Opus 2025-122: Knowledge and Understanding

As I read in different parts of the Old Testament, the awe the ancients felt at creation strikes me as being very different than our attitude today.  As they looked at the star struck sky, undiminished by light pollution, they told themselves that this didn’t just happen.  They tried to come up with all kinds of explanations, but all of them pointed to the existence of a Creator.  When God spoke to them, and explained that He had made it all they accepted that.  It didn’t fill in all the blanks of knowledge, but it gave them the understanding they needed to live their lives.

Today we have the knowledge that they lacked, or we at least have a lot more than they did.  With knowledge comes arrogance.  Arrogance unrecognized becomes a pathological condition.  We think that because we know the distance to the closest star, or can measure the extent of the expanding galaxy, somehow we are better prepared to live life.  Well, we have increased knowledge but what we lack is the understanding how to apply that knowledge and what it means.

You see knowledge doesn’t mean understanding.  I can recite for you Einstein’s equation E= MC2 squared.  I can define each element in the equation.  What I can’t do is explain how such a thing as possible.  Even Einstein came up short on that.

Most people are too busy living lives to worry about whether the universe is expanding or not.  They really don’t know how to apply the concept of the big bang and what difference it makes whether a monkey became a man.  They do, in the midst of their pursuit of food and shelter, stop to wonder, “Why?”  They might once in a while wander into the question of, “how?” But “how” is not as important to them as “why”.  How they treat their neighbor does not depend on whether they evolved or not but it might depend on the existence of a creator and universal truth.

Seek knowledge.  Seek understanding even more.

homo unius libri