I Can Account For All Of Them

Noam has never once been unable to do it and about a year ago he started wishing he could be.

Somebody tells him something. A timing, a recovery, a thing that came together in a way that seemed impossible. And before they have finished, without any effort and without wanting to, he has an account. Coincidence, base rates, selection effects, the ordinary shape of how these things get told and retold.

He does not say it. He is not that kind of man and he would never take a thing off somebody who was telling him about it warmly.

But it is there, every time, complete, before they get to the end.

And the reason it has started to bother him is not that he thinks he is being unfair to the stories. Most of his accounts are probably right. That is what a base rate means.

It is that he has noticed the accounts arrive whether or not he wants them, and that there is now no possible report anybody could give him that would not be met by one, and that this is not a conclusion he reasoned his way to. It is a reflex he acquired.

Which means he is not, in any meaningful sense, open to evidence. He has a mechanism that processes evidence into non-evidence at the point of arrival.

He is forty-one, and he has never said this to anybody, and he would find it very hard to say without it sounding like either false modesty or a confession of unbelief, and it is neither.

You may know that reflex.

Maybe you also produce the account before the person has finished. Maybe you also keep it to yourself. And maybe you have started to notice that it is not a judgement you are making but a thing that happens to you.

The sentence a man says when he stops

There is a moment at the end of Job where a man who has spent thirty-eight chapters constructing accounts finally stops, and what he says is worth having exactly.

Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.Job 42:3

Things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.

Notice what this is not. It is not a man being told off for thinking. Job's friends produced a great deal of confident explanation and they are the ones rebuked at the end of that book, and Job, who argued hardest and most honestly, is the one commended.

What has happened to him is not that he was wrong to reason. It is that he has been shown a category that his reasoning does not have a slot for, and rather than making a slot he says plainly that there is something outside it.

Which I knew not. Said by a man with an extremely well-developed apparatus, about the limits of the apparatus, without embarrassment.

And you are permitted to say that a category exists which your account cannot process. The written word has a formidable reasoner name the limit of his own understanding without being reduced by it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man who has never said this out loud.

And you can expect Him without putting Him on terms. The word makes the wonderful thing something that exceeds a man's knowing rather than something he must first admit as evidence, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring you to defeat your own reflex.

Nothing here asks you to think worse

Let me be plain, because a man like you will otherwise take a message like this as an invitation to lower a standard, and that would be a loss.

The accounts are mostly right. Base rates are real. Selection effects are real. People do tell stories in ways that firm up over time, and a man who knows that is better equipped than a man who does not, and I am not going to ask you to unknow it.

Nothing here says be more credulous.

What is worth noticing is narrower and it is the thing you noticed yourself: the accounts arrive before you decide anything. Which means what you have is not a conclusion but an automatic process, and an automatic process that runs on everything is not a form of judgement. It is a filter, and filters do not distinguish; they simply pass everything through the same aperture.

That is not a failure of intelligence. It is what happens when a faculty is used constantly for twenty years without a switch being installed.

And you are able to hold an account and not have it be the whole verdict. The word says the world by wisdom knew not God, which locates a limit in the method rather than a fault in the thinker, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a boundary rather than a rebuke.

And nothing about you is under review for having a good mind. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who cannot say this without it sounding like a confession of unbelief.

What a switch would look like

One practical thing, and it is small.

You do not need to stop generating accounts. You could not anyway; it has been running for twenty years and it is not under your control, which is precisely what you noticed.

What you can do is add one sentence after it, silently, when somebody tells you something.

And I may be wrong about that.

Not as a courtesy to the teller. As an accurate statement about a reflex that runs automatically and has therefore never once been tested against the specific case in front of you.

That sentence costs four seconds and it does not require you to believe anything. What it does is put a gap between the account and the verdict, which is the gap that has been missing for twenty years, and the whole of the difference between a mind and a filter lives in it.

And your account was never the same thing as a verdict. The word says we know in part, in the first person plural about everybody, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a working limit rather than a decorative one.