Complicated Explanations

The most profound quote I heard this week was from my stage lighting teacher. He's an old guy who has clearly done theater for his entire life, stagecraft and lighting and all that drudgery. "I remember working 62 hour days." Technical theater indeed.
But he was going over some terminology in class and had this to say:
"When you don't really understand something, you can only explain it in complicated ways."

That is to say, when you really understand something, you can explain it easily, and could write the Simple Wikipedia article about it. But when you don't understand something and someone asks you to explain it, you find yourself BSing some sort of answer that sounds like you know what you're talking about.
Example, I could probably explain calculus to a middle school student, because everything I've done in school for 4 years has been based on calculus. I could not, however, explain to you Spanish grammar. I could probably fake it because i long ago studied latin, but I really know nothing about spanish.

This observation is important to me because it really makes sense of so many "complicated" things in the world.
Economics, politics, theology, non-newtonian physics, the history of ancient cultures, global warming, global hunger, the weather. These things appear very complicated. There are all sorts of scientists dedicated to studying them, writing textbooks about them, debating the importance of different theories.
But the bottom line is, no one really knows how the economy works.
And that is dangerous for two reasons: One, lots of people have successfully convinced politicians that they do, in fact, know how the economy works. And Two, because of this, people/government try to control the economy based on their inaccurate models that don't really work. But this regulation is complicated because that is the only way people know how to explain the economy. The result is things like housing bubbles, debt crises, and inflation.

How about theology?
There are disgustingly long books written about theology. You can devote your entire life to just studying a single religion, and you would never even know what the guy down the street believes. Theology is complicated because it is invented by people to describe things that we don't actually understand. Think about the Romans. They had hundreds of gods, all responsible for little things in daily life, and the result was a ridiculously complicated set of social observances to make sure you didn't offend any deity.


Now, there is nothing wrong with studying complicated things. But I believe that there are far too many people out there who talk like they know more than they do. 
As an engineering student, I am surrounded by other students who think they understand how transistors work, but really, no one knows for sure why electrons behave the way they do.

This is one of the coolest things about Jesus. He said simple things. Short sentences. Little stories. Because He actually understood what was going on, so He could put it in simple terms. And christians have been complicating it ever since.