One of the perks of staying at home 24/7 during the quarantine is being able to really set aside a significant part of your day to spend time with God without any distraction. The technology today makes it possible for us to do this with more than just a Bible, a notebook, and a pen; we have Bible applications, online devotion plans, podcasts on Spotify, and even online sermons on YouTube from churches all around the world. How convenient, right?
During one of my recent devotions, I came across an 11-year old video of a Ted Talk given by American Evangelist, Billy Graham. He talked about technology, faith, and human shortcomings. With Lenten Season, I believe that this is both a timely and timeless message of remembering how Omni-powerful our God is, especially amid the current situation we, as a country, are in.
Generation after generation, we are faced with a multitude of scientific discoveries and technological advancements. Through all of these, science and technology has been able to, at most, impede suffering, and death, but not a single discovery has been able to completely solve any of the aforementioned problems. Billy Graham puts the significance of God and faith into the human equation and the role that it plays in the way we deal with evil, suffering, and death.
The insight that piqued my interest the most in Billy Graham’s thirty-minute talk was the way humans use technology to attempt to take control over things like human suffering and death. Our technology today has gotten us as far as paving a way for life to be born to infertile parents through reproductive technologies, a problem that seemed impossible to solve generations ago. As technology gets more complex and solves more of these everyday problems that we face, people start to depend more on it and believe that with just enough knowledge and time, much bigger problems could be answered.
Carl Sagan, a world renowned physicist, also agrees that humans are built with limitations. In his article entitled, “Can We Know the Universe”, he compares the maximum number of neural connections our brain can have to the number of atoms a single grain of salt has. Sagan says that a microgram of table salt is made up of about about 1016 sodium and chlorine atoms while the brain can go as far as to create 1014 neural connections. If each neural connection corresponds to the number of things knowable by the brain, this would mean that we are 9.9x1015 neural connections short of knowing everything about a grain of salt. In the same manner, human limitations, including the technology we are able to build, also restricts us from completely fathoming the phenomena of suffering and death.
Speaking for myself, maybe suffering and death should not be seen as problems that need to be solved, but rather as grains of salt. We can only discover and invent so much technology, only to find partial solutions and slow down the process of these phenomena. There will always be that 9.9x1015 neural connections that we humans lack to fully understand these problems. Billy Graham laid down the thought that King David did not stand out as one of the greatest leaders in history because he unceasingly sought for answers to the unknowable. He stood out because he accepted his limitations as a human and allowed God to pick him up at the end of his capabilities. This kind of faith allows you to live your life with more purpose, knowing that as you do your part to learn more about everything in hopes of creating a better world, God is doing His part in dealing with the problems you cannot. It just goes to show that having faith in God is more of being in a purposeful relationship wherein you work together rather than the routine religion we are often taught.
Story by Kyla Lu
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