Why Wisdom Is More Than Knowledge: Claire Gilbert, Harry Amos, and the Soul Debate

Unbelievable? recently hosted a conversation between humanist philosopher Harry Amos and Christian writer and ethicist Dr. Claire Gilbert. The prompt for the discussion was the existence of the soul. While this topic was addressed, a larger issue loomed in the background: the danger of reducing life to an academic abstraction —the risk of having one’s lifeblood drained by a thousand intellectual paper cuts.

Harry Amos is a bright young philosopher enthusiastically climbing academic trees, but, through no fault of his own, hasn’t spent much time navigating the forest. Claire Gilbert, on the other hand, while similarly academically minded, was forced by a cancer diagnosis to move on from counting tree rings to managing forest fires.

Amos is intent on discovering the truth; however, the correspondence theory of truth requires that his thoughts match reality, and while his mind may be ablaze, his life is several sparks short of a refiner’s fire. Gilbert, however, has felt the heat, watched the intellectual dross melt away, and discovered a soul that required nurturing. While both guests have received their share of scholarly commendations, Gilbert is one-up on Amos because she received an advanced degree in wisdom from the school of hard knocks. This discussion made it clear that while life can be debated on intellectual battlefields, the rules of engagement completely change when casualties start piling up in your own backyard.

Walking a mile in my shoes

It’s no surprise that wisdom is portrayed in books and movies as elderly characters like Grandmother Willow in Pocahontas, Yoda in Star Wars, and Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, because when we want advice, we don’t consult the well-coifed and chiseled but prefer to sit at the feet of the grey-haired and wrinkled. Good looks may take you places, but it is facial furrows that provide the topography necessary to navigate the terrain. It is the tattoos of time, and not the accolades of academia, that certify wisdom.

When we have academic questions, we go to those in the ivory towers, but when we need life advice, we go to those who have spent time wandering the mean streets of reality. Knowledge is a map, but wisdom is a travelogue. It is one thing to get from point A to point B, but quite another to know what clothes to wear, what supplies to bring, and which items to include in our first-aid kit to treat the inevitable cuts and bruises you will receive along the way. Wisdom isn’t obtained by being an intellectual voyeur but by being an active participant. It isn’t acquired through a thought experiment but by being slapped around by reality.

Interestingly, Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the world’s greatest theologian and philosopher, when encouraged by his secretary to finish his massive Summa Theologica, demurred and said, “The end of my labors has come. All I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.” His comments remind us that every intellectual work is humbled when paraded before reality.

I admire the new generation of atheists like Harry Amos and Alex O’Connor for their keen insights and their willingness to engage with Christians. However, their philosophical reflections, while a step in the right direction, only take me so far because they have yet to walk a mile in my shoes.

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Pinning the butterfly to the wall

Wisdom is the ability to see the big picture. It’s an ability that has been sadly lost due to the modernist tendency to reduce life to its parts and the more recent postmodern compulsion to deconstruct. The combined force of these two philosophical movements has taken a wrecking ball to the magnificent edifice of life, leaving us with nothing but a pile of rubble.

Socrates encouraged us to lead an examined life, but if we put it under the knife, the only thing we will discover is what caused its death. A life-review becomes an autopsy, and wisdom a reading of entrails.

Elizabeth Oldfield, in her book “Fully Alive,” eloquently summarized the problem this way:

“We measure and dissect and pin the butterfly to the wall.” (Elizabeth Oldfield)

Sadly, reduction and deconstruction have become the reigning pedagogies of academia. Knowledge is given to our young people as pieces of a puzzle. However, because higher education has adopted the postmodern mantra that absolute truth doesn’t exist, the students aren’t provided with a box-top picture to guide the assembly. Instead, they are told to create their own reality, which, rather than helping them grow in wisdom, condemns them to a life pounding round pegs into square holes.

T.S. Eliot recognized this danger.

“Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” (T.S. Eliot)

The beginning of wisdom

The book of Job is an excellent example of what happens when we try to understand our lives by reducing them to their parts. Job was distressed that, despite leading a seemingly God-pleasing life, he suffered the loss of possessions, family, and health. Job was so obsessed with God’s justice that he forgot it was but a small part of God’s larger body of work. So, God sat Job down and told him that before he unwound that theodicy thread, he might want first to consider the entire glorious tapestry. God then gave Job a front row seat to the Big Picture.

“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? (Job 38:2-5)

Etc, etc, etc…

Job was Godsmacked once he realized that life wasn’t a courtroom but an amphitheater.

Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. ‘Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you make it known to me.’ I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:3-6)

Proverbs tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Fear means more than terror; it also includes awe, respect, reverence, and piety. Job’s wisdom started once he realized that God not only had a law degree but was the Creator of the universe. Job’s reductionist tendencies gave him tunnel vision, but God pulled him out of his little world and plopped him down in Big Sky Country.

Awestruck

Awe is admiring the entire edifice; meaninglessness is dancing in the ruins. Awe humbles us by sticking a pin in our ballooning pride allowing us to see the big picture. It doesn’t diminish our importance but situates us in our proper place in God’s larger “very good” ecology.

St Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, argued that the people labeled as foolish, low, weak, and despised were the wise ones because they were able to make themselves small enough to see God’s big picture.

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. (1 Corinthians 1:26-29)

Interestingly, although children lack knowledge, they are exceptionally well-equipped to experience awe. Sadly, as grown-ups, we dismiss their larger-than-life fantasy worlds as immature musings, but then return to our little cubicle, which gets smaller with every passing hour we spend trying to be the adults in the room. This observation may explain why Jesus told us that the things of God were hidden from the wise and understanding—or, in the vernacular of this philosophical moment, the reducing and deconstructing—and revealed them to little children whose worlds are so spacious that they can’t help but find mystery even in the mundane.

At that time Jesus declared, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. (Matthew 11:25-26)

Let’s explore awe—the place where wisdom begins—and see how our reductionist and deconstructive tendencies have neutered it, rendering our imaginations infertile. I want to start by proposing that awe requires three basic things: Creator, content, and consumer.

Creator

When we deny a Creator, awe is reduced to amazement at the statistical improbability of a world randomly assembling itself. Life becomes a trip to the casino, where we mindlessly pull levers on a slot machine, hoping that today might be our lucky day. However, when we acknowledge a Creator, we stand in awe, recognizing that the world we see was conceived by a mathematician, built by an engineer, and painted by an artist.

Thankfully, most people believe that life is an adventure, not a gamble, and that they are characters in a story, not marbles on a roulette wheel. Atheists recognize this human intuition but attribute those beliefs to unresolved daddy issues, a troublesome evolutionary spandrel, or a useful fiction evolved to tame our animalistic tendency to monkey around. They pay lip service to Him by searching for the “God gene” or the “God particle,” yet, in the process, inadvertently make Him more believable by acknowledging the need for an organizing principle rather than blind, pitiless indifference to explain a world of such complexity and beauty. Despite the scientist’s reductionist rhetoric, humans still find themselves speechless when contemplating the work of the great Awerchitect. Jewish theologian, Abraham Joshua Heschel, described it this way:

“Reverence is one of man’s answers to the presence of mystery … When we stand in awe, our lips do not demand speech, knowing that if we spoke, we would deprave ourselves. In such moments talk is an abomination.” (Abraham Joshua Heschel)

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Atheists aren’t the only ones who have taken a scalpel to God. Philosophers and theologians are also very adept at dissecting God, removing each vital omni organ, labeling them, and then placing them in intellectual specimen jars, only to be taken out for an occasional lecture on divine attributes. God, however, isn’t the God of the dead but of the living, so rather than risk killing Him with an academic vivisection, perhaps our time would be better served by inviting Him into our lives for a heart-to-heart.

The cafeteria sensibilities of the modernist reduce God to a buffet. The postmodern chef de cuisine presents Him as a deconstructed dish. Sadly, they both present Him as an alternative spiritual dining experience rather than the Main Course —a meal that, regrettably, has a distinctly sin-forward flavor profile.

Apologetics, while a powerful evangelistic tool, is also prone to these reductionist tendencies as it defends an unmoved mover, a being than which no greater can be imagined, or a designing intelligence. While these proofs for the existence of God are powerful, I worry that relying on them too much makes us look more like deists than theists. Antony Flew, famously labelled “the world’s most notorious atheist,” became convinced in his later years that God existed based on the evidence from design. However, while he felt “that the Christian religion is the one religion that most clearly deserves to be honored and respected, whether or not its claim to be divine revelation is true,” he died a deist. Sadly, Flew admired the sharpness of God’s mind but never took the time to feel the scars of His pierced hands and feet.

Content

Even nature isn’t safe from the atomizing tendencies of the materialist. Origin of Life (OOL) research is a good example. Scientists believe that if they bring together the proper chemicals for a dip in a carefully curated pool, they will self-organize into a swim team. Sadly, all their

attempts to clarify the OOL have only muddied the waters. Ironically, while OOL researchers try to create life from scratch, biomimeticists tacitly acknowledge the superior design found in nature by attempting to replicate its nanomachines. It appears that even in the scientific realm, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Nature is awe-inspiring, yet our reductionist/deconstructing tendencies cause us to view it like a machine with a parts list. Science then serves as an owner’s manual giving us permission to take it apart, tinker with it, and give it upgrades. However, nature is a living organism made up of “good” parts working together in an ecologically “very good” way, which should warn us to be more cautious with our intellectual dissection, knowing that a single slip of the knife could turn our conversation with nature into a postmortem.

Consumer

We have discussed how our inability or unwillingness to see the big picture has caused us to reduce God, the Creator of the universe, to a gene or particle, and nature to a chemical crapshoot. Still, our reductionist tendencies don’t stop there. We have also turned our sights on humans, the consumers. We have taken the image out of the image bearers and reduced them to meat computers, rats in a Skinner Box, or the planet’s smartest monkeys. We eliminate the possibility of awe when we reduce the consumer to the content.

Astonishingly, some of the most academically gifted humans on the planet, those who have spent lifetimes tacking letters of scholastic achievement to their names, have made it their life’s work to prove that mankind is insignificant. The multiple Ph.Ds of human transcendence have somehow convinced them that they are nothing but the ABCs of immanence. They speak of evolution as if it were a series of collegiate weeding-out classes crafted to prepare us for the graduate school of life. The problem, however, is that there is no good evidence that our primate “ancestors” ever graduated and left the Animal House.

If the materialist succeeds in reducing man to a beast, it will come back to bite him. But if we restore man to his image-bearing status, then we can bring a little bit of heaven back to earth. The very fact that humans exhibit the fruits of the Spirit should be a clue that the apples don’t fall far from the Tree. We need to reclaim our dignity as image bearers of the King, not uncles to the smartest monkey. We must resist the scientific tendency to unravel the threads that have been woven together in our mothers’ wombs, because when we do, an examined life becomes nothing but tangled string theory.

“Men go to gape at mountain peaks, at the boundless tides of the sea, the broad sweep of rivers, the encircling ocean and the motion of the stars, and yet they leave themselves unnoticed; they do not marvel at themselves.” (Augustine)

Setting Sail

It’s crucial that we analyze the details of our faith, but we must be careful not to reduce the greatest story ever told to Spark Notes. If we break our faith into small pieces, our quiet time will feel more like a trip to the theological morgue, identifying a divine corpse than a conversation with the Author of life. It’s good to dive into the word, but we need to remember to come up for air and take a deep cleansing Holy Spirit breath. Once again, Abraham Joshua Heschel offers profound insight.

“The search of reason ends on the shore of the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide.” (Abraham Joshua Heschel)

After listening to the show, I felt Amos was shipwrecked on the shore of the known, while Gilbert’s sails were open and she was gliding on the ineffable.

I’m not opposed to exploring the depths of theology, science, and philosophy, but it must be done wisely. We need to be careful not to dissect the awe that draws us into dialogue with the divine, because when we do, we risk having it bleed to death in our hands.

Erik Strandness is a physician and Christian apologist who practiced neonatal medicine for more than 20 years and has written three apologetic books. Information about his books can be found at godsscreenplay.com