"There will no longer be any need for the sabbath, since human beings are their own creators in every respect."Before I proceed, let me explain, those are not Cardinal Ratzinger's words, they are a paraphrase of Ernst Bloch. Cardinal Ratzinger was not endorsing the thought, merely presenting it as part of his discussion of how confused we are about Creation. But, it got me to thinking...
Whether it's just that technology makes them more apparent or there are actually more of them, my personal observation is that there is an increasingly large number of atheists, agnostics, and human secularists in the world today. And my personal experience in talking with the ones I know has been interesting to say the least. But, one thing that seems to be common is that they seem to see scientific formulas as gods and fail to even be capable of asking the bigger questions like "Why am I here?", "What is the meaning of life?", or "Where did it all come from?" If a scientist can explain how a thing works, then science is all that matters. The lack of curiosity is strange to me. The inability to see or sense something beyond the physically observable seems decidedly shallow.
But the above statement got me to thinking. Is part of the problem that today we are so removed from nature, so innundated in human production we are slowly losing connections with the fact that there are natural sources that we can't reproduce?
I think about one of my friends, a very vocal atheist that has lived all his life in New York City. He's spent virtually every day of his life in the city, surrounded by skyscrapers, city streets, automobiles, man-made lakes, man-made parks, and while there are natural rivers in his everyday life, they are so polluted and filthy they certainly show more signs of man than of a nature that might spark wonderment.
And I think about the people I've known in my life that really have no sense where the food, fuel, and materials they use in their daily life come from. Eggs, milk and hamburger are found wrapped in plastic in refrigerators at the local grocery, electricity just appears when you need it, wood comes from big shelves at Home Depot. Cows? Chickens? Trees? Coal? Uranium? Oil?
Everyday science becomes better informed and able to explain how things work, they are seeking to explain some of the biggest mysteries of the physical universe and may soon achieve that. Between their ability to explain things that were previously mysterious and the way we progressively insulate ourselves from nature are we slowly convincing ourselves that we are creators and blinding ourselves to the deeper truths?
Are we slowly becoming foolish enough to believe that if we can explain something then we can truly create?
While I hear scientists saying they are close to understanding and explaining the basic building blocks of force and matter, what I don't hear any of them say is that once they understand how they work they will be able to create them. They can identify quarks, bosons, and other elementary particles. But I've yet to hear any of them say that once we identify and understand the Higgs boson we will be able to make them out of nothingness. And that's the narrow vision that the atheists I've spoke with seem to share.
They don't think about where the milk in their refrigerator came from, the cow on the farm, the grain that had to be fed to it, where that grain came from, etc., etc. they sort of just stop at the idea that there are man-made facilities where milk cartons are produced and shipped full of cool, white liquid that tastes good on cereal. Sure, some will recognize the milk came from a farm and from a cow, but they stop short of where did the matter come from? Where did the order and laws of nature that allowed the Universe, the solar system, the planet, then life to form come from? And if we can look around and recognize that this is a system of order, even pure evolutionists observe the evolution is not random, change occurs for a reason, for a purpose. But at some point they discard their own theory. If things evolve and happen for a purpose, didn't life happen for a purpose? Didn't we become sentient for a purpose? Don't we experience wonder and awe and artistic creativity and appreciation of true beauty for a purpose?
I suppose I'm getting a bit off track from my original thought. A thought based on the idea that so many people today are separated from nature. Don't experience the life and the world in any way that isn't directly tied to man's yoking of nature. Does being separated from nature and all it's wonders and mysteries, being surrounded by man's technology and altering of the Earth, does that deceive the human mind into thinking that Man is a Creator and make it harder to recognize the Truth that is God?
