Sometimes, It's Okay just to Say I-Don't-Know.....

I used to think that in matters of faith - where "ultimate truths" were concerned - that not-knowing was somehow wrong...Simple admissions of I don't know, I'm not really sure or I don't have a good answer for that had the distasteful whiff of agnosticism, resignation, defeatism. It seemed wrong, somehow, to be left in the lurch, with only ignorance as your crutch. We don't know and we can't know. We won't ever know. How dreary is that! Faith offered a set of assurances and clarifications which to a young, impressionable believer left little room for doubting.  If some matter of faith appeared fuzzy or confusing or unexplained - it was mysterious and complicated for good reason, not worth dwelling upon in the short term, certainly not meant to be a stumbling block. There is a strange passage in the gospel of Matthew - chapter 27, verses 52-53 - to be exact - which talks about the bodies of dead saints coming out of their tombs after Christ's resurrection, roaming about Jerusalem and appearing to many onlookers. This was never something I gave a second thought to until Christopher Hitchens raised it as a claim that no serious person could entertain as fact. It represents but one instance of having to walk the tight-rope between the tenets that one must affirm and things indifferent to true faith. On which side did this passage fall? There were many such cases of quandaries in need of explanation. Reading the Bible as a youth, there was so much there to simply assent to and accept - sometimes in order to bat down a feeling of growing uncertainty. At one point in time, I thought I had a handle on such matters; but they grew to overwhelm me. There were too many problems for which answers were not forthcoming... Yet it seemed akin to disloyalty to give way to that increasing sense of vertigo which is what I experienced more and more as the Bible went from being the most accessible guide-for-living to the most remote and inscrutable of texts. Eventually there came a point in time when I don't know started to feel like a good answer, the only answer. Was the Garden of Eden a physical place? Did Cain's wife come from some unknown tribe? Was Enoch somehow "taken away" by God? Did angels visit Sodom and Gomorrah? Was Noah historical or emblematic of the age of great floods? Did Methuselah live to be 800 years old? Should we think of Abraham as a legendary figure or a real person? Did Moses literally receive tablets on Mt. Sinai? Did Joshua really wipe out all the Canaanites, men, women, children and cattle?  Did Samson destroy the temple of the Philistines with his bare hands? Did Jonah spend 3 days in the belly of a whale? Did Elijah ascend to heaven in a chariot? Did Jesus rise into the air like a spaceship blasting off or did he vanish before the eyes of a few believers? What made the ascension different than his earlier post-resurrection appearances and visitations? Symbolic interpretations go a long way toward preserving a sense of revealed truth. Yet - every now and again other puzzles began to emerge - not from specific thorny passages per se, but from the logic of salvation.  For starters, why was evil such a strong, unrelenting universal phenomenon? By what right did Manicheans  maintain the virtual parity of divine power vs. that of the evil one? Why did it take so long for monotheism to take hold? What was God to ancient men during the first 5,000 years of human history? Why were there two covenants - a first half of scripture devoted almost exclusively to a chosen people - followed by a later testament (written in Greek, not Hebrew) and focused on bringing the rest of the world up to speed with this salvation history. Why had the churches been allowed to splinter and fragment into a thousand strands of conflicting denominations? How had the transmission of biblical texts been administered throughout the centuries? Were scholars like Bart Ehrman correct in claiming that verses had been tampered with by overzealous monks? Was it really possible to understand doctrines such as the trinity or the incarnation? Three-in-one seems like an obvious contradiction - a hindrance to logic - as does the notion of a corporeal being subject to motion and decay uniquely joined to a fully actualized source of all being. Amid all of this turmoil, my discovery of Socrates and Greek philosophy did not help matters any...I will admit to feeling a deep frustration with Socrates b/c of his slippery evasion of hard-and-fast doctrines,  his aggravating refusal to provide answers in response to his own questions. Socrates was downright obnoxious in the way in which he, on the one hand, teased, browbeat and interrogated willing interlocutors, while never allowing himself to be pinned down when it came time to offer definitive notions of justice, piety, friendship, virtue...He claimed unceasing devotion to his daimon - but paradoxically this divine spirit sent him forth ever questioning, seeking to refute all dogmas and orthodoxies...His vision of the afterlife was one in which the gods had left him free to continue his earthy mission among the souls of the dead...It is rare to meet believers who are fully aware of the threat posed by Socrates. He was charged with atheism after all...Did he have a credo other than the pursuit of virtue? And was virtue for him more intellectual in nature than moral? You can find Socrates the moralist - but one suspects that at such moments he has become (more than ever) the mouthpiece for Plato. Yes - it is satisfying up to a point to be securely agnostic on matters relating to astrology, UFO's, ghosts, alchemy, extra-terrestrials, and the virtue of cellphones. And certainly on the question of religion - everyone, whether they know it or not, is, at the very least, politely agnostic regarding all creeds that are foreign to them, or ostensibly cult-like in practice, or somehow counter-intuitive by virtue of being unfamiliar, extreme or wildly implausible. Having said all this, it remains true that creating a limbo for oneself is not always reassuring especially in practical situations where some degree of resolve and commitment are called for... Skepticism will simply not "cut it" in every situation...We cannot fall back upon chants of I don't know - when faced with questions of ordinary morality. Society impels us to affirm the wrongness of various crimes, the impropriety of bad manners, the vileness of hateful speech; part of our membership in a community requires buying into the standard rhetoric, and validating in part the accepted wisdom of the tribe such as it is. Nevertheless - there remain so many areas in the speculative realm where one cannot help but plead ignorance...It is not always from malice or pride that one refuses assent, but from a sense of cognitive overload - or dare I say, humility.