In the second series, particularly in the third episode, I began to pick up on a theme: how does one determine what is true? To the best of my understanding this question is handled in a branch of study known as epistemology. Thanks to a little help from dictionaries (cut me some slack, it's been a while since I studied philosophy!), I can confidently inform you that epistemology deals with separating opinion from justified belief.
So how does this relate to Sherlock Holmes? Well, I don't want to give too much away (should you choose to watch the series), but in the third episode especially, John Watson and other characters are faced with a lot of unsettling questions about what is actually true versus what they've been led to believe is true. As a spectator, I too was forced, again and again, to ask myself the question: What do I know is real? If I could cut my way back through the obscuring half-truths and downright lies to the things I knew had to be true, I could begin to understand the situation properly.
At some point I realized that this is very much true of Christian faith as well. If we can take a step back from the distortions of the truth that we're bombarded with, the lies we tell ourselves, and the extraneous and irrelevant matter that so often obscures our vision, we can refocus on one thing: what we know to be true. If--setting aside how we feel about ourselves or others today, forgetting our failures and even our successes (thank you Professor Moger and Philippians 3:13), letting go of the ways we've been let down--we can bring to mind those things we have learned from the Bible, as well as from our experience of the world and God's hand in it, we can reestablish a bit of real, solid ground to stand on. And, once we have that anchor (Hebrews 6:19), we can work our way back to knowing what else is real, as opposed to what's just being used by the master criminal (Moriarty or otherwise) to confuse us and throw us off the scent.
And you thought I just had a crush on Benedict Cumberbatch!
