Grow Mercy’s Year-end list of unfounded propositions

Welcome to Grow Mercy’s revised and expanded year-end list of unfounded propositions, or things I believe but can’t prove:

Time, love, quarks, discrete math, other minds, healing touch, the efficacy of hugs;
that words, as Elie Wiesel says, in moments of grace can attain the quality of deeds;
that our deepest desire is to be each others joy;
that an inner void must not be leaped over but into;
that both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were necessary;
that you can love the earth and not love God, but you can’t love God without loving the earth;
that God with a cherry-bomb equals a big bang;
that mycelium will always remain mysterious;

 
that there is life on Gliese 581 C, and Harvey Pekar and Peter Popoff live there;
that the mind is not separate from the body, except perhaps for Benny Hinn, augurs and certain certified psychics;
that a sock prefers the single life;
that if scientists were mere sceptics we still wouldn’t know about the Copernican system of planetary movement;
that extraordinary claims do not immediately need extraordinary evidence;
that beauty is its own proof;
that if everything was verifiable life would cease to be;
that doubt is necessary and healthy but that the spirit of scepticism is a sickness;
that most things we hold as true are by way of other authorities;
that it was exalted certainty that sent the boxcars to Birkenau and not iffy disconsolate minds;
that to live without faith is impossible and to attempt it is a castration of life;
that there are more than a few fish swimming around with coins in their mouths;
that desire is triangular, and its nature is mimicry;
that a cultural obsession with sex is not a sign of social depravity but an indication of deep loneliness;
that if and when we humans become fully real we will no longer impose ourselves upon creation but see ourselves as one aspect;
that Gary Larson and Al Purdy are pure tellurians—and each in their own way;
that science is humble in theory but not so much in practise and that this is what it has in common with religion;
that faith needs a frame, and reason needs a trellis;
that we are not born with an existential void but develop it over time;
that the non-existence of God can be proven by symbolic logic;
that a formally valid argument can nevertheless be false; 
that the argument of infinite regression is absurd;
that the earth rests on the back of a turtle…and that there are turtles all the way down;
that positive universal claims and negative existential claims are not testable in all possible worlds;
that all ravens are black, except for one or two, maybe; 
that presuppositions are held viscerally and emotionally and half-consciously;
that God is a verb and not a noun and that existence is not a property;
that the word piffle can be appropriately applied to a plethora of propositions;
that when the Mayan Calendar is up, we’ll just switch to the Dan Brown Calendar;
that our deepest and dearest beliefs are not logically verifiable;
that miracle is still the best term to describe life’s origin;
that hope and mercy are stronger than hate and violence;
that Holderlin was shining in his wooden tower when he said, “But where danger is, grows the saving power also.”
That at the end, heralding a true beginning,
comes not the apocalypse but apocatastasis;
that instead of escalation toward extremes,
the possibility of universal hope, reconciliation and restoration.