The Importance of Mystery: Where Embodied Experience Leads to True Knowledge

A question I’ve been pondering this week:
Is mystery the gap bwteeen the scientific data we know and the data we don’t know?

To ask that in another way: is the aim of mystery to fill that gap with more scientific knowledge?

In his book How God Changes Your Brain, neuroscientist Andrew Newberg argues that seeking mystery is integral to knowledge, and that mystery, in relationship to the brain and brain function, is defined by this innate human need to seek God. Through his observation and experience of the world, including in the realm of neuroscience (as a neuroscientist), this appears as a fundamental part of the natural order. This is true even if one doesn’t call it God.

In this way, while the seeking after mystery begins with a functional, observable embodied (physical or human) context, it is not confined by that or to that. At least not in terms of what it seeks and why it matters to the human observation and experience of this world. For knowledge of this world to be reduced to such terms is to cut ourselves from the very thing that this embodied facet of existence is seeking. More than that, it is to cut ourselves off from the necessary process, driven as it is by mystery, needed to obtain knowledge or true beliefs about this world

Thus, one implication of this, as I see it, is that defining the world in such terms (reducing it to the embodied experience rather than that which such an experience seeks to understand) cuts us off from actual knowledge of the world (or at least our awareness of it or out ability to reason from it or towards it). As Ryan Duns writes dialoguing about Rhaner dialoguing about Descartes in his book Theology of Horror,

“What we know lives by what lies beyond our knowledge. Everything we know gestures beyond the finite toward the infinite. What lies beyond our comprehending grasp is mystery: a transcendent mystery that is not inimical but invitatory. The metaphysical task is not to dispel mystery or capture it in concepts but to allow the desire to know to impel us toward that which makes all knowledge possible.”

Thus, mystery, properly rendered, does not speak to an imposed “gap” between the information that we don’t know and the information that we do. Mystery is not an absence of knowledge waiting to be filled by further scientific discovery. It is in fact a central facet of knowledge in and of itself, knowledge relating to the embodied reality and the embodied experience that this science is studying. It is a central facet of both being human and embodiment (brain function). It is a tangible component of this reality we occupy and seek to know.

And the minute we redefine that in material or scientific terms, we cut ourselves off from our ability to know a thing in any true sense of the word. Not only that, but we cut ourselves off from and set ourselves in disonnance (or disconnect) with the reality of a functioning brain. We operate on the illusion of mystery, when in fact rhe world we are seeking to know in material terms can never be anything other than the embodied experience we’ve reduced it to. In this sense there is no actual true knowledge to be obtained precisely because we are acting apart from the mystery that informs that, that draws this embodied experience forward.

In a proper sense of knowledge and knowing, mystery is upheld as that which informs a world of observable function and utility. Function and utility reveal a world that exist in relationship to mystery and that seeks after this mystery. Strip that from the picture the functional world ceases to be coherent. In this same sense, this is why participationist philosophy/theology, which understands that true knowledge comes through acting in this world and experiencing this world, is fundamental to how it is we know and whether we are able to acknowledge this necessary facet of a functional world. If mystery is simply a gap between the science that we know and the science that we don’t yet know, the great illusion of reality becomes that there is no mystery at all. The world is already known. It cannot be anything other than the thing we’ve already reduced it to.