Wisdom

 Yes, you are pointing to two of the oldest tensions in Christian interpretation.

The first is exactly the proof-text problem. If one assembles verses emphasizing exaltation—“the Word was God,” “I and the Father are one,” acceptance of worship, forgiving sins—one gets one picture. If one assembles verses emphasizing subordination—“the Father is greater than I,” Jesus praying, expressing ignorance (“of that day or hour no one knows”), obedience, suffering, even asking why he has been forsaken—one gets another picture.

The theological challenge for centuries has been: How do these fit together?

Traditional Christianity answered with increasingly elaborate metaphysics: Jesus as fully divine and fully human, one person with two natures, equality of essence but distinct role within the Trinity. To believers, this preserves all the texts without discarding any. To critics, it can feel suspiciously like a very sophisticated reconciliation exercise developed after the fact.

And then we come to the Logos idea in the opening of the Gospel of John: “the Word” becoming flesh. As you say—what exactly does that mean?

The Greek term logos is famously slippery. It can mean “word,” “reason,” “principle,” “account,” even the rational structure underlying reality. A first-century reader influenced by Jewish scripture might hear echoes of God creating through speech (“Let there be…”), divine wisdom, or God’s self-expression. A reader influenced by Greek philosophy might hear something closer to cosmic rationality or ordering principle.

So when John says the Logos “became flesh,” interpreters have heard many things:

    God literally incarnate in a human being.

    Divine wisdom embodied.

    God’s creative or revelatory principle manifest in history.

    A poetic theological claim rather than a metaphysical manual.

Your “who knows what that means?” strikes me as fair in one sense: John is writing at a high level of theological poetry, not giving analytic definitions. “The Word became flesh” has enormous suggestive power, but it is not the kind of sentence one can reduce to a tidy formula.

In fact, much religious language may work more like metaphor stretched toward mystery than like engineering specifications. You mentioned literary metaphor earlier. “Heart” does not literally mean a pump when we speak of compassion; yet the metaphor carries meaning. One could argue that religious language often operates in a similar register—trying to gesture toward realities believers think exceed ordinary categories.

That does not settle whether the claims are true, of course. But it may explain why centuries of intelligent people have argued over them without reaching stable agreement: the texts themselves are rich, layered, and sometimes internally tensioned.

Your instinct against cherry-picking seems sound to me. If one is going to reason from scripture, intellectual fairness probably requires holding all the evidence in view, including the awkward passages for one’s own position.

"The Bible is a fiddle on which one can play many tunes." My dad liked that one.

Of course RC teaching avoids the problem by putting reading it in the hands of the Church.  Here I wanted to talk about teaching people to think and ended up debating the Trinity.  I guess it works as an example.

It actually is a pretty good accidental case study for your original topic.

What you’ve run into is almost a textbook demonstration of why “teaching people to think” is harder than teaching content.

On one side, you have the Protestant-style impulse (very roughly speaking): read the text, compare passages, weigh evidence, identify tensions, and reason your way toward coherence. On the other, the Roman Catholic approach you mention: the claim that interpretation is stabilized by an authoritative teaching structure—the Church—so individual reasoning is bounded by a tradition intended to prevent fragmentation and endless re-interpretation.

Both are, in a sense, solutions to the same underlying problem you started with: humans are not naturally reliable interpreters of complex, layered information. Left entirely to themselves, people tend to cherry-pick, overgeneralize, and construct elegant but incomplete narratives.

So one solution is epistemic discipline: teach fallacies, logic, source criticism, comparative reading—what you originally had in mind. The other is epistemic delegation: accept that individual reasoning is fragile and place interpretive authority in a trusted institution.

Neither is purely “clean.” The first risks fragmentation and confident disagreement; the second risks over-centralization and inherited assumptions that may not be easily questioned. Most real-world systems end up somewhere between the two, even if they don’t say so explicitly.

And your instinct about fallacies fits neatly here again. Fallacy training helps individuals resist their own cognitive shortcuts. But institutions arise partly because even trained individuals still disagree—sometimes rationally, sometimes not—about which shortcuts are acceptable and when.

So yes, the Trinity discussion is not a derailment. It’s almost an illustration of the core thesis: even highly intelligent people, given the same text and different interpretive frameworks, can produce radically different “reasonable” conclusions. Which is exactly why both logic training and humility (and sometimes authority structures) keep reappearing in human systems.

If anything, your original claim still stands: most people are not taught how thinking fails in predictable ways. This whole theological detour just shows how high the stakes can get when those failures scale up.

Is "wisdom" a real thing?  I see it used in places like seances.

I think “wisdom” is a real thing, but probably not in the spooky, séance sense of tapping into hidden cosmic knowledge.

The difficulty is that wisdom is a fuzzy word. We use it to mean several different things at once.

One meaning is simply good judgment under uncertainty. Not intelligence, not memory, not formal logic, but the ability to navigate messy situations where the facts are incomplete and values conflict. A wise physician may not know more medicine than every specialist, but may know when intervention will help versus merely prolong suffering. A wise underwriter may sense when a risk “doesn’t smell right” even if the spreadsheet looks acceptable.

Another meaning is pattern recognition tempered by humility. Older people are sometimes called wise not because age magically confers truth, but because long experience reveals recurring human mistakes: greed, fear, pride, wishful thinking, tribalism. Wisdom, in this sense, is partly recognizing that reality punishes overconfidence.

There is also a moral dimension in many traditions. Wisdom is not merely cleverness; it includes judgment about what matters. Someone can be brilliant and foolish if they optimize for the wrong thing. You can see why traditions from Christianity to Buddhism tie wisdom to compassion, restraint, or perspective rather than IQ alone. Given your own emphasis on compassion as a guide, I suspect you already lean toward this broader sense.

Where I become skeptical is when “wisdom” is treated as mystical authority: “an ancient spirit has wisdom,” “the universe revealed wisdom,” or a séance medium channeling elevated beings. That often functions rhetorically—it discourages questioning. Once something is labeled “wisdom,” people may stop asking, How do you know? What evidence supports this?

Your instinct about séances may be reacting to that tone. The word can acquire an aura of unearned authority.

A practical test I rather like is this: if someone claims wisdom, does it survive ordinary scrutiny? Can it explain itself? Does it work across cases? Does it admit uncertainty? Genuine wisdom, if it exists, usually sounds less like certainty and more like careful proportion: “Here is what tends to happen, here are the tradeoffs, and here is what I might be missing.”

In that sense, I suspect you have met wise people—perhaps doctors, old farmers, monks, businesspeople, maybe even a few priests—without necessarily using the word. They are often the people who are slow to certainty, attentive to consequences, and oddly hard to fool.

It's "good judgment under uncertainty." That hangs on what we mean by "good." 

Yes—and that is exactly the place where the floor suddenly drops away philosophically.

If wisdom is “good judgment under uncertainty,” then we immediately have to ask: good by what standard?

If “good” means effective at achieving goals, then wisdom becomes largely instrumental. A wise general wins wars, a wise investor preserves wealth, a wise politician maintains stability. But this can produce what we would normally call morally bad outcomes. A ruthless dictator might be “wise” in the narrow sense of preserving power.

If “good” means morally good, then we must answer the harder question: what morality? Compassion? Happiness? Duty? Justice? Social cohesion? Minimizing suffering? You have often framed ethics around suffering and compassion, which would make wisdom something like: sound judgment that reduces suffering in a complex world.

There is also a humbler, more pragmatic meaning people often use without noticing: wisdom as good enough judgment that reality does not punish severely over time. In other words, the wise person tends not to wreck relationships, squander resources, trust obvious charlatans, or repeatedly make the same catastrophic mistakes. Reality itself becomes the examiner.

This is where your skepticism is useful. The word “wisdom” can smuggle in approval without argument. Calling something wise may simply mean “I admire it” or “my culture reveres it.” One should probably ask, as you instinctively did: By what criterion are we calling this wisdom?

Interestingly, many older traditions wrestled with exactly this problem. In Christian thought, wisdom often meant alignment with God’s will. In Buddhist traditions, wisdom is often linked to seeing reality clearly and responding compassionately. In more secular settings, wisdom becomes practical judgment under uncertainty.

Your question reminds me of something from philosophy: before arguing over whether something exists, clarify the definition. Otherwise we risk debating a fog.

You may be edging toward the view that “wisdom” is not a thing in itself but a label we attach after the fact to decisions whose outcomes and motives we approve of. That is not an unreasonable suspicion. Though I confess I still think there is something there—perhaps an accumulated habit of calibrated judgment, tempered by experience and humility—even if the word is frustratingly slippery.

Well, if the advice turns out well, then I would take it as evidence but not proof that the advice was wise.

Yes—and that distinction is very important. You are applying the same discipline you were advocating earlier: resisting the temptation to infer too much from outcomes.

A good outcome is evidence of wisdom, but not proof of it, because luck contaminates the picture.

A foolish decision can turn out splendidly by accident. A wise decision can end badly because the world is messy. The underwriter who declines a risky exposure may look foolish if no loss occurs; the one who accepts it may look brilliant—until the rare catastrophe arrives. In medicine, a doctor may make the statistically correct call and still lose the patient. Another may choose poorly and be rescued by chance.

So if we judge wisdom only by outcomes, we risk outcome bias: “It worked, therefore it was wise.”

Perhaps a better test is something like this: Given the information reasonably available at the time, were the assumptions sensible, the tradeoffs understood, the uncertainties acknowledged, and the reasoning sound? Then repeated good outcomes over time strengthen the case.

That feels very actuarial, actually. One decision proves little. A pattern across many decisions starts to tell us something.

It also explains why genuinely wise-seeming people are often hard to identify in the short run. Flashy confidence can look like wisdom temporarily, especially during good luck. The quiet person who keeps saying, “We may be missing something here,” often looks obstructive—until circumstances vindicate caution.

There is a lovely old idea—I think one you might appreciate—that wisdom is only really visible longitudinally. One does not know whether counsel was wise after a week, or even a year, but after decades. Time acts as a kind of auditor.

And even then, as you would probably insist, one never gets proof—only accumulating evidence.

If an advisor's advise turns out right ten times in a row, or if a piece of advice does the same, it improves the chances quite a bit.

Yes, very much so. That is basically Bayesian thinking in everyday clothes: repeated success updates confidence, even if it never reaches certainty.

If an advisor gives good counsel once, that may be luck. Twice, perhaps coincidence. Ten times in a row—especially across different situations—you begin to assign a higher probability that the person has some reliable judgment or method.

But, as I suspect your underwriting instincts would immediately add, one still wants to know what kind of success is being measured.

Someone may look brilliant in a favorable environment while merely riding the tide. A stock-picker during a long bull market, or an executive during an easy credit cycle, can appear wise without being especially skillful. Then conditions change and the apparent wisdom evaporates.

So one naturally asks:

    Was the advice successful across varied conditions?

    Did it work when circumstances were difficult or novel?

    Was the reasoning visible and sound, or only the result?

    Did the person acknowledge uncertainty and revise when wrong?

In other words, repeated success raises the posterior probability—there is the Bayesian language—but the strength of the update depends on how hard the predictions were and how much chance was involved.

You are also hinting at something subtle: sometimes we trust not just people but heuristics. “Sleep on major decisions.” “Beware investments you do not understand.” “Avoid speaking in anger.” A rule that repeatedly serves well acquires evidential weight even if we cannot formally prove it is universally wise.

Though here too, your earlier caution applies: ten successes do not prove a principle. Humans are very prone to overfitting—to mistake a pattern for a law. One could imagine the investor who says, “I ignored every downturn and held my position ten times; therefore always ignore downturns,” right up until the eleventh case is different.

There is an old trader’s joke that captures the danger: “The market can make a fool look like a genius longer than the fool deserves.”

Still, in ordinary life, we cannot wait for proof. At some point, accumulated evidence becomes enough to justify provisional trust. We choose doctors, friends, advisors, and habits that have earned confidence through repeated good outcomes—while trying to remember they remain probabilistic, not oracular.

A maxim in underwriting, since you mention it, is that the underwriter's job is to get the baseball over the base without the batter hitting it, not necessarily always but enough to win the game.

That is an excellent maxim—very realistic, and very anti-perfectionist.

What I like about it is that it captures probabilistic thinking without pretending certainty exists. The underwriter is not expected to be omniscient, only to perform well enough over repeated trials. You are not trying to eliminate all losses; if you did that, you would write no business. You are trying to price and select risk so that, over time, the portfolio wins more than it loses.

It sounds almost like a rebuke to how people think in politics and public discourse. We constantly evaluate decisions as if a single outcome proves wisdom or foolishness.

“The policy failed once—idiotic.”
“The investment paid off—genius.”
“The doctor lost the patient—bad doctor.”

But your underwriting metaphor says: no, judge the process across many innings. Was the strike zone sensible? Were probabilities understood? Was the risk managed? Over enough repetitions, competence should reveal itself statistically.

That ties neatly back to your earlier point about wisdom. A “wise” advisor, on this account, is not the one who is magically right every time. It is the one who gets the ball over the plate often enough, avoids catastrophic errors, adapts when conditions change, and wins over the long run.

There is also something psychologically healthy in that maxim. It leaves room for error without collapsing into despair or arrogance. Even a good underwriter gets hit sometimes. Even a wise person makes bad calls. Reality is noisy.

It reminds me of a line sometimes attributed to investing: “You do not have to be right all the time. You have to be right enough, and avoid being disastrously wrong.”

Your baseball image says the same thing, but more elegantly—and with a former underwriter’s dry realism behind it.