It’s apparently going to be quite a day here on planet Earth. The kind of day that gets a guy’s mental juices flowing and inspires him to jot and tittle away in the old blog section. First I notice there’s to be another annual solar eclipse. This one will partially obscure the sun and create the illusion of a “ring of fire” in the sky around the Indian Ocean region.
I suppose it’s hard for some of us to imagine that given the pervasive influence of the internet and satellite TV, the advances in scientific knowledge and global education, that there are still millions of people, on this day, who will be quite unsettled and fearful when they observe such a natural phenomenon as a solar eclipse. Is that crazy or what?
On the other hand though, there are billions of people on this planet who would also contend that all they “know” about the world around them is a result of some cosmic happenstance that instigated an evolutionary process that brought about the whole universe coming into being. To me that sounds pretty far-fetched in and of itself.
Of course, you then have people like me who are quite comfortable and at peace with the concept that God created everything from nothing. I would firmly contend that all the stuff we think we “know” is only a partial understanding of anything that can be known and even the miniscule smattering of what we hold to be self-evident has come to mankind as a result of God having deemed it prudent to reveal particular aspects of His vastness and glory to humanity. On top of that, I would further argue that a majority of the things humans think they can fathom about how things operate in this old world are, at best, quite recent revelations. Even the best speculations on the part of anthropologists suggest mankind is a relatively recent occurrence when you factor in a “billions of years” equation essential to explaining (or exploiting) the evolutionary process. I just wonder, given all that technology has afforded us -- in now being able to see things and go to regions in the heavens above and the Earth below -- how is it that we never had an inkling about so much of this even a century ago? Doesn’t it make a sort of reasonable sense that God has perchance always known about all of these things, and they are all where they are for no other reason than God likes them this way? There. Now you can really talk about your nut-case notions.
Certainly we, of this information age, would no longer believe the same silliness that the people of ages past did, would we? In the “take these for instance” category, how about the notion of a flat earth (there are actually some intelligent individuals, people who can formulate thoughts and write books, who still believe this is true), or how could anyone still entertain a long prevailing notion that suggests man has never gone to the moon and the whole pretense of a space program is nothing more than a carefully crafted sham? Such a scurrilous suggestion remains quite alive and well and persists in being debated within various portions of the public forum. (I, as you may know, also work as a Mission Briefing Officer at the Space Center in Houston, Texas – and if you’d be inclined to simply take my word for it…the whole of the human space exploration program is quite real, thank you very much.)
Have you ever wondered where any, let alone all, of our whacky ideas originate? Well certainly there must be an explanation for how we come to arrive at the conclusions we’ve drawn, isn’t there? And I wonder if one man’s mania isn’t simply the substance for another man’s scorn and ridicule?
Essentially the question comes back to, what’s up with the aspect of abstract thought that allows for the human brain to ponder such perplexities? When in the overall scheme of evolutionary development did this thing pop up? Certainly you don’t find anything else, anywhere, like the Homo sapiens capacity for seeking to unravel the mysteries of the universe among living creatures. (And don’t think people haven’t been looking.) One of our NASA scientists shared how he, on more than one occasion, tried to get his cat to look through his telescope at home. It wasn’t long before it dawned on him that the cat was just not interested in the same things he was. To my knowledge, this cat has never taken the time to peer through the telescope…not even to try and locate a bird. (Although it should be said that the cat does indeed spend a lot of time unaccounted for during the day.)
You see, I can’t imagine how the first single-celled organisms, however they came into existence, were ever inspired to replicate themselves apart from the input of some element of abstract thought. If it wasn’t inherent to the SSO, then where did it come from? What told an amoeba (something humans didn’t even know what to name them until 1878) that being two amoebae is a good thing? At what point was that first fish inspired to take a shot at walking on dry land? And even as a desire to fly seems innate to humans, what impetus caused that first speculative idea that such a feat was even doable? Was this ultimately behind the original inclination the fish had to get out of the water in the first place?
Well friend, as you ponder these paradoxical precepts you’ll not just be utilizing that special gift you have for abstract thought, but as you begin embracing the validity of some ideas and then turn a thumb down on others…you’ll be engaging in another aspect totally unique to the human creature…it’s something called critical thinking.
And honestly, this is not at all, not even close actually, to what I had originally intended to write about today. I simply thought you might find it interesting to read that after decades of being firmly aligned with a non-denominational approach to Christian worship…today my wife and I are going to be joining a Baptist church. (Southern Baptist no less!) If you’re interested I’d be willing to go into more lengthy detail about how a decision like this came about in another blog entry. But for now suffice it to say I nearly blew a brain gasket coming to an alignment of critical thoughts that resulted in a monumental decision like this one…and yet, I did it!
Anyway, until next time, I remain ever yours regardlessly,
the old-man at the mike-ro-phone – sharing voices inside my head
P.S. I did scrap the other “@ the Rock Shop” show and am currently working on another one. Thanks for asking.
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