may be the closest thing to “Gravity Waves for Dummies” that I'm going to find, it's a bit disheartening that the majority of it is still well beyond my comprehension.  But maybe that's as it should be.  

Beyond any confusion and wonder at the weird, freaky, science-fictionish nature of our cosmos, there's one particular string of thoughts from Science Mike that stuck with me in terms of theological parallel:

"Gravity is very weak when compared to other forces in physics.  Now I know that sounds strange.  Here on Earth where you feel the intense pull of gravity every time you climb a flight of stairs, for example.  You clim enough stairs and you become very aware of Earth's gravity well.  But just think about how small a magnet is needed to pull a nail off a table.  And when you do that, that magnet is attracting that nail, is pulling that nail more powerfully than an entire planets gravity.  Gravity is weak compared to other forces in physics, and because of that, gravity waves are very, very small."

But at the same time, we have this:

"Why doesn't the moon crash into the earth?  Because the moon is traveling fast enough to be in free fall that's equal to the curvature of spacetime.  So the moon is constantly falling around the earth.  And the earth is constantly falling around the sun.  And the sun is constantly falling around the center of the Milky Way galaxy."

On the one hand gravity is weak.  While the laws of physics say that a nail will be inexorably pulled towards the mass of the earth, all it takes is a tiny, tiny magnet to pull it away.  The gravitational force of an entire planet submits to this tiny magnet.

On the other hand, gravity is the force that keeps planets and stars of unfathomable size from crashing into one another.  It allows the cosmos to dance.  And, scientifically speaking, the cosmos are indeed always dancing - spinning, twirling, falling.

Weak, yet unimaginably strong.  Dynamic, not static. It's "perfection" creating ceaseless relational movement.  In what seems to us as infinite nothingness and outer darkness, gravity is working to pull things together, to put each created object dance it it's rightful place.  Constant.  Invisible.  Light, dark, warm, cold - doesn't matter.  Nothing is beyond it's reach.  Though we drift, we drift within it.  Inescapable.  

As Radiohead sings "Gravity always wins".

Gravity is a symbol of the weakness of God, the weakness that is yet stronger than the strength of men.  It causes the cosmos to dance.  Love.  The gentle yet providential love of God that pervades the cosmos, down to the tiniest subatomic substance.

Do I dare believe this?  Or is this poetic nonsense?  A delusional assignment of meaning to a cold universe of arbitrary power or chance?

Who is this God, this God who speaks through the consent yet inevitability and inescapability of gravity?

I won't take the metaphor too far.  Gravity, after all, also causes the heaviness of cement walls that crash upon children in Haitian earthquakes.  Rather than lift them, it pulls floundering refugee mothers clinging desperately to capsized boats down to the depths.

Such is the nature of our existence.