Inadequate Words

v

From The Luminous Web by Barbara Taylor Brown

No one has ever seen a quark, for instance. These particles within particles were invested by Murray Gell-Mann in 1961 because he needed them to make one of his theories work. The word itself alludes to a line from James Joyce ("Three quarks for Muster Mark") in Finnegan's Wake. According to Gell-Mann, quarks exhibit such things as "flavor" and "color," There are "up" and d"down" quarks. There were once "truth and "beauty" quarks as well, but according to my friends Louis Jensen, "this was a little much for the physics community, so they changed 'beauty' and 'truth to 'down' and 'up'". But a quark remains a theoretical construct, leading Niels Bohr to say that "we must be clear, when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry."

Behr's point is that our language is not adequate to describe things we cannot see, much less understand.

We cannot see God. We certainly cannot understand God, and yet do you think that we presume to be able to use our language to describe God? To not only describe God, but to arrogantly state that our descriptions are complete and error-free, To say, "This is how God is!" 

Even when we state that our faith is based on what we read in the Bible, can the language of the Bible accurately and completely describe God? And that our understanding of what we read would also be error free and complete? 

 I think we would be wrong if we did.