Which Way The Wind Blows

As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things. (Ecclesiastes 11:5)

          “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit”
         “How can this be?” Nicodemus asked.
            “You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things? Very truly I tell you, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?”  (John 3:8-12)

            I just looked at the weather forecast for the next five days. They say there’s a twenty percent chance of rain today, a ten percent chance tomorrow, and a ninety percent chance the day after that. That means I have to get a lot of work done today and tomorrow. We like to think that our meteorologists know what they’re talking about, but the truth is, if it rained all day today, they’d be able to say, “Well, we did say there was a twenty percent chance that it would.” If it doesn’t rain on Friday, well, there was a ten percent chance that it wouldn’t. 
          I don’t mean to pick on meteorologists. They get enough abuse as it is. Cosmologists tell us, “In the first one-hundredth of a second after the Big Bang….” First problem: they weren’t there. They didn’t have equipment there to register what happened. They claim that they can look back by looking into the farthest reaches of the universe. Some will even tell you what happened before the Big Bang. They might be right but let me ask you this. Can you tell me what specifically happened during any one-hundredth of a second? Can your conscious mind even register what a hundredth of a second is? And yet we trust these scientists that they can tell what happened in the first one-hundredth of a second by looking at space forty-six point five billion light years away?
          They may be absolutely correct. I hope they have at least a couple things right. The point is that we like to think that we, or at least our experts, know so much when much of what they claim to know is speculations based on models they’ve built in a computer. Those models follow known natural laws, but then they add in their theories and speculations because that’s how science works. When they find out some part of their theory is wrong, they change it.
          Einstein rejected the idea that the universe had a beginning, so he came up with a fudge factor, a universal constant, to make his theory of relativity work. When it was revealed that the universe was expanding and likely did have a beginning, he was able to remove that fudge factor and his theory worked.
         All this to say that while we like to think we’re better than the folks described in today’s passages, we really aren’t. We like to think we know which way the wind blows, both literally and figuratively, but we just have ideas. We like to think we know how a baby develops in the womb but even if we have the mechanics right for ninety-nine percent, we’re still missing that one percent and that one percent might be much more important than we have ever imagined.
          We’ve been told that we share ninety-nine percent of our DNA with Chimps. The idea seems to be to tell us to get down our high horses, we’re nothing special, we’re almost Chimps! But ask a Chimp to compose something as beautiful as the Moonlight Sonata or find a cure for AIDS and see what you get. Clearly, that one percent difference makes a huge difference.
          Now, I’m not raising the “God of the Gaps” idea. I’m not telling you we need God because we don’t have all the answers. All I’m saying is that given the fact that we don’t have all the answers, perhaps we should be a little more humble about our assertions that we do. Perhaps we should put off making grand assertions about multiple universes, quantum mechanics, and God until we actually figure out some of the simpler stuff.