We Can't Know Everything, But That's Okay

Astronomer Carl Sagan said, “I don’t want to believe, I want to know.”

He may have been quoting atheist Paulo Bitencourt.

If we’re honest, we would all like to know. 

Will my relationship work out? Does she really love me? Will my kids be okay? Will my dreams work out?

I sympathize with Carl Sagan. I would like to know too. But the reality of our world is that some things are unknowable. That’s why Saint Paul wisely said, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).

It does no good to bang your head against the wall seeking absolute proof when it’s not possible.

We live in a reality that is much more uncertain—and glorious—than that. 

Take God, for instance…

No one has ever seen God. The Bible itself says so. “No one has ever seen God. Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us, and his love is brought to perfection in us” (1 John 4:12).

That’s where faith comes in. I don’t know the reason, but God requires us to have faith… faith that he even exists, faith that he loves us, and that everything will work out according to his plan, if we seek him and follow him.

Faith requires us to look beyond ourselves and the knowable reality. It requires us to trust in God.

That includes his existence, and also his care for our lives, our relationships, our destinies, and our families. 

If I had to know that my first marriage would work out—and then was able to see that it wouldn’t—I never would have taken the risk to love. But above all, God requires us to love, with all its uncertainty and risk. Will we get our hearts broken? We can’t know. Will we end up happily married until death? We can’t know. 

But there is one thing we can know. It’s that God wants us to love one another. In a messy world of personalities and pain, damaged families of origin and human frailties, we have no guarantee that a relationship will work out happily, or that our dream career will materialize. But we are called to love and live anyway. 

We must seek God for wisdom on how to best do that. He never calls us to love without taking care. In that sense, love is not blind.

But in another sense, we are blind.

God made it that way. And that is why he calls us to walk by faith and not by sight.

Even Jesus claimed he didn’t know everything. Regarding his return to Earth, he said, “But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone” (Matthew 24:36).

If Jesus on Earth didn’t know, why should we need to? 

This life, and Christian faith, is, at a fundamental level, a mystery.

There is comfort in mystery. We don’t have to have it all figured out. We just know that Jesus told us to love God and others. If we try our best to do that, and keep seeking God, we can trust that we are on the path he calls us to.

And as Julian of Norwich said, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Don’t despair if you don’t have it all figured out.

Don’t fear the fact that you can’t see the future. If God wanted that for us, he would have given us all a crystal ball, not his Word and the Church. 

Rest in not knowing. God is outside time. He is outside the future, as well as the past and the present, and it’s all in good hands with him. 

So let’s do the things we can be sure to do: Have faith in God, and love him and others. 

I have stopped trying to figure everything out, and there is real peace in that. I’d love to be like Carl Sagan and have absolute certainty too. But I can’t. None of us can. Stop struggling for certainty. Rest in the mystery of things unknowable. Have faith in God’s love for you, and live.