Seeing is Believing – Is That Really So?

I have been given a book called 2010 Ripley’s – Believe It Or Not! It’s a stunning book that enraptured my eye as soon I pulled the wrapping paper from its cover. This literary work features many things you wouldn’t believe, unless you actually saw physical evidence of it. It says, ‘There’s nothing stranger than the truth.’

My first working-life career provided many of these sorts of lessons, albeit in an innocuous form. Working with mechanical machinery—pulling it apart and putting it back together—provided many opportunities to literally be surprised by fact.

When something won’t come apart or go together when it should, no matter the force you apply to it, it can be utterly tormenting—all because you can’t see what prevents it. Yet it is there. I recall working continuous shifts in fitting this 12 inch diameter steel pin. We’d use thousands of degrees of heat and hundreds of tonnes of hydraulic pressure and it still wouldn’t go into the clevis. We measured more than once and it should’ve fitted but there was still no way it was going in.

It was only later that someone noticed something very obvious in its way—if only we’d have thought, ‘This is ridiculous—there must be some logical reason why it’s not working.’

But, we didn’t. And we—as human beings—continue not to see many obvious things a vast majority of the time.

We prefer what only we can see; we close our minds to the possibilities. But we must somehow start looking objectively at the evidence. That massive steel pin was not moving when it was clear it should have been. It should’ve been obvious there was a problem but it wasn’t that obvious to us. We blanked out any limiting possibilities from our thinking. And what was the sum of our thinking? ‘More force,’ that’s what. Simply ‘more force’ doesn’t always work.

What are the broader lessons? What are we missing in the broader context of life?

Not everything we see is believable.

Not everything we don’t see is not believable.

Yet, we stand in the face of objective evidence; say for the existence of a Creator God—there’s enough evidence to seriously get us thinking—especially for those interested in science.

What more could we get from life by simply having a more open mind to things about us?

Not everything we see is real. There are things we don’t see which—one hundred percent—are true, real... incontrovertible.

© 2009 S. J. Wickham.