REAL AMERICA

ARE WE TOO SMART FOR GOD?

Exclusive: Patrice Lewis spotlights impact of the 'unchanging arrogance of mankind'

We think we’re SO smart.

After all, look how much we’ve advanced in the past 150 years. In the time of our great-grandparents, medicine was barely out of the Middle Ages. The causes of endless diseases and birth defects were utter mysteries. Transportation was mostly limited to horse and buggy, and the height of new technology was the telegraph.

Yet the old joke in 1899 was the patent office should be closed because “everything that can be invented has been invented.”

The point, of course, is every generation thinks it’s the smartest that ever was. Every generation believes it is the apex of civilization. And yet 100 years ago we were just a step away from the pioneers. If mankind doesn’t blow itself up first, imagine what we’ll accomplish in the next 100 years.

Since 1840, life expectancy has nearly doubled, thanks to advances in nutrition, medical care, sanitation and endless other factors brought to us by the brilliant minds in science, medicine and technology. While this longer life span is indisputably an enormous advancement, it has led to a problem: We think everything can be cured. With a bit more research, maybe we can even live forever. The remarkable fields of science, medicine and technology have become our gods, at the feet of which we lay all our health, hopes, dreams, plans, aspirations – and future.

As with so many previous generations, we have appointed ourselves the pinnacle of existence. This, coupled with our longer lives, has resulted in many people also appointing themselves the pinnacle of consciousness. 

What I mean by this is, because so many people believe God can’t possibly exist, they’ve replaced Him with the gods of science, medicine and technology.

Many things which were formerly inexplicable are now understood quite well. In a remarkable leap of logic, some people now assume it’s just a matter of time before ALL things can be explained by the gods of science/medicine/technology; therefore belief in a Deity is not only unnecessary, but downright primitive, hearkening back to the days when leeches and crossbows were the height of modern know-how.

The arrogance of this is hard to comprehend for those of us who still marvel at the mysteries of the universe, but there you go. Google has replaced God. 

Those who are so positive “we know it all now” are equally positive “there is no God.”

Yet history has shown us time and time again the limits and failings of our own knowledge. It happens daily, in fact, as we make new discoveries and new inventions and new explanations for the mysteries of life, the earth, and the universe; explanations that replace the previous “facts” that were certainties just the day before.

Google is visible and tangible. We see its insidious, invasive hand on all levels of our daily lives. 

But those who are willfully blind cannot and will not see the invisible, intangible hand of God in their daily lives, and therefore can confidently deny His existence due to a “lack of evidence.”

Using the god of science, a biopsychologist named Dr. Nigel Barber confidently predicted the decline of religious beliefs. In a 2013 article in Psychology Today, he wrote:

[T]the data on this issue could not be clearer. Given what we now know about the predictive relationship between economic development and rising secularism, it is perversely illogical to argue that “religious beliefs will enjoy a resurgence as the world continues to develop.” Numerous empirical studies point in exactly the opposite direction.

Research has shown that religion declines not just with rising national wealth but also with all plausible measures of the quality of life, including length of life, decline of infectious diseases, education, the rise of the welfare state and more equal distribution of income.

Clearly, there is less of a market for religion in societies where ordinary people feel secure in their daily lives. In the most developed countries, such as Japan and Sweden, the quality of life is so good that the majority is already secular.

In other words, summarized U.K.’s Daily Mail, “Dr. Barber … says religion evolved to help our ancestors cope with anxiety and insecurity, but now people enjoy a decent standard of living, formal religion is being squeezed by modern substitutes such as sports and entertainment.”

Dr. Barber may well be right. Religious faith may indeed be in decline. But that doesn’t mean we’re smarter for it, or that we’re right to discard faith. An as an ironic aside, anxiety and insecurity are now higher than ever. Why? Because in earlier times, people could fall back on prayer and rely on the comfort of an eternal God when things got tough. Now they can’t – or won’t.

Again and again, we’re assured that science has decided an issue beyond doubt, only to later have it disproven by new studies. This is part of the Scientific Method, of course. Science is a fluid, adaptable thing that yields new results with increasing amounts of data. It’s a honing process that has worked wonders in improving our lives.

But in the end, science, medicine and technology can only help us explain, cope with, or improve what’s already here. It can only modify the raw materials that already exist. It cannot create something out of nothing.

Doubtless you’ve heard the old saying “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” It leads to an elevated opinion of one’s own abilities, a belief we’re smarter than we actually are. But we’re not all that smart. We’re still the same flawed individuals striving to make sense of the world.

The arrogance of thinking we know it all is like a collective version of the Dunning-Kruger effect, defined as “a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is … a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their own ineptitude and evaluate their own ability accurately.”

If there’s anything certain in this world, it’s the unchanging arrogance of mankind. Oddly enough, this was observed in Ecclesiastes a couple thousand years ago: 

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

Despite all the wonders of modern civilization, there are still many inexplicable things far beyond our mortal comprehension.

Worshipers of technology can continue paying homage to their man-made gods. I prefer to put my faith in the Creator, not the created. 

The unbelievers can mock me into their graves. That’s fine. We’ll see who’s right in the end.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/08/are-we-too-smart-for-god/#RWypcx2T124bT8uq.99