Sometimes making sense of the world is difficult. We have questions and we do not always have answers. However, sometimes our greatest problem is that we focus more on our questions than on our answers. This is akin to materialism in our western world today. We find ourselves wealthy and surrounded by more things than many of our ancestors would have ever expected to exist, and yet we always want the one thing that we do not have.
Our materialism looks something like this: My phone works, but it doesn’t have the noise-cancelling qualities of the iPhone 5. Sure, I can make calls and I can send and receive emails, texts, and everything else that I need to do, but since noise-cancelling technology now exists (that I didn’t even know I needed) I must have it. I neglect to focus on the fact that I really have all that I need and instead focus on what I do not have.
Often, people approach the world and their knowledge of the world and of God in this way. Rather thank acknowledging all that they know and enjoying and appreciating what is known, people get hung up on what they do not know. So, in this case belief in God is suspended or rejected despite the many evidences that exist because a person focuses on the one, two, or three questions to which he or she cannot find sufficient answers. In A Jigsaw Guide to Making Sense of the World a new book by IVP Books, Alex McLellan argues that we should seek to make sense of the world first from a big picture perspective.
Just as a jigsaw puzzle takes absolute shape even when some pieces are missing, so too he argues that a Christian worldview is obvious when all of creation and all known facts and realities are considered from a birds-eye view. His argument is not that we should not seek answers to our various questions, but instead that we should look for the answers in the same way that we look for missing pieces to a jigsaw puzzle. We use the evidence of the adjoining pieces to fill in the gaps. Just like we want to the noise-cancelling technology that we didn’t know we needed, people often get hung up on a new question and an answer that prior to its introduction into their psyche, they didn’t even know existed.
Likewise, in our worldview, if we begin with the unanswered questions we may never move to the answered questions, we seek to create context from ignorance rather than using the context of our world to aid in the answering of other questions. I agree with McLellan. There are questions in our world that are difficult and some that may not even have sufficient answers in this life, yet the overwhelming evidence from a birds-eye view is that all we know of creation points to a creator. The big picture helps us to formulate the skeleton for our worldview and as we seek answers to our questions that arise upon further consideration, we have the strength of a sturdy worldview skeleton to aid us in discovery and to provide a structure upon which we can stretch the skin and muscles of our worldview.
