Do We Really Need to Know This?

Do we really need to know how God works? Or even how nature works? How centipedes use all their legs, or how many times a humming bird flaps its wings in a second? Of course some of these things are fun to know, and probably do no harm to know. Knowing certain things can help us live too. Think of the indigenous people of the world. Think of what they learned, and knew, about nature, the seasons, the plants and animals. What they knew was enough. Anything more can be a problem. Knowing for example how nuclear fission works, can be a problem.

But what about obvious things that are important? Like medicine? We know so much about the human body. We know many of its dark well protected secrets—how blood oxygenates the organs, how brain waves carry information through the brain, how the immune system functions, how cells provide hormones and carry nutrients. We know all that, right? Well, we know a lot, but not nearly as much as we carry on about. Still, why would that information be unwelcome? We really DO need to know all that, right?

Well, that’s a big argument. Sorry all you scientific types—all of the knowledge in medicine has not necessarily improved our lives if we were living the natural life. Sure, we have made our lives more complicated, therefore more dangerous. We have subjected ourselves to almost unworldly pathogens, both organically as well as chemically. We have created such a complex world of machines and devices that we are constantly exposed to catastrophic accidents, and experience these accidents as well. For all these “added” things, medicine has been amazing in repairing and healing our bodies. But most of these dangers came about due to us knowing too much to begin with.

I don’t have time to show it here, but read up on human diseases and see how as humans became more advanced “knowing the world,” diseases that ravaged the globe became more prevalent and deadly. This was due to a variety of things—one big one being the cultivation of animals as food sources, the zoonotic opportunities skyrocketed. There is a theory that human diseases started to flourish as we started to move about the planet looking for food. This occurred once our populations started to soar due to our superior intelligence. Clean water, hygiene, and lack of sewage control became a problem once cities came on the scene, replacing small villages of huts and tents. Commercial trade, simple curiosity, and a penchant for adventure, all took its toll.  

Sure, there were always ways to get sick, but medicine men, with their limited knowledge (see above for the word on the wisdom of indigenous know-how), kept most killers at bay. People got sick and died as they were supposed to in order to keep the world in balance. Then humans starting knowing too much, and started growing too much, and started inventing new ways to get sick and injured, and then had to invent new fangled technology to fix ourselves . . . on and on. Yeah, do we really need to know all this crap that we know? Sure, now we do. But did we have to start acquiring all that information to begin with? And look at the pickle we’ve got ourselves in with GMO technology. Yeah, strawberries are huge, eh? That’s advancement in technology for ya.

I don’t mean to get all religious on you, but think about the Garden of Eden. Why was God so concerned about Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge? Why was that a no-no? Well, there is the “disobeying the word of God” part—that was a big deal. But what else? Even if you don’t believe in God or the Bible, you have to admit the scriptures contain some pretty significant ideas, even if only metaphoric. There is some important information in those pages. We can see that now more than ever before.

Let’s stick with the ol’ Garden for a moment. One popular idea regarding God’s motivation in prohibiting the eating from the Tree of Knowledge might have been to preserve the sanctity of His creation. Allowing humans access to the knowledge of good and evil could have disrupted the natural order and harmony in Eden, potentially leading to chaos and moral dilemmas. No kidding.

I think the Tree of Knowledge not only represented the knowledge of good and evil but pretty much the knowledge of everything. Just as the above paragraph suggests, God was concerned about the sanctity of His creation. If humans learned a way to reverse engineer God’s creation then eventually man would claim superiority over God, and proclaim himself to actually be God. Duh. No kidding again. Isn’t that exactly what is happening with transhumanism?

Some theological perspectives posit that the experience of making choices and facing consequences is essential for human learning, growth, and spiritual development. Without the ability to make choices, humans may remain stagnant and fail to grasp the deeper meaning of their actions and their relationship with God. Yeah, I could buy this if the experiment worked out well, but so far it hasn’t. I mean, if man is allowed free will, and only uses that free will to figure out everything that God made for him to live a free and beautiful life, and then to push God off the throne and claim that for himself as well, how can that have turned out ok?

So the question remains, why do we need to know everything? I am not sure if the problem is in knowing everything, but rather the problem is in what we do with that knowledge. We are naturally curious beings, and we enjoy very much tinkering with stuff to figure out how it works. But there is a limit to that as well. Some things we leave well enough alone because we know we may have trouble putting whatever we tore apart back together again. And experimenting on the house cat to see how it works typically doesn’t end well. There is a joy in the simplicity of life that we seem to have forgotten. Many eons ago we used to marvel at a full moon, or a bumblebee flying from flower to flower, without feeling the need to shoot missiles at the moon, or put a bumblebee in a killing jar so we can dissect it or pin it to corkboard to stare at its dead body. What happened?

I know when I was a kid I was fascinated with science and with nature. I did kill bumblebees and did all sorts of wicked things in the pursuit of knowledge and in the name of science. I don’t necessarily regret it, and I remember fondly of my desire to learn and don’t regret that either. So what’s the problem?

I remember being fascinated with the perspective of the great French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre. When I came upon his writings at the highpoint of my bee killing activities, I experienced a paradigm shift. He advocated what few scientists at the time were doing—observing nature in situ, in its natural position. He did not need to kill, to dissect, to destroy, or to learn “too much.” He learned what he chose to learn by observing insects in their natural habitats—lying on his stomach in the wild weed patches of his back yard. He learned a lot, but not everything, much that he observed he allowed to remain a mystery—God’s mystery. That’s how to do it right.