"I don't know" is such a bad thing to say these days

Life is such a great mystery. I think I’m figuring that out the hard way. The other night I got home pretty late and when I got out of my truck I looked up at the stars and was amazed at how bright and clear they were in the night sky. I was so caught up in the sight that I walked around to the other side of my house where there are no lights to get a better view. It was incredible. I live out in the country, but even where I live there is a lot of light. In spite of all the lights, a remarkable amount of stars were visible. I could see the big dipper and Orion, two of the three constellations I can correctly identify (the other being the little dipper).

Even from what little bit I know about stars, I was still filled with a strong sense of awe at their sight. Stars are huge, bright, burning balls of gas just like our sun. The stars we see are part of our galaxy, the Milky Way. They are so far away from us that it takes like millions of years for their light to reach our humble planet. I tried to put it in perspective from what the ancients knew. They believed the earth was flat, that it was in the center of the universe, and that the sun revolved around it. From their perspective this was the right way of looking at things. Even though they were wrong, it is clearly easy to see how they made that mistake.

Still, now that we know that we aren’t in the center of the universe and all that, it doesn’t take away the mystic and awe-inspiring quality from looking at the stars. They are a mystery to us, and even though we have a better understanding of what’s out there, we still are grasping onto crumbs of the actual truth of what it is.

I think that in approaching life people have to embrace that mysterious quality of it - that “we don’t know” factor. It’s great that so many people are out there researching, thinking, and trying to unlock some of the mysteries that the universe holds. In the last century people have made tremendous gains from an increased amount of knowledge and understanding. We know more about the world we live in, and greater technology has provided us with things like better medical treatment and automobiles.

But we are becoming a people who only accept the concrete, the explainable, and the provable. The mystical understanding of the world that the ancients had is starting to fade out because we think we really know the world we live in. We know what stars are and how they got there. We have an idea of how our world got to be the way it is. And because of what we do know, sometimes we use that to keep us from believing that life may be something more than atoms held together by gravity.

In high school and college I have learned a lot about old scientists, philosophers, and thinkers who formulated certain theories about all sorts of things. And what they do in these theories is try to offer an explanation of how the world works. Lots of times these theories deal with ideas that can’t actually be proven, but are generally accepted based on the evidence that we have. That’s how their theories end up in our textbooks. I noticed that when approaching a subject, a text won’t just give you one guy’s theory and say “this is the way it is.” No, they usually give you multiple different theories that all sort of explain things but not quite. It’s like these brilliant thinkers were able to offer an explanation that sheds some light on a problem, but doesn’t exactly nail it.

I don’t think that people, no matter how brilliant, can use what we know to offer some universal theory that encompasses all of life and the universe. We just don’t know enough, and we don’t have all the information. With what information we have, we have to break it down into formulas, rules, and laws that make it simpler so we can understand it. We are only a small group of organisms who understand only what we can observe and try to apply it to the whole of existence. We are trying to make something way too small encompass something that is way too big.

It would be kind of like being a person who lives in a primitive African village. You never wander more than 15 miles from your home. Your people hunt, fish, and grow food. Your clothes are made from animal skins. You don’t have TV, the internet, transportation, or any other convenience of modern life. Now imagine being dropped in the middle of New York City. Upon returning to your small, primitive tribe, how do you think you would be able to describe New York City to your villagers? You would have been exposed to new sights, people, and ways of life that you have never experienced before and probably didn’t have a word in your vocabulary to identify. How would you be able to understand New York City, much less communicate it to your fellow villagers?

Chances are you would probably use metaphors. That skyscraper was like a mountain, or that plane was like a bird. You might even invent other ideas by reasoning that because the people wore extravagant clothing they were gods. Either way, the fact remains that with your primitive, tribal understanding you wouldn’t be able to come up with anything that sufficiently explains New York City. In fact, you may have to just tell other tribes people “You have to experience it for yourself.”

This is why science can be a flawed way of looking at the world. We have to see things more holistically. It is useful and it does teach us important things, but science can’t encompass all of it. Any person who reduces life experience to what some scientists discovered in a laboratory is throwing away a lot of important information.

With religion, I think people also make the same mistake of trying to offer too much explanation on things that we really don’t understand. We have a really hard time even using the Bible to explain the intricacies of God, but we still try to. How does an all-loving God send people to hell? Why does the God of the Old Testament seem different from Jesus? What is required of a person to be saved? How can Jesus be a man and God at the same time? I could go on all day long. Do we ever get any crystal clear answers to these questions? Aren’t churches and denominations divided over some of these very issues?

We are using our own human logic and language to try to understand God, and it’s not working. In fact, it seems counterproductive. The Bible does more pointing to God than it does explaining Him. That’s why it includes so many metaphors, stories, and poems. Jesus told parables, his miracles were called signs. They were pointing to something bigger, something Jesus liked to call a “kingdom.” But they weren’t the kingdom themselves. They were just there to show the way.

I’m a person who is hardly ever sure of anything. I have found that when I try to act like I know a lot and throw my opinions in other people’s faces I sometimes look like a complete idiot. Sometimes I would be better off saying I don’t know. I think a lot of people should come to this point. The jury is not in on a lot of things, and I think that rather than trying to explain away everybody’s questions when sometimes it can be futile, I would rather let my life point to what I believe in. And I use that word believe because I don’t know. I simply believe. And what I believe in will never fit inside my head, and I can’t write it down on paper. So all I’m going to do is simply live and point.