The Path of the Wind

                 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 NIV) 

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… You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things?” (John 3:8&10 NIV)

 

We’ve made a lot of (supposed) progress since Solomon wrote today’s passage. We tend to think that we know all that’s needed to know. We have surgeons who perform surgery on babies while they are still in the womb. We have satellites that let us track high and low-pressure systems and make more accurate predictions of what weather is going to be like in given places. We went to the moon using less technology than is found in our laptop computers. We can use the sun, the wind, the tide, river currents, the heat of the planet, stuff we find in the earth and even atoms to generate energy. Don’t misunderstand me – all of this is hugely impressive and much of it is important.

But how much of it do we really understand. Oh, there are engineers, scientists, doctors, and other experts who understand much more than we do. What we know tends to be closer to “When I flip this switch, wires carry electricity from somewhere and we have light!” That’s probably all we’re really interested in knowing. Someone else knows, and we reap the benefits. That’s what matters. That, and our thinking that we’re so much better than those primitive folks who attributed everything that happened to some god, or to magic. We suffer from secondhand pride, or pride by association.

I’m almost done with a book that argues that the sociological evolutionary model of civilization is wrong. All that we thought we know about how we started out as hunter-gatherers, then made the mistake of becoming farmers, which led to cities, and all of our current woes, the authors suggest, is nonsense. People were never as simple – or stupid – as we like to think they were. We can’t pat ourselves on the back for all of our great progress, because at least some of it isn’t progress. It’s more like a pendulum.

But we do pat ourselves on the back, building up theories based on myths and praising the priests of science for sharing their wisdom, which we then suppose to be our own. But the truth is that neither we nor the scientists understand as much as we think. And, I can’t help but smile at this passage as I think about John 3, and Jesus’ comment to Nicodemus.