Encyclopedia
I was raised in a house that had a complete set of big, blue, encyclopedias. They took up an entire book shelf full of space. But, these particular encyclopedias did not just take up space. I was raised to love knowledge, and we read those encyclopedias. In fact, when I was a child my dad would actually gather us up and read to us not from children's books, but from those big blue encyclopedias.
Fast forward a few decades to today and--fun fact about me--I do not own a set of encyclopedias. But it's not because I don’t love knowledge, I do. It's because the world has changed. Throughout most of human history, knowledge was a very difficult thing to come by. Even the very basic research of any given subject required great amounts of time, and expense, and travel. But things are different now. Primarily because of the development of the internet and other forms of information technology, knowledge is now an easy thing to come by. I don’t own a set of encyclopedias because I can access vastly more information than any set of encyclopedias can hold from my computer or even my phone in a matter of seconds. Oh, and when I read to my kids, guess what I read them?? Children’s books! (Come, on dad. I mean seriously…)
More to the point, When it comes to knowledge, the world has changed drastically. But, interestingly, it also hasn’t. When the internet was developing, it was commonly predicted that as readily available knowledge swept around the world, the result would be a grand liberalization of thought. The idea was that as people knew more and more about what other people thought and believed, then we would all find common ground and areas of agreement and the world would become a more peaceful and moderate place. At this point, we are going to call that prediction a huge failure because what really happened was the exact opposite of that. Rather than a mass liberalization or moderation, the world has experienced a great polarization. Rarely in human history have people been more divided and distrustful of one another than they are today. The reason for that is a little concept that psychologists like to call confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias means that when confronted with a bunch of information, people tend to pick out the stuff that they already agree with and ignore the stuff that challenges what they think.
News Flash— people love to be right. Because of that, when we go looking for information we usually don’t look for information that broadens or corrects our views on anything. Mostly we are looking for information that confirms what they already believe. Hence the term confirmation bias. As it turns out, all this time in human history as people have been hating and hurting one another, lack of information has not been the primary problem. Arrogance has been. And if we are ever going to solve this problem, it's not going to be through some new technology. It's going to happen through an old piece of wisdom.
Three different times the Bible tells us that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. And I confess that for a long time I never really understood that. Why do you have to fear God to be smart? But I think I’m finally beginning to understand a little bit of why that is true. When people fear God, we begin to understand the universe in its proper order. Namely, we understand that He is big, and powerful, and right, and we aren’t necessarily any of those things. And, therefore, He is exalted and we are humbled. And that, I think, is the key. From that place of humility instead of arrogantly pursuing and defending our own rightness, we can seek out that which is actually true. I think that is how the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and my hope for all of us is that we can start together from that single point of truth and see God and life for what they actually are.
