As humans, we have gained an incredible amount of knowledge and information, especially inthe last two hundred years. Knowledge and information, however, are not necessarily the same thing as “wisdom.” We have also gained a much greater understanding of the natural world than our forefathers ever had. A “greater understanding,” however, isn’t the same thing as wisdom either.
There is so much in human thought that challenges God’s Word. Whether the issue is the resurrection of Jesus, the Creation itself, or any miracle, human “wisdom” (even when buttressed with the “facts” of science) must be deemed “foolishness” when it contradicts the Word of the Lord.
Also, as stated earlier, so much science today, especially in the context of human origins, begins from a purely naturalistic perspective. Even though many of history’s greatest scientific geniuses-Newton, Kepler, Galileo-were believers in God and saw their work as helping to explain the work of God in creation (Kepler once wrote: “O God, I think Thy thoughts after Thee . . .”), such sentiments today are often mocked by segments of the scientific community.
Some even seek to explain away the miraculous stories in the Bible by arguing that they were really naturally occurring phenomena that the ancients, ignorant of nature’s laws, misinterpreted as divine action. There are, for instance, all sorts of naturalist theories that seek to explain the parting of the Red Sea as something other than a miracle of God. A few years ago, one scientist speculated that Moses was on drugs, and so he just hallucinated the idea that God gave him the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone!
However silly some of this might sound, once you reject the idea of God and the supernatural, you need to come up with some other explanation for these things; hence, the “foolishness” that Paul so clearly and prophetically wrote about.