Information technology has done quite a bit good for society. A populace armed with cell phones accessing unfiltered news and filming government abuses is a people less likely to be oppressed. A father deployed overseas may see and speak to his wife and children with a wireless device. Taxes and benefits are handled much more efficiently with computers and internet--as are budgets and payrolls. The benefits of information technology are immense, but any technology possesses both pros and cons.
The obvious of the cons are pornography, bomb-making instructions, and the sales of illicit drugs. I am concerned with these cons, but at least they are obviously distasteful. I believe a less evident result of our IT-rich lives is a sense that we cannot believe in something we can't measure. Computers have increased our ability to handle vast amounts of data and have led us to attempt quantifying, tracking, and analyzing just about everything. We use massive spreadsheets to quantify a lot of things and then analyze the numbers. I am all about finding the truth, but sometimes we must go beyond the quantifiable truth.
For instance, most wives would not be happy with their husbands if the husbands did not make a single decision without running a statistical analysis. "I bought you these roses on our anniversary, because it was the option that surfaced when I ran the numbers" just doesn't sound very romantic. Quantifying and graphing love just doesn't do it justice.
Likewise, attempting to quantify and graph the supernatural is not going to work (for the most part). Historically, in completely different and unrelated contexts, people have concluded that the supernatural exists and have sought it. This is fairly significant evidence that the supernatural exists. I assume we could calculate the percentage of people that have come to this conclusion and analyze that, but doing so is not going to give us much information about the supernatural world right here and right now. The furthest we would get with such an activity would be to the conclusion that the supernatural probably exists.
This is a personal concern with our quantification bonanza. We must not start worshiping at the feet of quantitative evidence and neglect anecdotal and historical evidence. If we neglect the wisdom of historical evidence for the luster of modern, new quantitative evidence, we will miss out on the wisdom that history offers, and we will probably miss out on the revelation of God.
I did parenthetically mention that quantifying and graphing the supernatural partially works; I will attempt to describe.
I do believe there are several strands of evidence that we can follow to belief in the supernatural. Among these are: nearly universal belief in the supernatural across historical people groups, a cause needed to start the Big Bang, the fine tuning of the universe, and the belief that Jesus certainly lived and died, among others. Now, if we are in the quantifying mood, we could line up all of the evidence for the divine vs. all of the evidence against the divine and ask a large sample of people to provide a rating for the reliability of each piece of evidence and see what happens. This sort of experimental design would pose some challenges, and maybe someone has already done it. Who knows? But, I do believe carrying out such an exercise would miss much of the point.
Such an approach may be helpful for the most thoughtful, but the God I believe to be the true God will not be related to with pure calculation. In honesty I have done somewhat of an informal statistical analysis on whether Jesus Christ should be my Lord and Savior, but I must be careful to not go along treating Jesus the same way I do the laws of physics. This would be the equivalent of handing a significant other roses with a graph attached, as God, in the Father, Son, and Spirit, are beings to be related to, not purely quantified.
The greatest command is to love the Lord with everything we have. This, of course, includes both our mind and heart. The mind can calculate all it wants, and if the calculations are correct, I believe, the outcome will be the existence of God. But we mustn't leave it there. God wants to be talked to and cherished, not simply calculated and analyzed. A meter stick will measure mass, and a container volume, but there will never be a tool that measures the amount of God in your room at this moment. That, you see, must be accepted by thoughtful faith.
The obvious of the cons are pornography, bomb-making instructions, and the sales of illicit drugs. I am concerned with these cons, but at least they are obviously distasteful. I believe a less evident result of our IT-rich lives is a sense that we cannot believe in something we can't measure. Computers have increased our ability to handle vast amounts of data and have led us to attempt quantifying, tracking, and analyzing just about everything. We use massive spreadsheets to quantify a lot of things and then analyze the numbers. I am all about finding the truth, but sometimes we must go beyond the quantifiable truth.
For instance, most wives would not be happy with their husbands if the husbands did not make a single decision without running a statistical analysis. "I bought you these roses on our anniversary, because it was the option that surfaced when I ran the numbers" just doesn't sound very romantic. Quantifying and graphing love just doesn't do it justice.
Likewise, attempting to quantify and graph the supernatural is not going to work (for the most part). Historically, in completely different and unrelated contexts, people have concluded that the supernatural exists and have sought it. This is fairly significant evidence that the supernatural exists. I assume we could calculate the percentage of people that have come to this conclusion and analyze that, but doing so is not going to give us much information about the supernatural world right here and right now. The furthest we would get with such an activity would be to the conclusion that the supernatural probably exists.
This is a personal concern with our quantification bonanza. We must not start worshiping at the feet of quantitative evidence and neglect anecdotal and historical evidence. If we neglect the wisdom of historical evidence for the luster of modern, new quantitative evidence, we will miss out on the wisdom that history offers, and we will probably miss out on the revelation of God.
I did parenthetically mention that quantifying and graphing the supernatural partially works; I will attempt to describe.
I do believe there are several strands of evidence that we can follow to belief in the supernatural. Among these are: nearly universal belief in the supernatural across historical people groups, a cause needed to start the Big Bang, the fine tuning of the universe, and the belief that Jesus certainly lived and died, among others. Now, if we are in the quantifying mood, we could line up all of the evidence for the divine vs. all of the evidence against the divine and ask a large sample of people to provide a rating for the reliability of each piece of evidence and see what happens. This sort of experimental design would pose some challenges, and maybe someone has already done it. Who knows? But, I do believe carrying out such an exercise would miss much of the point.
Such an approach may be helpful for the most thoughtful, but the God I believe to be the true God will not be related to with pure calculation. In honesty I have done somewhat of an informal statistical analysis on whether Jesus Christ should be my Lord and Savior, but I must be careful to not go along treating Jesus the same way I do the laws of physics. This would be the equivalent of handing a significant other roses with a graph attached, as God, in the Father, Son, and Spirit, are beings to be related to, not purely quantified.
The greatest command is to love the Lord with everything we have. This, of course, includes both our mind and heart. The mind can calculate all it wants, and if the calculations are correct, I believe, the outcome will be the existence of God. But we mustn't leave it there. God wants to be talked to and cherished, not simply calculated and analyzed. A meter stick will measure mass, and a container volume, but there will never be a tool that measures the amount of God in your room at this moment. That, you see, must be accepted by thoughtful faith.
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