“A theory is an idea. Any idea is no more than a tiny, and extremely blurry glimpse at the nature of reality, which is infinitely diverse, and endlessly profound.

We have crude theory-ideas about processes and situations. These must »never be promoted to a declaration of ‘reality’ or nature. Specifically, I speak of the ideas we have surrounding ‘evolution of species’ and ‘divinity’.

These ideas, compared to the realities they may provide either a window into or blindness in the face of, are absolutely lethal to human intelligence when promoted to ‘facts that declare what nature or being, reality or organisms ‘are’ or ‘are for’ or ‘do”. Theories are toys compared to reality. They cannot declare its nature or purpose, function or even activity. They are a tiny glimpse, poorly interpreted, by a species that is still in its infancy in terms of understanding.

Just as you would not let a tyrannical infant who discovered that the remote control operates the television declare that he now understood the meaning of reality and relation, we should never evacuate reality and nature for the sake of some crudely held or scientific grasp on a single aspect of some process. There are no single aspects because there are no single processes! And one does not promote a crude model over discovery, the unknown, nature, organisms, the universe or reality.

Rather than promote our ideas as arbiters of the true or the real, we should realize that the universe is not a vacuum waiting for us to declare something about it as its flat, literal fact. The origins of our minds and bodies cannot be declared, for the same reason your right hand cannot ‘get a grasp’ on its own wrist. The index finger cannot trace all bodies with a single gesture. It cannot build a home, or even use silverware. The thinking mind produces frameworks that it compares to reality in hopes of getting ‘a grasp’ on some phenomenon or relationship; the product is toys, not gods, laws or even ‘facts’. Where there are exceptions, their scope is extremely limited. Even in mathematics, physics, and other sciences we consider to be ‘absolute’.

A finer goal is true relation and learning. This demands the depromotion of models that inflate their authority; to reject their universal application and call them out as mere representations and interpretations. This does not mean we should dismiss their reliable intelligence, but rather that we should dismiss their claim to universal arbitration of reality, identity or relation.

Evolution, as an example, is a fact in terms of a process. But the process is poorly understood, in part because we have misframed the genome as entirely local to individuals (we evacuated the environment and disregarded commensality in bacterial symbionts). So our theories may be relatively accurate, but their scope is absurdly narrow. Further, we cannot trust our interpretations for many reasons, not the least of which is that the contexts that generate them are depersonated, analytical, and pseudo-mechanical.

So we must be careful with theories of any kind whatsoever; but especially those that, like religions or political regimes, appear to ‘declare’ to us the nature of organisms, reality, relation or even matter. As if from ‘above’ all other authorities or influences—as if ‘from above’ nature and reality. Indeed, these should be carefully and intelligently examined, and we must train ourselves to limit their authority, if any, to their proper contexts and originary situations. The lab is not the universe; individual animals, like ‘parts’ in a single body, are not as ‘individual’ as our theories and models pretend.

Let us not promote ideas and models to the status of gods; at the same time, we should be willing to be persuaded by well-formed models and arguments that illuminate a process we have studied. But interpretation should be held in question, and we should carry with us a profound respect for the incredibly modest grasp that our sciences and theories give us on the phenomena they examine.

In nearly all matters our capacity to see at all is barely present, and half-retarded by language and common habit of thought; what we then derive is but a infinitesimal fraction of whatever situation is observed. The results then, are like stepping stones to better, more informed and intelligent positions. They are not pure facts, and interpreting them requires far more than the ability to echo the interpretations of the mob, science, the church, or any other apparently authoritative ‘source’.”

— an anonymous informant