Lesson 1: Born to Interpret
Look at the little baby in your arms. Gurgling, cooing, and waving its tiny arms and legs. You would hardly suspect that this child is working on the intellectual project of a lifetime -- and making a momentous decision about it, as well.
Before we get to that, I want to talk to you about some well-established facts about infancy.
A newborn baby is receiving all kinds of new information through his senses. He sees lights, colors; he hears various sounds; he feels all kinds of feelings,both pleasant and unpleasant. The fascinating thing about all this is that the baby does not understand any of it.
The infant's eyes receive all the data from the room around him, and his nerves pass that information along to the brain. The problem is that his mind has no means to interpret all this information. Patterns of light and colors. That's all he perceives.
Researchers in child development have even determined that the newborn in the bassinette, wildly waving his arms, sees the motion. But he does not realize that he is causing the motion, or that the things he sees moving are a part of him. That connection comes over a period of weeks.
Over time, an infant finally makes the connection... that the arms and legs he sees belong to him... that this particular pattern of light and shade and color is a face (Mommy's face!)... and so on. The fact that he makes those connections testifies to the fact that God has built something into the child that drives him to make sense out what he sees and hears and feels.
A child born without a particular sense -- let's say sight -- could never develop a mental pattern to interpret sight pictures. We find a clue to this in Scripture (Mark 8:23-25).
He took hold of the blind man by the hand, and brought him out of the village. When he had spit on his eyes, and laid his hands on him, he asked him if he saw anything. He looked up, and said, "I see men; for I see them like trees walking." Then again he laid his hands on his eyes. He looked intently, and was restored, and saw every-one clearly. (WEB)
Jesus did something truly unusual here. First He healed the man's physical organs of sight. They could pick up light and send signals to the man's brain. But evidently, the man -- blind from birth -- had no way to interpret what he saw.
The only way he could tell that the blobs he saw were men, rather than trees is that he already knew that trees do not move. At that point Jesus goes beyond the mere healing of physical organs. He lays hands on the man's eyes and implants in him the mental patterns necessary to interpret the information coming in from his eyes.
Jesus does not implant that ability in newborns. Instead, God gives the newborn the drive to form a mental pattern -- a grid -- for himself. As adults we call this interpretive grid a "worldview". Thus we can say that, from the beginning, each one of us has had the inborn drive to construct his own worldview.
The Bible tells us, "The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, YHWH has made even both of them" (Prov. 20:12). I don't think I'm straying from Scripture when I say that God designed not only the physical eye and ear, but also the process by which the mind grows to make sense out of what these physical organs detect. Certainly, the child's worldview will take years to develop and mature, but the discerning Christian parent will recognize that the process does not begin with formal education. It is going on in the cradle.
Copyright 2006
By Craig Mutton
Standard Copyright License
Look at the little baby in your arms. Gurgling, cooing, and waving its tiny arms and legs. You would hardly suspect that this child is working on the intellectual project of a lifetime -- and making a momentous decision about it, as well.
Before we get to that, I want to talk to you about some well-established facts about infancy.
A newborn baby is receiving all kinds of new information through his senses. He sees lights, colors; he hears various sounds; he feels all kinds of feelings,both pleasant and unpleasant. The fascinating thing about all this is that the baby does not understand any of it.
The infant's eyes receive all the data from the room around him, and his nerves pass that information along to the brain. The problem is that his mind has no means to interpret all this information. Patterns of light and colors. That's all he perceives.
Researchers in child development have even determined that the newborn in the bassinette, wildly waving his arms, sees the motion. But he does not realize that he is causing the motion, or that the things he sees moving are a part of him. That connection comes over a period of weeks.
Over time, an infant finally makes the connection... that the arms and legs he sees belong to him... that this particular pattern of light and shade and color is a face (Mommy's face!)... and so on. The fact that he makes those connections testifies to the fact that God has built something into the child that drives him to make sense out what he sees and hears and feels.
A child born without a particular sense -- let's say sight -- could never develop a mental pattern to interpret sight pictures. We find a clue to this in Scripture (Mark 8:23-25).
He took hold of the blind man by the hand, and brought him out of the village. When he had spit on his eyes, and laid his hands on him, he asked him if he saw anything. He looked up, and said, "I see men; for I see them like trees walking." Then again he laid his hands on his eyes. He looked intently, and was restored, and saw every-one clearly. (WEB)
Jesus did something truly unusual here. First He healed the man's physical organs of sight. They could pick up light and send signals to the man's brain. But evidently, the man -- blind from birth -- had no way to interpret what he saw.
The only way he could tell that the blobs he saw were men, rather than trees is that he already knew that trees do not move. At that point Jesus goes beyond the mere healing of physical organs. He lays hands on the man's eyes and implants in him the mental patterns necessary to interpret the information coming in from his eyes.
Jesus does not implant that ability in newborns. Instead, God gives the newborn the drive to form a mental pattern -- a grid -- for himself. As adults we call this interpretive grid a "worldview". Thus we can say that, from the beginning, each one of us has had the inborn drive to construct his own worldview.
The Bible tells us, "The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, YHWH has made even both of them" (Prov. 20:12). I don't think I'm straying from Scripture when I say that God designed not only the physical eye and ear, but also the process by which the mind grows to make sense out of what these physical organs detect. Certainly, the child's worldview will take years to develop and mature, but the discerning Christian parent will recognize that the process does not begin with formal education. It is going on in the cradle.
Copyright 2006
By Craig Mutton
Standard Copyright License
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