“Human beings are explanation generators.”

So says Daniel Taylor in his book The Myth of Certainty (p. 22). He says that we generate explanations about what life means to give us security, and that (and this is the interesting and scary part) all explanations for life are self-verifying. That means that they all seem to be true, that we can find “evidence” to back them up.

Our house is currently under the attack of fruit flies. There used to be a theory that said that fruit spontaneously generated fruit flies. It isn’t true, but if I hadn’t been taught otherwise, I would THINK it was true. It’s an explanation that works. All I have to do is leave an apple out and I’ve got fruit flies.

People used to think that the universe revolved around the earth. It seems to do just that. If you picture the night sky as a black globe enclosing the earth with the stars painted on it, that works as an explanation for most of the universe. Only a few objects mess up that theory by moving against that black globe, including the sun, moon and planets (which is why they’re called “planets” or “wanderers”).

Explanations of all kinds “work” to explain life, and everybody has one - from staunch young-earth creationists to strict Darwinists, from radical Islamic clerics to shouting fundamentalist Christian preachers to left-leaning atheists, from the Amish in Lancaster who stoically mourn the recent school shooting (and put it in God’s hands) to the baffled worldly reporters who sip Starbucks Chai Tea Lattes in front of their farmhouses…we all know how to explain the world and we all have a group of friends around us who will affirm our explanation.

Doesn’t make it true, though.

I see these life-explanations at work in Christians around me:

• Money doesn’t buy happiness. Money and Christ buy happiness.
• Pursuit of pleasure is empty…unless you go to church every other Sunday. Then pursuit of pleasure is quite admirable.
• The greatest commands of the faith? Learn to love yourself so you can love your neighbor and give ten percent of a tithe to God’s work.

Daniel Taylor: “Once in operation, a belief system processes all information, all evidence in its own terms, appropriating that which verifies its outlook and defusing or ignoring anything else” (p.23).

Remember, friends…there are many people who will affirm your version of the truth, for now anyway.

And then there is One who is Truth Himself.