The mark of the firm scientific person is to live and believe by verifiable evidence, holding a healthy skepticism about life meaning. Healthy skepticism creates motivation for further investigation, and gives the seeker an appropriate humility in what he/she communicates. The skepticism about all else is not always held in healthy context, but that issue is for another Page. We stay for now seeking right and constructive context for all persons. The point, to live by the evidence, suggests sound evaluation criteria, offering objectivity and fairness, providing margins to contain the results of the search for truth as base for progress in investigating the material world. All implications are that truth (reality) is salutary to life.
The strength/weakness in the system is the general belief that there is no alternative, no other reality that runs with it. Even further, that there may be a system that makes the element (science) into a compound (a combination of science and beyond-science element). The element oxygen (gas) united with the element hydrogen (gas) makes a compound of water (liquid). For example: alcoholism can be evaluated in scientific terms as to what it is in a living body, and science declares it to be an illness, something contrary to health. Christianity reviews alcoholism, in the context that it may discuss the matter and evaluate it to discover it is a sin – known or unknown. There is no barrier for either the Christian or the scientist to deny it may be both, or to identify it as, in some instances an illness, in others as sin, and in others both illness and sin. In my counseling with persons, and evaluating their situations, I have not the slightest doubt that it may be one, or the other, or both. It is, in the sense adopted here, a compound of a violation of the health found in common grace (an illness), and the violation of righteousness (right conduct), found in divine grace. This latter is sin. Many alcoholics need the ministration (medical) for mankind and the ministration (spiritual) of God if they are to recover. Perhaps the use of approved medical drugs may seem more attractive in analogy. A drug may be useful as means for treating an illness, but, in some omission, becomes a loss, and solutions evasive. A person may need both a physician and a minister.
Jesus used, as his modus operandi, a combination of the ministration to spiritual and health issues. Is it easier to heal persons (natural) or have authority to order them to rise and walk (miracle)? The first acknowledges the grace of healing, the second the grace of spiritual resource. The combination suggests a wholeness that is missed unless fact and faith join to holistic healing. Scripture casts spiritual redemption as a process of spiritual healing. If this is not attended there will be expected spiritual death – as in the event of physical illness the end is physical death. Mankind does not live by verifiable sciences alone. For example: there are many studies that show premarital living together is, on average, a negative context. Hook-up does not make a marriage, and is poor context for children. It tries to make an intimate friendship into a common-law marriage, where family history collapses. These couples may even marry, but divorce more commonly than those who follow history’s best traditions. Those who live together, and do not marry, simply break away, sometimes in serial fashion, without making it to the statistics. Yet with all the evidence, couples are living together in greater numbers than ever before. (In 2010 the number was published that nine million couples were living together without marriage in America. Further, the evidence shows what is necessary to rear children effectively in a home, but the quality of parenting in the close of the 20th century was so poor that even humanistic evaluators were deploring the disorder with dire consequences for future generations for various factors.) Questions at this writing relate to declines in moral education. It has been discovered that, in some important contexts, previous generations may have fared better than the present in the day-by-day business of life and society. One is left with a feeling that formal education is doing well for professions, less so for life. Society stumbles along. Time is now given to the attractions of entertainments, casual living, reduced values, limp or exotic religions, secularism, and the like. Aspiration for life in improved conducts, larger beliefs, human/spiritual courage, and the like have been muted. Some amendments are needed to cultivate the good life. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020