Terryl and Fiona Givens in their enlightening book, “The Crucible of doubt” wrote:
We all inhabit geographical, linguistic, and social worlds that shape our vision and impressions of what is normal, what is real. Our world view is a collective view of assumptions we carry with us that condition every question we ask. These “paradigms” make it possible to guide inquiry, but they can also limit and impede our inquiry. They can get us off on the wrong foot, obscure our line of sight, or simply misdirect our focus. This is because, all too often, we don’t realize the limiting assumptions with which we are working.
. . . .We can’t easily step outside most such preconceptions. Even recognizing the extent of our unexamined assumptions can be the hardest thing of all. It’s like asking a fish what it’s like to be wet. “What is wet?” even a miraculously verbal fish would reply. Our assumptions like the ocean in which a fish swims are like the invisible background of our thinking, waking existence. Only when we have left a misguided assumption are we able to see it clearly. Then no longer ask why ships do not fall off the edge of the world. We don’t bind women we don’t like, throw them into a pond, and watch to see if they float or sink. Neither do scientists try to measure the earth’s motion relative to the space through which it speeds. Flat earths, witchcraft, and the cosmic ether are no longer part of our intellectual universe. We now see them for the erroneous frameworks they were. They have gone the way of alchemy and philosophers’ stones. It should not be difficult to recognize the implications of these transformations for our present circumstances and lives; we are inevitably living under the burdens of some paradigms, individually and collectively, that will one day be relics with other conceptual assumptions we have cast off. It is only with hindsight that we can see the paradigms of the past for the intellectual straitjackets they were.
The important point, however, is that those frameworks are not just themselves error-laden. Erroneous assumptions do not just forestall truth and progress, although that would be a cause to lament their malign influence in our lives. . . .They point us in the wrong direction, limit our understanding, and even warp the questions we ask. Worse, they create the conditions for faulty reasoning and disastrous conclusions. In past ages, bad paradigms led well-intentioned physicians to bleed to the brink of death and beyond millions of the already sick and enfeebled. No scientist had reason to seek for the sources of disease in filth, fleas, or dirty water in a world where the four humors were believed to govern all physical and emotional health.
In the realm of religion and spirituality, as in the areas of science, medicine, and public order, wrong assumptions can provide invisible deterrents to a life of religious devotion. Such flawed paradigms have been known to trouble even stalwarts of faith. Great Christian thinkers of the past have operated with assumptions—some of them deeply ingrained, sanctioned by long tradition, by ecclesiastical authority, and by scripture—that made answers difficult or impossible to obtain. At the least, such assumptions can delay prayerful responses to earnest questions, even by decades.
One such example involved one of the greatest mystics of the Middle Ages. Julian of Norwich was a model of piety. Living in England’s second largest city in a time of rampant plagues, she fell gravely ill in her thirteenth year. As the sickness reached a crisis in 1373, she experienced a series of heavenly visions. She recovered her health and retreated into solitude in order to meditate upon the sixteen revelations, or “showings” she had received. Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and others revere her today as a holy woman, a faithful disciple of a Gentle God. It is impossible to read Julian and not be profoundly affected by a version of the Father’s love that has rarely been expressed so vividly and movingly and convincingly. In reading her, one is immersed in the experience of Divine Love. . . .continued
Julian spent the next twenty years in voluntary seclusion. . . . ~Terryl and Fiona Givens, The Crucible of Doubt (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2014), 2-4 Continued. . . see The Crucible of Doubt II.
