“Not to see Him is to be wrong about everything”
One can easily read the quote from Frank Sheed, found above in the tagline (God is not only a fact of religion; He is a fact. Not to see Him is to be wrong about everything), and move on to something else without giving it much thought. But, in doing so, one misses an opportunity to explore a profound idea that leads to a significant conclusion. Let us elaborate.
Knowledge: a relationship between an item and a context
A single “point” of knowledge exists where there is a relationship between two things, an item (e.g, a physical reality or a concept) and a context (e.g., a setting in which the item is found). Neither the item, considered in itself, nor the context, considered in itself, gives us a point of knowledge. For example, if we take the number twenty-five as an item, it is readily apparent that the number conveys, essentially, no information to us, unless a relationship is established between it and a context. With the addition of context, we have the necessary item-context relationship that provides us with a point of knowledge. In the context of outdoor temperature, the number twenty-five tells us that it is cold outside. In the context of bicycle tire pressure, it tells us that a tire is under inflated. In the context of the current page of a book, it tells us what page precedes and what page follows. Thus, the number and its related context, together, become a point of knowledge, a knowable fact: it is cold outside; my bicycle tire is under inflated; the next page is page twenty-six.
The need for specificity in an item and its related context
It readily follows that what has been said above applies to knowledge in general, and we can further say that the more specifically the item and its related context are expressed, the more precise is the point of knowledge they represent. In the case where an item is a number and its related context is outdoor temperature, the point of knowledge is a particular temperature. But this expression is general rather than specific because the stated context didn’t indicate what temperature scale was being used: Fahrenheit, Celsius, or Kelvin. Thirty degrees Fahrenheit is considerably different from thirty degrees Celsius, and both are immensely different from thirty degrees Kelvin. For humans, thirty degrees Fahrenheit is considered to be cold, while thirty degrees Celsius, which equates to eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit, is considered to be hot or, at least, very warm. Thirty degrees Kelvin, on the other hand, is a minus four hundred six degrees Fahrenheit, which is very cold indeed! It should be apparent from this that a point of knowledge, in order to be genuinely useful, needs not only an item and its related context, but also some specificity about both the item and the context.
The Ultimate Context
Having established the necessity of there being an item-context relationship in order to have a point of knowledge, and having further established the necessity of a proper level of specificity for the item and the context in order to have a genuinely unique point of knowledge, we are now in a position to understand the degree of profundity found in the quotation from Sheed. St. Paul, in speaking of God to the men of Athens, said, “‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring’” (Acts 17:28). Paul does not mean that we are “in” God like fish in an aquarium but, rather, that we have our existence in him. In other words, apart from God we could neither come into existence nor remain in existence. This tells us that we are absolutely rooted in God; thus, God is the ultimate context for every human being. Since God is an infinite being (more accurately, God is infinite being), as a context He infinitely overshadows every other context. In other words, when we consider a human being in the context of God, we have a point of knowledge that infinitely surpasses any other point of knowledge we can have about that human being when considered only in relationship to a finite context.
The Ultimate Context and our sanity
The habit that we tend to have of seeing human beings, and the rest of the created universe as well, only in finite contexts, leads us to conclude erroneously that these things are sufficiently known in their finite context. But this is clearly wrong, as has just been demonstrated above, and it is not merely wrong, it is enormously wrong. Thus, one’s failure to recognize that God is a fact, and not merely a fact of religion, has the consequence of that person being wrong about everything. The person who makes that mistake is living in a make-believe world and is not thinking in a sane manner. Sanity requires that we see everything in its proper context. Since the ultimate context of every created thing is God, sanity requires that we see all things in the context of God. If we fail to see everything in the context of God, then we fail to see things as they really are; this is a definition of insanity. For this reason, we need to study theology. Our sanity is dependent upon it!
Theology and Sanity 