The Polarization

"It came, burning hot, to my mind, that whatever he said and however he flattered,
when he got me home to his abode, he would sell me for a slave"
John Bunyan - Pilgrim's Progress.

Remember the old saying, 'the operation was a success, but the patient is dead'?
It's something that rings so true when we begin to ponder the redundancy of the secular approach to life, especially the ideology which under girds this.

To state it simply, there's a dire price to be paid when humanity becomes content to merely soothe it's bruised ego rather than dragging it into the light. Harbouring such a criminal can only lead to a murdering of ourselves and our place amidst the 'vocal' message of creation. Such murder is evident everywhere, but the noise and fury of contemporary "Scientism" has granted it a new appeal....

"We are here because one odd group of creatures had a peculiar anatomy allowing transformation, because comets randomly struck the earth, extinguishing the dinosaurs, granting us mammals opportunity....We may yearn for a 'higher' answer, but none exists.
This explanation, troubling, if not terrifying, is truly exhilarating.
We cannot read the meaning of life into the facts of nature. We must construct answers for ourselves". Stephen Jay Gould - Life and the Meaning of Life).

If the Universe we observe truly leads us to conclude that our existence is merely a result of thousands of 'by chance' events, building one upon another to today, then the best we could hope for is a manufacturing of some purpose from within our own aims or goals, but is that really where all of our looking has reached? Are we merely the construction of an enormous series of cosmic flukes as many currently suggest?

The analysis we so commonly hear of the human condition is tragically poor, simply because it mis-construes the manner in which we 'look' at (define) the physical universe...

"You cannot go on 'explaining away', for you will only find you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things forever. The whole point of 'seeing through' something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden can be seen, because they are opaque. How would it be if you saw through the garden as well?
A wholly transparent world is actually an invisible world.
To 'see through' all things is not the same as to see". C S Lewis - The Abolition of Man).

The 'answers' currently being sought in certain fields of research, primarily constructed upon the theoretical assumptions of how the universe 'should be', are leading to a point of 'invisibility'; where all things are essentially divorced from a context of meaning or value beyond the merely functional, thus to equate significance to the universe or ourselves becomes pointless. The solution therefore becomes to 'find' value in the moment, the relative good or bad of what 'feels' right to the individual right now.

Is that all there is?

Humanity has been here many times before.

In the book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon looks upon us busy in such existence, and concluded that such life was entirely futile. Without a deeper meaning, the universe simply has no value.

The 'window' in us, looking out upon creation, looking in to the turbulence of our disquieted existence, sees something more substantial than the moment, more vital than merely fulfilling our immediate wants and needs. The philosophy of Scientism would tell us that such a perception of meaning is itself an illusion - that there is nothing more...but could this philosophy itself prove to me the ultimate version of delusion - a language that de-nudes of our true value as easily as the thieves flattered the fabled emperor's ego whilst actively stealing his wealth and status?

The 'garden' of a deeper reality still beckons us to look, to catch a glimpse of something far deeper than ourselves, which, when comprehended, makes every moment count.