In yesterday’s study we said that the foolishness of the world’s philosophies, science, and investigations is seen in their inability to produce the kind of results people expect. The world’s so-called wisdom is actually foolishness and is found to be inadequate.
It does not make any difference what particular area you move in. I suppose that in recent generations a great deal of hope was put on the field of psychology and psychiatry, at least ever since Sigmund Freud. And through the training up of psychologists and psychiatrists, we have given ourselves the idea that we have been able to gather data and understand how people function. And because we understand how they function, why they do what they do, and the kind of problems they have, we can therefore know how to deal with them and solve these great psychological problems that people seem to have.
Nevertheless, it is an obvious fact to anybody who looks around at our culture that in spite of this supposed wisdom, we have more psychological misfits today. We have more intense problems. We have more unresolved anxieties than we ever had in our history. If psychology is the wisdom that is supposed to solve all things, why are our problems still not being solved?
Or take the field of sociology, the study of how people function in relationship to one another in homogeneous groupings. It seems to be a very popular discipline today, and I suppose for very logical reasons. Sociology deals with such things as relationships, cultural movements, and demographics. We can put all kinds of sociological phenomena to our analysis, and gather data, and project all sorts of things. Yet still our social problems are not being solved. If anything, they are worse today than ever. Is it not true, as Paul says, that God is bringing to nothing the wisdom of the world? “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate” (1 Cor. 1:19).
I suppose there is no greater example of the folly of this world in its profession of wisdom than in the great trust that is put in the theory of evolution. What is really foolish about evolution is the inevitable attempt to make what is essentially a theory into a kind of religion by using it to try to explain how things came to be, when evolution cannot possibly explain it. A great example of that was the book and television series by Carl Sagan called Cosmos. It appeared on television in 1980, and was broadcast again in 1981. Many people watched that. It was even required viewing in many of the public schools in our country. But it was not a mere presentation of evolutionary theory. It went beyond that because what Sagan did was make evolution more than it could possibly be. He used evolution as an explanation of all things.
That was where the folly comes in. Sagan said in that series, “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” That statement was using biblical language. Sagan was saying that instead of God being yesterday, today, and forever—the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the One who is, who was, and who is to come—the universe takes God’s place.
There are great errors here in Sagan’s approach to things. Let me suggest a few. The first is the error of supposing that what I can see is all there is. That is utter foolishness because at the beginning, in a most unscientific way, it excludes the possibility of the existence of a God who stands over and beyond the creation.
Another error is the supposition that the impersonal universe can somehow create the personal. The universe is considered to have creative abilities. Now to speak in that way must mean that the universe therefore possesses the qualities of purpose and intention. But, of course, that is not what Sagan is saying. He is saying it all happened by chance. We simply evolved. For Sagan, then, evolution is thus responsible for explaining how an impersonal universe can make personal beings.
