We know a lot of stuff. How much stuff? A whole bunch. Like, a great big bunch of stuff. Don't believe me? That's fine, you're allowed to be skeptical—but I can prove it. Just read Wikipedia.

What do you mean, "Which article?" Read the whole thing—read all of Wikipedia. I'll wait.

Fast forward

Okay, welcome back! Assuming an average reading speed, that no new content was added and that you didn't stop to eat, sleep or go to the bathroom, it is now January of 2014. As I was saying, we know a lot of stuff.

You may wonder if there wasn't a better way to prove my point than forcing you to spend three years of your life in extreme discomfort, hunger and sleep deprivation? Probably, but there's no sense crying over spilled milk. Speaking of which, you may want to clean out your refrigerator sometime soon. I can only imagine the odd smells it managed to cultivate in your absence.

Info overload

The total amount of information available to the human race is absolutely staggering. The Internet currently contains what scientists refer to as a "ginormous boatload" of information or, for the rest of us who aren't particularly well-versed in technical jargon, that's 487 billion gigabytes.

If you had that printed and bound in book form—and had an inclination to defy most of the physical laws that govern the universe—you could make a stack that would reach from earth to Pluto...10 times. And in just 18 months, statisticians expect that quantity of information to double.

After a while, the numbers become meaningless. It moves from "much more than you could ever learn in a lifetime," to "much much more than you could ever learn in a lifetime," to "just forget about it—you're not even going to nick the surface."

What's really interesting about the whole information thing is that at no point have we been able to say that we have all the information there is to have. No one has ever earned the right to say, "Well, that does it! We figured everything out. Guess I'll see if there's anything good on TV."

On the contrary, there are always, always more questions—most of them arriving in hordes on the backs of the answers we discover. We've made remarkable progress, but the big inky void labeled "Things We Know We Don't Know" never gets smaller.

The One who knows

A few thousand years ago, God asked a man named Job a barrage of questions that drove home just how little mankind comprehends (see Job 38-41). Since then, we've unearthed partial answers to some of those questions—though He could just as easily ask us even tougher ones today. What's worth noting is that God knows the answers.

As the omniscient Creator of the universe, God has in-depth answers to all the whats, whys and hows we could ever ask about—all the knowledge that makes those 10 Pluto-bound stacks of books completely laughable.

That same Creator preserved for us His Bible—a guidebook for navigating life even in its most confusing moments. The world has a penchant for mocking that way of life as outdated, narrow-minded and foolish. The world, it's worth noting, has also had a penchant for believing things like the earth is flat or that rotting meat magically transforms into flies.

Bottom line: We have to decide between believing people who are still struggling to understand the world's complexities or believing the God who designed them. What will you choose? VT