Did you know that “neuro-physiologists at the University of Stuttgart have uncovered a connection between jogging and reduced intelligence. They tested more than 1200 people over a period of five years, and found that as the number of hours people jogged increased, there was a corresponding decrease in their intelligence. They don’t know exactly why but there it is.”

Did you also know that a Harvard study recently revealed that “a normal diet supplemented by chocolate eclairs, eaten six times a day, is the best [way to lose weight]. It seems that there’s some special nutrient in the eclairs — encomial dioxin — that actually uses up calories at an incredible rate.”

Fascinating, to be sure—but what, you may ask, does this have to do with prudence?  Well, as Proverbs told us yesterday, “[t]he simple believes everything, but the prudent gives thought to his steps.” 

Did you believe the claims about jogging and eclairs?  Were you ready to give up exercise and change your diet?  Well, that wouldn’t be prudent, because you would not have “given thought to your steps.”  Neil Postman used these two examples with his work colleagues to show they’d believe just about anything.  And he attributes this imprudent gullibility, not to their lack of intelligence, but by observing that in modern times, “in a world without spiritual or intellectual order, nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise.”

It is akin to Chesterton’s observation that “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

Everybody knows that sitting on the couch and eating eclairs won’t make us healthier or smarter.  Prudence dictates that we give thought to those claims before accepting them and acting on them.  But without the God-ordained order to the world, everything is believable, and prudence is impossible.  I wonder, how do you decide what to believe?