Knowledge and wisdom
The human brain is one of creation's most amazing achievements. Out there are the people who can plot the equation that describes almost the first moment of the universe (10 to the power of 43 of a second), research and discover the genes that carry beauty and disease, speak dozens of languages and name all the beetles in the world.
As someone pointed out, 'Astronomically speaking man is infinitesimally small, but man is the astronomer.' We may be tiny but we are the describers, the analysers, and the conscious ones. Our minds can reach beyond ourselves, beyond the patterns of thinking by which we have been shaped, beyond our culture and tribe, beyond our planet. With eureka leaps of brilliance we can discover treasures of knowledge.
Yet even at our cleverest we can still lack wisdom.
Which brings me to what may be this Christmas's bestseller, Richard Dawkins' new book, The God Delusion (Bantam, 2006). In the past he has written well argued books, The Selfish Gene, Back to the Ancestors, in which he has shared his scientific knowledge and lively understanding of our evolutionary and genetic history, helping me, and others, to understand our world. But in The God Delusion his writing is, 'incurious, dogmatic, rambling and self-contradictory... reduced to one long argument from professorial incredulity'. Another reviewer began, 'Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology'. Neither of these reviewers is a believer, but like many others they found this an angry and illogical book.
But those of us who believe in God and in Jesus Christ, 'in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge', have no room for smugness. Some of us are capable of a know-nothing, dogmatic, anti-intellectual, facts-are-facts approach to the sublime yet almost incomprehensible truths about our creator, sustainer and redeemer God. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and that means being humble, amazed, and sometimes a little tentative before the mystery of God and the mysteries of science, as we seek both wisdom and knowledge.
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