The rugs are being pulled from under our intellectual/spiritual feet. Our distant forefathers appear to have believed in a context of nature. If nature was pleasant and the hunting good, then whatever gods there may be were gracious. If negative there was deep disappointment in life, and punishment followed in nature’s turmoil. Combinations of explanations were odd and fanciful, as the surviving concepts and practices of primordial man continue in parts of the world today. In all this, God appears to have been gracious. In one of his sermons the Apostle Paul referred to invented devices, and asserted: The times of this ignorance God winked at – Acts 17:30 (KJV). Then followed belief in God and gods, beliefs related to forms of worship and human life characteristics (including genders, races and physical substance), except for the monotheists who related one God to morality, even to perfection (holiness), and ordered theology (sacred philosophy was born – pursued to the present). A nation (Israel) felt called of God to communicate and live in the meaning of righteousness adapting practices known to them (like blood sacrifices) so to gain a faith that would be coherent to human culture needing sacrifice for acceptance of God in nature, and with a promised Messiah to complete the meaning of the procedures. Jesus Christ fulfilled the prophetic expectation, so ending the sacrifice of animals in the innocent God/Person verifying himself in miracle and a coherent faith related to morality (values), emanating from God’s nature, love, truth, power, life and promises for life in mortality and immortality so to address despair (death) into hope (immortality).
In the passing of the centuries there gradually emerged a natural faith for the future, dubbed science for a name. In this science the hope was transferred to progress, giving increasing force to the visible (nature), and diminishing the unseen (spiritual). Mankind was seen as limited to nature, mankind’s beginning, and the only hope for the future was to make the most of progress, which concept was applied to everything physical (nature) and humanly spiritual (art). The secret was to find the laws of nature and find ways of using them for the good life, with the side assumption that the evil (negatives) would decline. That belief, commonly known as Social Darwinism reached a zenith just before World War I, and began to decline in the light of the horrors that physical progress had provided, later accented by a world depression, and another World War in which two bombs killed more persons than the experimenters imagined, and that iced with a holocaust.. But the people held on until, as we are discovering in the new millennium, there isn’t as much in science as we may have hoped. The burden of science is too complex for scientists to unravel.
The literature is beginning to warn the public about the uncertainties of current knowledge. Even the scientific processes (the best humankind has found for managing nature) are coming into question. Recent publications on nutrition have come into question because the research has been too casually planned; the results spread over a number of elusive possibilities; the human body may be aided in one procedure and damaged in its context; and, the unknowns are so great that to solve one problem may introduce another. The complexity of it all in the ranges of the various factors may indicate that there must be new research introduced. The sizes of the populations, variance in the factors, shifting of nature’s factors, uncertainties of individuals in beliefs and applications are all playing a part to undo the hard work of many scholars. The rise of new diseases, unknown before, adds still another barrier. Flu strains are now being numbered as they appear. Even as this is being written, a new disease has been introduced by one person in America, a person having traveled through the Middle East where the disease has been identified in fewer than 100 persons, but holds threat to the health of a nation unless it can be isolated in some way. Scripture is highly supportive of learning and truth. One of the first commandments to mankind was to learn. This is carried through in biblical counsel, but with warnings here and there in the narrative that nature’s learnings are no substitute for spiritual life learning. We might also say that religiosity is no substitute for learning in nature. It is not a matter of either/or but both/and. If they are joined both benefit for here and hereafter. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020