Before I get too far down this road, let me offer an observation that has been rattling around in my head. It seems to me that the physical world doesn’t actually enter us as finished reality. What enters our bodies are waves—electromagnetic waves striking the retina, pressure waves vibrating the eardrum, chemical molecules stimulating our senses of smell and taste, and mechanical changes that we experience as touch. Our nervous system converts all of that into electrical activity, and then something remarkable happens. The brain goes to work constructing a coherent picture of the world.
But the construction doesn’t stop with the senses. Meaning is built from memory, language, culture, emotion, education, and every experience we’ve accumulated along the way. In other words, we don’t simply receive reality; we interpret it. Two people can witness the exact same event and walk away with entirely different conclusions because each person filters the incoming data through a different life story. Our beliefs become the architectural plans by which we organize experience.
That leads me to think there are really two realities. There is objective reality—whatever exists independent of me—and then there is experienced subjective reality, the mental model my brain constructs from sensory input and interpretation. I never encounter objective reality directly. I experience my brain’s best approximation of it.
That’s a humbling thought. Much of what I confidently defend as “truth” may actually be my interpretation of the data rather than the data itself. It also explains why paradigms become so powerful. Once a mental model has been established, new information is filtered through it. We don’t simply observe reality; we are continually constructing it.
This reminds me of the “cognitive castle” analogy I’ve used before. Our worldview becomes a fortress we’ve spent years building. Then new information from astronomy, geology, biology, archaeology, biblical scholarship, or even life’s experiences comes knocking at the gate. If the castle is built on fear, the drawbridge stays up. But if it is built on curiosity and humility, the gates can open, and the castle doesn’t collapse—it simply grows. It becomes a living city rather than a fortified prison.
What I find interesting is that Jesus seems to invite this very posture. Rather than demanding absolute certainty, He continually called people to see, hear, perceive, and awaken. “Those who have ears, let them hear” sounds less like an appeal to collect more information and more like an invitation to develop a new way of perceiving reality itself.
Is it possible wisdom isn’t having the perfect mental model, but recognizing that my model is not reality itself but simply my best current approximation of it. That realization doesn’t weaken faith; it deepens it. It gives me enough confidence to live by what I presently understand and enough humility to revise my understanding when greater truth comes knocking on the door.
Thoughts For Thinkers 