I was thinking last night and this morning about a line Peter Kreeft once gave. He spoke about how sad we are in that in passages like Deuteronomy 4, which I read last night, and Deuteronomy 5, which I read this morning, that the people are told to not worship the sun, moon, and stars. Now Kreeft and I agree that we shouldn’t, but the sadness today is that we aren’t even tempted to.
As I thought about that last night I went out and looked out at the stars. I couldn’t see the moon from my patio but I saw the stars and thought, “It’s a distant point of light X number of light years away.” How sad indeed! While there have been blessings from the age of science, it seems we have made the worldview mechanical to the extent that we lose our wonder.
The largest mountain in our Solar System is on the planet Mars and is Olympus Mons. When I think about this mountain, I get a sense of awe and wonder. I sometimes wonder if mankind will ever climb to the top of that peak or not. I wonder what it would be like to get a view of the sun from Pluto. I wonder what is going on in that red spot of Jupiter. I wonder what it would be like to see the underground sea of Europa.
These things should give us wonder. It should amaze us so much that we are tempted to worship. I should look at the star and realize what it really is. It is a huge mass of gases that has constant activity going on, if that star is even there any more! For all I know, it could have died out billions of years ago and I just haven’t seen that yet.
We may know what the moon and sun are today, but why does it not amaze us that they are? Could we even rule out that they were deities? Now as a Christian, I don’t think that, but can we rule it out? “But the moon is a body of rock!” Who’s to say a god couldn’t have a body of rock? Who’s to say the way the sun appears to us is actually the body of a god?
Kreeft takes this to everything in life also. He says when he meets a man who doesn’t struggle with lust, he doesn’t envy him. He pities him. If you don’t struggle with lust, then that means that you’re not seeing the lady as a beautiful creature. When you see her, there should be some part of you that is at least tempted to sin. It takes self-control to not let your desires win out, but you should be tempted. Remember temptation isn’t a sin. It’s what you do with it that is.
Could it be our age of science has made men and women as mechanical as the universe?
Could it be in doing so, we’ve failed to see the grandeur of God?
How much farther an this go?
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