wisdom's beauty and the science of free will

OK, I was better today, so I took a stab at recording the readings as YouTube videos. They're not my best work. But you can listen to them if you CLICK HERE and HERE for the OT, and CLICK HERE and HERE for the NT readings. If you would like to listen to someone who hasn't recently been sick, CLICK HERE.

Today the part of the reading that spoke to me was the bit about wisdom. It's interesting the way that the Psalm says it. It doesn't say we'll become wise and make good decisions. It says, "Wise choices will watch over you, understanding will keep you safe." There is a sense in which the Psalms and Proverbs personify wisdom and make it a "mistress" for us to pursue. But in a very real sense, the use of personal pronouns to refer to wisdom in these readings speaks to a deeper truth. In the gospel of John, we read, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The word for "Word" in these verses is logos. And it's the same concept that is used in the Psalms to refer to wisdom. So in a sense, the wisdom from the OT is the logos from the NT - which both refer to God.

Now, to shift gears a little. When scientists break down what actually happens in our brains when we're thinking, it amounts to chemicals and electric impulses. And there is a branch of science that believes that these chemical reactions and impulses are out of our control. There is even research that shows that we respond to stimulus before we consciously realize what the stimulus is - meaning that we're not controlling our reaction, but we are only coming to REALIZE what our response was after the fact. In other words, this group of scientists believe that we have no free will. We only do what we're "programmed" to do. Given ABC, we will automatically do XYZ.

It's an interesting question, and one that we don't have time to explore fully in this short blog. But here's an interesting application. When we set our foot on the path of wisdom, we "program" ourselves in a certain way. We "preset" our electrical and chemical impulses to do one thing rather than another. So in a strictly scientific sense, the "wisdom" that we choose to follow "watches over us" even when we're not aware that it's happening. "Train up a child in the way that he should go, and when he is old, he won't depart from it," the Proverbs tell us. And it's true with our own minds, as well. Once we decide to meditate on wisdom, we program our minds to run a certain course - and wisdom watches over us.

God, thanks for making us such unimaginably complex creatures - and for giving us a way to let your wisdom watch over us.