Consider how much of our conversation these days involves confidence that we can predict the future. This was particularly manifest in the run up to the election. “Can’t you see that if X is elected Y will happen?!”

Much of social media and YouTube content expresses certainty that we know what’s coming. Warnings of rising seas, rising taxes, collapse of central banks and the stock market, the next pandemic, inflation, the next golden age, etc. — all in the future.

We all have an “algorithm,” a worldview, a frame, a paradigm, a way of sorting data to come to conclusions. Its job is to 1) filter and make sense of everything we encounter, and 2) provide a basis for decision-making and action. Since we decide with a desired future in mind, the test of a sound paradigm is its ability to predict the future well enough.

I recently hired a person to install a new furnace. I visualized having heat again in 2 days and saving lots of money by not using one of the bigger companies that have huge overhead. That future did not materialize.

What went wrong, why didn’t I get the future I saw so clearly in my imagination? How could I have been so stupid, naive, etc? Do I need to tweak my paradigm? Was this a “glitch or a feature,” as they say?

Burns’ wonderful poem “To a Mouse” ends with this philosophical conclusion: “…the best laid plans of mice and men go oft awry.” [English translation]. It’s basically a shrug. “That’s life”. “You do your best and make your plans, but you can’t be expected to get it right all the time.”

Is it better just not to plan at all? Live in the moment? Take it as it comes? But isn’t that too a plan of sorts based on a vision of the future? “I prefer a future in which I do not make specific plans, I go with the flow and take what comes. After all, whadayagonna do?!”

One of the benefits of not planning or imagining a desired future is that you are never wrong. For some people that is very important.

I used to have more confidence in my paradigm than I do now. I’ve been tinkering with it for over 60 years. It served me well in the small to medium things of life, but it failed me monumentally in the thing that was most important to me, what I wanted most of all, and never doubted I would surely get. I’m still in recovery from that and probably will be for the rest of my life. Perhaps that’s the purpose of life

Some wise men, like Rene Girard, think that such a paradigm failure is essential to our salvation. It does not guarantee we will be saved — one can always rationalize, blame others, “curse God and die”, collapse into self-pity and passivity — but at least these total system failures create the possibility for salvation. Before I was afflicted, I went astray. Ps 119:67

As the good book almost says, “How hard it is for a man whose paradigm has never failed to enter the Kingdom of God.”

The future? Well, I don’t know a lot more than I do, and the former is more important. I’m learning to listen more and to say with increasing peace, “… but of course I could be wrong.”

Is that a lack of faith? I don’t think so. It’s a different kind of faith.