Knowing
Discerning Meaning, Priority, Structure, Pattern, and Order
We assume we know ever more today when instead we may know progressively less. Intellectual history presumes that knowledge involves an amassing of information, making each generation smarter than the previous one, each day adding information to the rest. We not only look back at the ancients as stupid and call prior generations sadly uninformed but also see ourselves today as much more thoughtful than we were yesterday. After all, each day brings more information, which we just pile onto the rest.
But information isn’t knowledge. Information, an assault on our limited senses, is instead chaos, data, confusion, and a mess. We know that information biases our perceptions. Primacy and recency studies teach us that what we hear first and last distorts the rest. Information becomes knowledge only when discernment gives it meaning, priority, structure, and order. Information and discernment work in opposite directions. Information is bottom up, outside in. Information is the data’s assault on our senses. Discernment, though, is to perceive the meaning, priority, structure, and order that turn information’s assault on our senses into knowledge. Discernment is thus a top down, inside out thing.
God created information, the earthly chaos and confusion assaulting our senses from the ground up. But God also gave us his Spirit, divinely ordering from heaven down and inside our souls out those earthly chaotic things. The Lord’s mouth gives knowledge, not the swarm of chaotic earthly things. We are no more knowledgeable simply because today’s information is greater than yesterday’s. In truth, we are only more or less knowledgeable the closer or farther we are from God, from sensing the patterns and purposes he has for the otherwise disordered things. Are you closer to God, more attuned to his voice and patterns, than you were yesterday?
