Man's Wisdom or God's Wisdom

"The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God" (1 Corinthians 3:19).

"The foolishness of God is wiser than men" (1 Corinthians 1:25).

Most Latter-day Saints — and indeed most Christians — are accustomed to the idea that man's wisdom is pure folly compared to the wisdom of God. We hear it in our churches and read it in our scriptures over and over again. We learn and we teach that no matter how bright we think we are, the best of our plans are nothing compared to the least of the Lord's. That conceptualization helps us understand just how wise God is, which on the one hand helps us rely on his guidance more easily, and on the other keeps from putting too much faith in our own imperfect designs.

We see God's wisdom most abundantly in his organization of the world and the universe. As the Book of Mormon prophet Lehi spoke of the Lord's plan in organizing the world when he taught that "all things have been done in the wisdom of him who knoweth all things" (2 Nephi 2:24). As we see the organization of the world, the superiority of God's wisdom over our own becomes obvious. Our finest machines are not nearly so well-designed as the simplest of animals. Our most powerful man-made sources of heat and light are insignificant compared to the sun. Even our most destructive weapons are nothing compared to the destructive power of the earth itself. All our wisdom is as the widow's mite in the treasury of the Lord's wealth of wisdom.

In fact, one of the kinds of problems that people run into most frequently is the kind caused by our own misinformed good intentions. We think, in our limited wisdom, that a particular course of action will improve a situation, so we interfere. Then we find that our interference ended up causing far more harm than good.

A few examples will illustrate easily how our interference with God's design causes problems. Consider Utah Lake, where the introduction of a new fish species to compensate for overfishing the native stock has driven almost all the native species to extinction. Or consider the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, stronger than bacteria we faced before penicillin, due to our having killed of the weakest of their kind to leave only the super-fit to survive (at the same time weakening our own gene pool). Or consider first contacts with unknown tribal cultures in America, Africa, and Australia, where intending to bring the hunter-gatherer tribes the riches of European civilization, many good-hearted cultural diplomats brought devastating diseases instead. We see over and over again a common pattern: man interferes with God's design because he thinks he knows how to improve it and he ends up ruining a system that was far more complex than he had imagined.

The ancient Greeks called this hubris, the special kind of pride in which man thinks he knows better than the gods. A lot of Greek tragedies were written to highlight the dangers of hubris and the sorrow it brings into human lives. Today, we often call the same thing progress. But no matter what we call it, it's still us thinking we're brighter than God. And it still brings the same tragic results.

The amazing thing about this kind of pride, though, is how much it permeates our lives. One area where we see this sort of pride flourish is in the concept of government.

Government, as we know it, is the result of man's efforts in planning how humans will interact with each other.

Now humans, like many animals, are naturally sociable beings. They want to live together in groups and interact with each other. They naturally and innately want to work in groups, to play in groups, to eat in groups, to love in groups, to worship in groups, and so forth. Humans universally, across all cultures, abhor the idea of being forever removed from the joys of associating with some group. In almost all cultures, the worst punishment a group can give a criminal among them is to remove that individual from the group, whether through death, solitary imprisonment, or banishment. Humans naturally have a strong desire to form groups.

That natural desire is part of God's plan. In fact, the basic group of human society — the family (both immediate and extended) — is the direct and obvious result of God's plan.

Somewhere along the line, however, some men decided they were smarter than God. They liked God's design fairly well, but they thought they could make some improvements on it. They thought they should start applying their own wisdom to the task of improving the natural, divinely-appointed desire for humans to interact in societies. The result was, and has been ever since, government.

Government takes our natural sociable desires and forces them into a mold crafted by our own painfully finite wisdom. Such a course always creates unforeseen problems. And since we already feel like the way to solve problems is to apply our own wisdom to them instead of letting nature play out as God designed, we increase the size and power of our governments to tackle the problems that their creation brought about. This vicious cycle continues until governments (that is, the instruments of man's interference in God's design for human society) end up controlling everything and all our happiness is constrained by our own narrow minds instead of being free to roam the wide breadth of God's.

We fool ourselves into believing that without governments, society would break down. But that just isn't true. Society is a natural human impulse. If we got rid of governments, we would undoubtedly continue to suffer the ill effects of their initial creation. But over time, society would resume on a level far better (because it would be according to God's natural design) than anything we have today.

At some point we must recognize that we are not smarter than God. His natural design is far better than what we devise. This is true in all aspects of life, including human society. Planned societies (that is, states) are vastly inferior to natural societies because they are based not on God's wisdom, but on man's. Governments are just another instance of man's hubris. And they bring about the same tragic results.

It's time we stopped trying to lecture God with our wisdom and simply started learning from his.