** Divine wisdom vs Human Wisdom **
"And when he contemplates it thoughtfully, he will realize that the One who created it by His will is infinite in power, wisdom and greatness" - Shaar Bechina ch.5
The distinction between human wisdom and divine wisdom is as follows. A human-engineered contraption can be fully understood by us. We can trace it back, study it, reverse-engineer it and eventually understand it fully. No questions remain. The divine wisdom, however, is bottomless. It can never be fully understood by us. Sure, we can delve into it and study it deeper and deeper, but every door we unlock will reveal new locked doors. It is a bottomless wisdom. The more we know, the more we realize just how much more there is to know. Physicists for example had a noble quest to probe the atom, hoping to unlock the nature of reality. They thought they could reach an end, a final understanding. But the more they probed the more exotic the particles they discovered, and the more elusive and distant were they from an understanding of reality. The laws of physics become increasingly strange, the mathematical wisdom increasingly deep. Until just the opposite happened - the mystery only grew. The same can be said for the cell. New discoveries about the cell's incredible machinery continue to mount [1]. Despite all of our research, our knowledge of how the cell works is merely a tiny drop in the ocean and even less than this. For it is of a different "kind" of wisdom than ours - an infinite, bottomless wisdom."And when he contemplates it thoughtfully, he will realize that the One who created it by His will is infinite in power, wisdom and greatness" - Shaar Bechina ch.5
The Ramchal writes in "the Knowing Heart" (section 54):
You should know that all of G-d's works are awesome, infinitely broad and deep. This is [the meaning of] "how great are Your works O, G-d" (Ps. 92:6). The least of His works contains such degree of wisdom, in quantity and depth, that it is impossible for us to ever fully grasp it. This is [the meaning of the second half of the verse:] "Your thoughts are exceedingly deep" (ibid). We can only grasp the superficial surface of the works of G-d...Likewise, the Rambam wrote:
When a person contemplates G-d's great and wondrous deeds and creations, and he observes through them His infinite wisdom which surpasses all comparison, he will immediately love, praise, and glorify Him, yearn with tremendous desire to know [G-d's] great name, as David stated: "My soul thirsts for the L-rd, for the living G-d" [Psalms 42:3].
When he [continues] to reflect on these matters, he will immediately recoil in awe and fear, knowing how he is a tiny, lowly, and dark creature, standing with his flimsy, limited, wisdom before He who is of perfect knowledge, as David stated: "When I see Your heavens, the work of Your fingers... [I wonder] what is man that You should recall Him" [Psalms 8:4-5]. (Mishne Torah, Yesodei Torah ch.2)
>> Next: the Nature of Reality
Footnotes