Knowledge vs. Wisdom

            These are strange times. The store of human knowledge is increasing rapidly and exponentially; the evidence of human wisdom seems sparse and infrequent.

            I value and affirm the place of science, for example, but know that pushing its boundaries has not always produced good outcomes. Germany boasted the most advanced scientific community of the early twentieth century; yet its then-celebrated but now-debunked “science” of eugenics was a major justification offered for the Holocaust. The knowledge intelligent people have does not seem to make it more likely they will believe what is true or do what is right.

            A full century later, we may not have come all that far. Politicians still seem to vote the interests of their richest and largest-donor supporters. Courts can still be guilty of rendering verdicts tinged with favoritism toward the wealthy and well-connected. A 2005 study of psychiatric drug trials hit upon the unsettling fact that academic researchers whose work was funded by a drug company were almost five times as likely to report the treatment was effective.

            All of us are limited, thus always fallible. Furthermore, we are often tinged by bias and too frequently swayed to seek selfish advantage.

            So you must pardon me for being skeptical of the Ivy League professor who reports that casual sexual experimentation is a healthy rite of passage for adolescents. You must forgive my naïveté when a government economist explains that debt accumulation is normal. You must overlook my sheer stupidity in not rolling over to the latest published diatribe against faith in a personal God.

            What I have found in professional and personal interactions with such persons is that they are often parroting what they were told by some “authority.” At other times, they are using their academic skills to justify or defend something they have already embraced for personal reasons. Then, in the halls of academe, there is always the temptation merely to tear down what was once in place.

            Don’t take the word of any human as final and beyond challenge. Whether Christopher Hitchens or Billy Graham, Stephen Hawking or Pope Benedict, what anyone says is subject to challenge. Hear others respectfully, but hear them with a sense of obligation to examine contrary views – and to think for yourself.

            If thinking seriously about the most important issues of human experience is thought too great a burden, one has already fallen for a popularized fallacy – and has a way to go to get back on her feet to think rather than to follow blindly.

            That we live in a time of so many facts so easily accessed may or may not be helpful. It depends on our being wise enough to use them with mature judgment.

            “Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes of wisdom” (James 3:13 NIV).