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Knowledge Versus Wonder: The Grudge Match!

by James Barringer  
7/15/2010 / Christian Apologetics


I have a couple of complaints that I would love to bring to God, although I know that if he ever gave me the chance, I would have much more important things to do than pick a fight over something like this. Either way, the complaint is that humans are built with two conflicting appetites. The first is the appetite for knowledge. You can see this in children almost beginning from birth. They love to explore, to make noise with things, to put blocks together, to create, to figure things out. It jumps to the next level once they can verbalize these thoughts, leading to the infamous stage where children ask a question and then respond to every answer with "Why?" for half an hour. They want to know. They crave knowledge. The irony is that they often lack the mental ability to understand the real answer, while adults who could understand the answers lose the desire to ask the questions.

The second insatiable appetite we have is for wonder. Why do we like looking at sunsets? Beauty is, honestly, pretty useless. We'll forget the sunset in ten minutes and lose out on the time that we could be using to do other things. But I don't know anyone with functioning eyes who doesn't like looking at pictures of beautiful things, or visiting beautiful places, simply because they're beautiful. We like being moved to wonder, to awe and amazement.

The problem is that knowledge and wonder are often savage enemies. I love magic, but once I learn how a magic trick works, I stop being amazed by it. The world was an incredible, magical place for people up until about 100 years ago, when science began to assert that the world was merely a giant machine, that everything was explainable and nothing had purpose or meaning. Wonder vanished from the world in a hurry, prompting even the famous (atheistic) astronomer Carl Sagan to lament that scientists had lost their sense of wonder. Here's another example. I started bowling when I was about twelve, but you can take out "bowling" and replace it with anything that you've ever learned how to do. When I first started, I was thrilled just to hit the pins. It was a cause of joy for me when I somehow avoided getting a gutterball. However, it wasn't long before the wonder and joy disappeared and I was no longer content to just take down one or two pins. I wanted to hit more than last time. The better I got, the more my sense of wonder disappeared, until I lost the joy in simply playing and began to feel frustration and anger at not playing well enough. I did the same thing with golf, when I later took it up, and with piano, and with public speaking, and with soccer, and so on. Over time, knowledge crowded out wonder, and I began to wonder if the two could ever coexist or if they were as mutually exclusive as day and night. The appearance of one chases the other away.

There seems to be no way to avoid the inverse relationship between knowledge and wonder (except to be a child, where knowledge itself is wondrous purely because it's new). This would not be a problem except that our appetite for wonder persists; we just find ourselves starving. Does it bother you that we have to go out of our way to take in something like a sunset, because our regular lives provide a wholly insufficient amount of beauty and awe for us? Yet the fact that we'll still stop to notice exceptional beauty shows that it still appeals to something deep inside of us. Why do you think NASA has thousands of Hubble telescope photos up on its website? It's not because those photos have any kind of practical application to our lives. It's because they're gorgeous, and even hardened scientists like gorgeous things.

Into this mess steps Christianity, which makes the audacious and unbelievable claim that it can fully satisfy our appetites for knowledge and wonder simultaneously. We raise an eyebrow to skeptically evaluate the claim and find it to be true. The Bible offers a full and comprehensive explanation for the existence of the universe (God made it), human behavior (we're caught between sin and the desire to be good people), good (God) and evil (rebellion against God), meaning and purpose in life (to be God's people and have him be our God), and honestly everything else of any kind of importance. Yet this incredible wealth of knowledge doesn't cause us to lose our wonder: exactly the opposite, we find our wonder enhanced by the existence in the universe of an infinite God who we can't understand. He shows us love when we feel we deserve condemnation, and we marvel. We find that Jesus joyfully took our sin and guilt on himself so that we could be reconciled to God, and we gape in disbelief. He holds all of humanity in the palm of his hand, simultaneously making all things work together for the good of those who love him, and we stop trying to make sense of it all because our tiny minds are overwhelmed.

Indeed, one of the seriously noteworthy things about Christianity is that most of the best and brightest minds of the last 2000 years have spent their entire lives trying to make sense of it, and not a one of them has gotten their head all the way around it. There is knowledge enough to spend a whole life studying and still feel woefully short of it, and there is wonder enough that even eighty years of faith do not leave a person jaded.

This incredible juxtaposition explains why Christianity appeals to everybody. There's an incomparable amount of knowledge to be had - but you don't have to be intelligent to follow Jesus. There's room for deep thinkers and room for the very simple. There's a mind-bending amount of wonder to be had - but you don't have to delight in deep things or paradoxes to be a Christian. (I will say that it certainly helps, especially when you begin debating the intersection of God's sovereignty and man's responsibility.) The knowledge of Christianity appeals to those who like that sort of thing. The awe and majesty of Christianity appeal to the people who aren't too keen on knowledge. The two appetites conflict frequently in the real world, but because they're so nearly opposites, any faith which offers both can appeal to...well, basically everybody who has a hunger for knowledge and wonder.

Of course, it is possible to try and deny the legitimacy of either of these appetites, insisting on living (as the super-scientific folks do) with no craving for wonder, but this makes just as little sense as going through life with no craving for knowledge, constantly wide-eyed and baffled, like a two-year-old in a grown-up's body. Either of these approaches leaves the person a little less than human, by denying one of the primal appetites we come born with. So we must find a philosophy of life that provides us with both, or consent to being less than we really, at our core, want to be. And, like billions of people all around the world and all throughout history, we find that a relationship with the God described in the Bible is the exact answer for the questions we have been asking all along.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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