ANSWERS

There is an answer to every question of man—though not in this world

Among animals, man alone has the capacity to reason, to ask why. And we do, constantly. We are by nature lovers of wisdom, which is what the Greek word philosophy means—lover of wisdom. Man is a lover of wisdom who wants to understand the world and his place in it. So, he asks why.

A child may hear of God from his parents, but the divine is beyond his comprehension and immaterial to his immediate needs. He cannot see God or understand how He functions, but he can see his parents and knows that they hold the keys to his short-term happiness. If he wants a cookie or a toy, he asks his parents, not God. If he wants to know why the sky is blue instead of green, he asks his parents, not God.

As a child grows, his needs become less immediate and his questions less prosaic. He gradually sees the limits to what his parents can provide both materially and eschatologically. They can tell him that the sky is blue because the atmosphere scatters sunlight in all directions and blue light scatters more because it travels on shorter waves.

But they cannot tell him why God chose to scatter blue more than green. Or why there is a sky at all. Or why he sprung from his mother’s womb to walk the earth for eighty or so years.

Or, most importantly, why his walk on earth will someday end, and what then will happen—or what that should mean about how he should live now. Neither his parents nor any man can answer those questions for him, because those answers come only from the divine.

There is an answer to every question of man—though not in this world