The magic and wonder of Christmas time seems surreal at times as if one has stepped out of reality and into a world that exist for only a few glorious days. The house is perfectly clean and wonderfully decorated in full Christmas splendor. The shopping malls and neighborhoods are winter wonderlands. Joyful melodies float across the radio waves and fragrant winter scents of apple cinnamon and ever green trees tantalize the senses. Even more, people’s hearts are filled with merriment and the joy of giving. Bright colored packages are exchanged and time stops for just a moment on Christmas day giving the illusion that all concerns of life are suspended and nothing matters except this wondrous atmosphere of Christmas.
Some may think that all of this is merely an illusion life grants us for a short period of reprieve each year. However, what if instead of seeing it as an escape from reality, we see it as the first time we really stop to taste reality each year? What if all this creative wonder and spirit of joy is not an illusion, but a taste of something we ought to be enjoying all year. What if our lives are consumed with an illusion of reality, and Christmas is the time where we allow ourselves to stop and smell the roses?
Why is there so much faith put into science? Why the certainty of factuality when it comes to what is considered scientific? Science does not tell us how life originated. It doesn’t tell us why life originated or give us insight into our purpose.Science can tell us that if I put strychnine in a well the water will kill those who drink it. But it doesn’t tell us if it is wrong to kill.
G. K. Chesterton quips “Nobody can imagine how nothing turned into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else.”
I do appreciate science. I think we are motivated by God given curiosity and desire for knowledge to search out the hidden things with our microscopes, telescopes and other instrumentation.We want to know. We need to know. But why? Science cannot answer that.Notwithstanding, so many have such an unwavering faith in science when it tells us so little about who we are and why we are.Science can give us a complete composite of our biological make up and that is outstanding progress. It can get into the molecular level and tell us so much and give us ways to repair bodies.It can help us explore the oceans, plants, animals, and universe. The scientific advances are astounding wonders of exploration.
When I was watching Dawkins and Lennox debate, Dawkins said that the beauty of creation compels us to want to worship something greater and he said that science can show us how things came to be this way dismantling the desire for worship.Science can break down things and show how they work, but it fails to explain why nature should be so picturesque. It doesn’t explain why our hearts fill with wonder at a sun rise over the ocean or a rainbow over a field of flowers. It doesn’t explain what happens in our soul when we take in this grandeur of the universe. Can it be that it is precisely this wonder that so captures our soul that launched the sciences in the first place?Why now does science in some schools of thought destroy the need for wonder?
Science is an awesome tool for exploring life, but it isn’t THE tool to knowing about life. It falls short in many areas of answering the great questions most of us think about. Some say there is no meaning to life and yet they thought about the meaning of life enough to write about it acknowledging a need for meaning that prompted the negative answer to the question.The great thinkers like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, and Kierkegaard, etc. explored these questions of life. What drove their exploration? There is something in us that cries for answers and accepting defeat to our questions does not make logical sense. If that desire is in us then there is a reason for it. If we haven’t found the reason we can’t give up by denying the question.
The magic and wonder of Christmas time seems surreal at times as if one has stepped out of reality and into a world that exist for only a few glorious days. The house is perfectly clean and wonderfully decorated in full Christmas splendor. The shopping malls and neighborhoods are winter wonderlands. Joyful melodies float across the radio waves and fragrant winter scents of apple cinnamon and ever green trees tantalize the senses. Even more, people’s hearts are filled with merriment and the joy of giving. Bright colored packages are exchanged and time stops for just a moment on Christmas day giving the illusion that all concerns of life are suspended and nothing matters except this wondrous atmosphere of Christmas.
