We live in a universe that is filled with a great deal of uncertainty. My father’s family were farmers, and though I did not spend a great deal of time around them growing up, when I did, it was during the hay harvest. During this time, it was essential that there be enough sunny days in a row for the hay to be harvested in square bales, which would be piled up in the upper portion of the main barn to feed our family’s several dozen head of cattle through the Western Pennsylvania winter. One summer, while I was in college and visited Western Pennsylvania, there had been more than a month straight of rainy and chilly weather that closely resembled a winter in the Northwest, rather than the usual sunny summers that are known in that part of Appalachia where I come from. Understandably, my relatives wondered how the hay could be harvested, and whether the cattle and the farm could survive such a disaster. Most people do not handle that sort of uncertainty well, yet when I returned to Southern California, where I attended college, I found many of my older friends to be completely indifferent to the havoc that disastrous weather plays on the operations of small family farms. The illusion of knowledge as to where food comes from prevented them from showing any understanding or concern to those at the base of the process by which food goes from field to table.

At work, I sit in an area where there are a lot of highly knowledgeable people. One of them is a young fellow with educational interests in theoretical physics. In listening to him, it strikes me as highly curious how often people who think themselves as highly knowledgeable about science demonstrate through their speaking that in reality what they know is dogma rather than science. The human facility for making leaps of inductive reasoning and for inventing technology carries with it some major tradeoffs. Among those tradeoffs is the fact that any gain in insight and understanding that we gain from inductive reasoning or from more advanced technology depends on a leap of faith. The leap of faith with inductive reasoning is that what we notice in one area of knowledge is readily applicable to a larger scope or a different field of knowledge; this assumption is not always valid. With technology, the issue that we have is having to trust that our technology is giving us the right result when it is difficult for us to empirically test the results. Again, this is an area where our trust may not be well-rewarded given the possibility of systemic issues in the hardware or software that are required to provide our results for analysis.

The illusion of knowledge is also very common when it comes to matters of religious belief. Whether one adopts a syncretistic view of faith that blends and borrows religious traditions that strike our fancy and avoid making a firm commitment to any particular way of life, or whether we believe we know what in fact we (or someone else) may merely interpret, the illusion of knowledge is everywhere to be found when it comes to thoughts about God, justice, or faith. All too often we read our own preconceptions into the Scriptures, and ignore those areas of God’s Word that challenge us, by considering them somehow obsolete. None of us is immune from this particular difficulty whether in theory or in practice. Likewise, because much of what we think we know is on the level of interpretation and not on the level of coming to grips with the actual text itself in any number of its possible readings, we far outstrip the actual level of our understanding very quickly. And yet we still believe we know what we are talking about when we clearly do not.

What are we to do about this problem. Since we cannot deal with with large amounts of certainty and yet we live in a world where there is a high degree of certainty, where are we to properly draw the line so that we are able to seek out knowledge and understanding where we can, with the understanding that there is likely to be a lot that is far beyond our ability to understand or recognize. A knowledge of the extent of our ignorance keeps us humble and also provides us with encouragement to continue to study, to learn, and to grow, rather than to remain complacent in our estimation of our knowledge. Yet too much skepticism and doubt is crippling to our faith, whether that faith is in God, in scientific knowledge, in ourselves, or in our abilities to survive and cope in a world of immense difficulty. Given that it is easy for us to recognize the difficulties others have in standing on foundations of quicksand, and how slow we are to recognize the same thing about ourselves, we need all the humility grounded in genuine faith that we can muster. How to remain content with the fact that we may never know what we would like even as we continue seeking to improve our understanding and how we act in consistency with that understanding is a quest that takes a lifetime to master, or even come close to mastering. Like many of my quests, it seems to go on without any end in sight.