Wisdom as we know it
[From my WordPress blog in 2019. Some of the science excerpts probably need to be updated.]
1 Corinthians 1:26-29
26 For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, 29 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.
Over the last centuries, science–with its consistent standards of evidence and rules for testing ideas about how things we observe work–has produced great improvements in the human condition, as well as tremendous improvements in the means of producing death and destruction. But something is wrong. It seems that the more we learn, the less we understand.
Once, the physical world could be explained by Newton’s physical laws. Now, we learn this only explains the tiny context of the world of our species’ experience, and time, space, and seemingly immutable realities are subject to the observer’s frame of reference. At very tiny scales, the “reality” of a phenomenon can be changed by observing it.
Once, everything in the Universe was fixed in place, orbiting like clockwork about planets, stars, and galaxies. Then, the Universe was seen to be constantly expanding, the galaxies flying away from an apparent point of unimaginable explosive force. Now, they are seen to be accelerating away from each other, expanding faster by the moment. The orbits of stars around the centers of galaxies, rather than politely following Newton’s laws of motion, are seen to orbit at similar velocities all to way out to the rim. Observations indicate that what we have always assumed was the stuff that made up everything is only a small fraction of the matter and energy in the Universe.
Once, everything could be assumed to follow empirical and analytical laws of thermodynamics. Now, we are faced with the indisputable existence of life, which so ravages the principles of entropy as to be thermodynamically preposterous. Worse, we have ~6 billion “observers”—sentient being of unimaginable complexity—on one tiny rocky planet in the galactic outback. There are theories that it would be less improbable for sentient beings (“Boltzmann brains”) to spontaneously wink into existence in deep space, look around, and wink out of existence in a tiny fraction of a second.
It even becomes necessary for those who uncritically devote themselves to scientific dogma (!) to worry about a Universe which is “apparently tailored” to produce and support life. To have an existence which can still be explained by mere flickers of probability requires an infinite array of parallel universes, so that all possible outcomes are supported without resort to a Creator. Now we don’t need “free will”, never really decide anything ourselves, but are simply permutations of an infinite decision tree–statistical puppets.
It’s almost as if Creation is making fun of us. Far from leading us to “laws of everything”, this unquestioning, dogmatic devotion to our own logic and reason will only lure us farther from the Truth. We should rely instead on God’s Wisdom, which will show us the way home.