The secular humanism (read: unbelief) at the center of our current cultural problems has left us with much chaos - and a slurry of societal anxiety and fear to go along with it. This fear and chaos and anxiety all intensifies every time God, in his kindness to all of us, gives our world troubles that expose our frailties and ignorance. We live in a society that is currently, by and large, in the business of running as far away from the fount of living waters (Jeremiah 2) as it can get. This means that we’re all in a hurry to abandon the source of all wisdom and knowledge (both moral and otherwise). This is increasingly leaving our well-endowed society with nothing but folly, fear, and a kind of insidious pride that eats away at everything. We are left, as a whole in the condition described by my father-in-law as he commented on an unfortunate waiter at a dinner in Chicago as “enthusiastically incompetent.” We have become like the angry and foolish child insistent about what we do not actually know much about. We keep trying to manage or even control what we barely understand. We have rebelled against faith in God - his existence, his strength and his goodness, and thus his words. This leaves us in the precarious position of scrambling to find certainty somewhere, anywhere we can find it - even if it is a remarkably poor substitute. 

You see, faith in God - certainty concerning his goodness, his strength, his love, his words- leaves all kinds of wonderful room for uncertainty elsewhere. Faith in God is, in part, a confession that we cannot control the world - viruses, temperatures, our mother-in-law’s mood at dinner. A society isn’t left to scramble to find substitutes. You aren’t haunted by the existential dread of all the scary things you don’t know and what you can’t manage or control. You don’t have to cover your unknowing with a kind of performative scientific or moral hubris. All of this scrambling and existential fear and anxiety works through a society like ours and quickly devolves into an overzealous dependence on what we feel. Don’t get me wrong, our feelings, or better -our affections - matter greatly, but they were are to be sunk deep into what we know, what we trust. They are to be rooted in the knowledge of God. 

C.S. Lewis noted an important distinction between what he called science and scientism. I think this distinction illustrates what I’m hitting at above. Scientism is the insecure cousin of science. This insecure cousin roots our knowledge, moral and otherwise, in a place where it can never thrive. It grounds our understanding of what is good and noble and wise in profoundly unstable soil, namely our own knowledge or observations of the world around us. Science doesn’t do this. It was intended to move from something solid and certain (God) out to observe the world around us. It observes, it marvels, and yes, seeks to carefully and humbly use what we learn. Scientism assumes (because it must) a kind of mastery over what it sees and then seeks to manage and control that world. Not only is this hubris of the worst sort - it is also deadly. It is deadly because it cannot acknowledge what it cannot see. It can’t cope with the impossibility of control. It can’t acknowledge that there is simply far more to learn and see about a thing than we will ever be able to know or see about a thing. Events over the past 2 years have exposed the great problem of scientism. It attempts to control and manage again and again with a kind of certainty and an expectation of success without ever acknowledging its own limitations, generally vastly underestimating what it does not understand. 

There is a big hill on our family’s land near Pine, CO. I’ve hiked around it and on it. I’ve seen it covered in snow in the winter, fluttering with life in the spring and summer, and (my absolute favorite) accented by changing aspen leaves in the fall. I’ve seen elk roaming along it, a bobcat, and even the rare bear. I’ve hunkered down in my son’s remarkably well-built fort on its steep side. But sitting here across from it now, I am keenly aware of the vastness of what I do not know about this hill. I observe, enjoy, even use that hill, but there is far more I don’t know about the goings-on of that hill than what I do know about it. I know very little about the interconnected ecosystem represented on its slopes. I don’t know about the history of people who may have explored there, what kind of snakes I step past (usually with a very manly squeal and a light jump), or what lives in the dirt up there. This is our way in the world. For example, while we know far more about the human body and our own psychology than we did 50 years ago, we actually know boatloads less than there the body of knowledge to be known about these things. We can observe, experiment, delight in, and use all of this knowledge we do have, but we should do so knowing that there is far, far more to be known - and a lot of that knowledge might be very pertinent to our current troubles. Scientism says things like “I believe in science” without knowing what science is actually for. It simply lacks the wisdom and humility of being far less certain about what we think we know. If this is true for the human body, and I don’t think that’s disputable, then how much more so for things like the climate, or social problems or even seemingly simple things like family dynamics at Thanksgiving dinner. Without the knowledge of God and faith in his word, the knowledge of our unknowing is existentially intolerable. We may confess with our mouths that we love mystery, but we can’t handle a world out of our control. We will desperately scramble to find some relief from the overwhelming anxiety that plagues our culture. (I’ll point out Edwin Friedman’s brilliant description of this communal problem in A Failure of Nerve). 

But Christian. You need not fear what you do not know. You need not adopt the fears of this secular age - either out of some ill-advised empathy or the temptation towards unbelief. No - not only need not, you must not. Rest in the good certainty of the knowledge of God. Find roots in the confession that He is good and strong and that his words are True. Let your roots sink deep into the simple confession that He is there and that he is not silent (as Schaeffer said). Then, from those roots, learn to humbly see the world, to marvel at its beauty and complexity, to tremble, to even be troubled by what you see - but do so from the good ground of knowing the God who is there.