cripture challenges, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction." This point is often difficult to convey to those who are lost; it tends to look like mere name-calling, which it is not. The following analogy is an attempt, with obvious limits, to depict the folly and self-defeating nature of all non-Christian thought.
Consider an undersea world rich with diverse aquatic life -- eels, plankton, scallops, tiger-sharks, perch, cod, coral, etc. -- and surrounded on every side by salt-water in currents, waves, dark depths, and blurred horizons. This undersea world is much like earth's own, except that aquatic-humans live and move and build their cultures there. These persons are naturally adapted for breathing and swimming underwater for the entire length of their years. They differ from us not only in respiration but also in cranial structure and some aspects of their thinking capacities. Most notably, growing out of the top of their skull is a rather small, bone, fish-net type of structure which functions somewhat like a sense organ.
Apart from these differences, these "aqua-humans" are very much like us and our history. In particular, they are prone to philosophical debates concerning the nature of their world. On this question, the aqua-humans are clearly divided into two main groups: "Netists," those who maintain that they can discover the nature of their world by means of their cranial fish-nets, and the "Anti-Netists," those who deny that their nets can successfully capture reality.
This debate has a long and prestigious philosophical history. The Netists have long argued that the materials caught in their cranial nets are sufficient to completely depict the world around them. At various times, they have attempted to build entire systematic edifices out of the material ensnared in their nets -- fish and whale-parts, seaweed and coral bits. Moreover, fierce intra-mural Netist debates rage over which side of the net to use. Some Netists develop intricate and speculative systems, but others disdain such practices, favoring a more common net-sense approach. Nevertheless, all Netists agree that the cranial net is an adequate tool for discovering truth and will often make all sorts of grandiose claims about what they know. Inevitably, the ensuing generation of Netists recognizes that the prior maritime-bit edifices are always rather fragmented and incomplete depictions of the world (with too much emphasis on the whale-parts, for example), so they self-assuredly dismantle the structures, scorning the naivete of their predecessors, and proceed to repeat the same process with great zeal.
As to the other main group, the Anti-Netists, they make up the more skeptical and subjective tradition and deny that the nets help capture reality at all. They maintain that the nets are too small to capture the alleged big parts of reality and too big to catch any very small particles which they suspect exist. They also argue
that each person's net is unique to that person, and so each person's catch will differ from every other. In short, the Anti-Netists use their nets to demonstrate that their nets are quite useless, and they will often be heard describing what they don't or cannot catch.
As usual, some thinkers attempt to reconcile the best parts of opposing viewpoints, and here too, we have Net-Synthesists who claim that their nets can capture only some parts of reality and are inadequate for the uncatchable parts; nevertheless, the Net-Synthesists have much to say about the uncatchable world. Few opponents are really impressed.
Quite strangely, though the Netists and Anti-Netists differ on just about everything, they do agree on one thing: They agree that there is no water in their undersea world. The Netists have at times offered proofs for the non-existence of water, on the obvious grounds that their nets don't capture any water. The Anti-Netists insist that water plays no part in their world, since they can't know it or anything -- it is beyond their nets! Both groups write elaborate treatises explaining why extremists have sometimes posited the existence of water, usually attributing it to some deep inner drive to be surrounded. Others have argued that water would inhibit their freedom, and still others have suggested that the existence of water would be incompatible with the existence of air-breathing whales. They all take special pleasure in pointing out that even many of those who advocate the existence of water spend much of their time acting like there is no water.
Nonetheless, the culture of Water-Advocates has long lived alongside the Netists and Anti-Netists. The Water-Advocates relish the water and train their children in the knowledge of its currents and depths. They recognize that they thrive on account of the water and that the water makes it possible for them to write, speak, think, communicate, calculate, and develop culture.
They too have cranial nets, but they don't worship them or use them beyond their limited purposes. In fact, they recognize that they wouldn't be able to use their nets if it weren't for the water flow. However, the Water-Advocates don't claim to have figured out all of this for themselves. They claim to have received a body of messages from a type of sonar-transmitting device left to them and their posterity long ago. It describes reality, the big and small parts, the currents, the nature of water, the limits of their nets, and even the foolishness of the Netists and Anti-Netists, who love to loudly mock the alleged sonar device. After all, they can't hear it by their cranial nets, and even if it did transmit sonar, it could only work in water -- which doesn't exist!
The Water-Advocates attempt to point out the futility of using the cranial nets as sources of truth, noting that neither the Netists nor the Anti-Netists ever succeed in building their parochial edifices or fraudelent skepticisms. ( In fact, each group usually ends up imitating the other, though it is not considered polite to point this out.) The Water-Advocates also attempt to argue, some say "preach", that the Netists and Anti-Netists constantly live as if water exists and presuppose it even in their denials. Such is the vanity of nets.
