Australian comedian, musician, and Atheist, Tim Minchin, said in a valedictory address in 2013, “Searching for meaning is like searching for rhyme in a cookbook, you won’t find it and it will bugger up your soufflé.” The biblical book of Ecclesiastes agrees. The grand plan of secular society to create an enlarged meaning in our achievements, wealth, pleasures, and reasoning is all subject to frustration and contradiction. Our strengths have proven to have an annoying habit of becoming our weaknesses, our greatest accomplishments and discoveries morph to somehow also become our greatest threats. In an age of AI, factlessness, deep fakes, human-made climate change, hyper-diversity with rising social division, hyper communication with cynical manipulation, wars, and hybrid wars, we can learn a great deal from the disillusioning wisdom of Ecclesiastes. After all, this negative wisdom was given to us to teach us how to live with uncertainty. It turns out that is increasingly the world we are in.

Our teaching series on Ecclesiastes starts 28/9 with Dr. Lindsay Wilson.