MtM 46 - When sparks fly

Prometheus is more than a movie blockbuster. In Greek mythology he was the crafty Titan credited with stealing Zeus’ fire for the benefit of humanity and thus enabling the progress of civilization. The power of fire was again stolen from nature’s vault, when James Watt made the first sparks fly from his steam engine, launching the Industrial Revolution. With the harnessing of electricity, carbohydrates and atoms, man’s hegemony grew hand-in-hand with his hubris – the extreme pride of being master of the planet. We have stolen from the gods not only fire, but the right to determine life through the use of reason, as if the origin of human intelligence was a tribute to our species. In the last two centuries – really just a blip in time – progress has been astonishing. Science and technology seem to guarantee boundless, unchallenged dominion over mankind’s reach. Reason appears to bend nature according to man’s every wish and command.

An exalted man has proclaimed supremacy over nature, celebrating self-sufficiency and the fulfillment of his plans, as if he breathed life into his own existence. Convinced of this mastery, man walks the earth proud of his ideas, whilst disregarding the mysteries of his own genesis. Man has become the measure of his surroundings and the source of the ethics implicit in his actions. The more this mindset spreads, the deeper God disappears, shunned as irrelevant. Secularism is the notion that man belongs to himself and to no one else. It is the presumption of total autonomy of destiny. An assertive and creative individual has no time to waste thinking about a God he cannot see. Pressed by burning desires, man is preoccupied and God is rendered pointless, if not a nuisance bounding people with meaningless covenants and commandments. Modern civilization doesn’t openly profess atheism, but to all effects this is the present reality.

Wrestling with the meaning of life, Einstein deeply wished for man to transcend individuality and experience the impenetrable mysteries of the universe that inspired his thinking. His rational mind appreciated that the universe, and the laws governing it, couldn’t simply be the product of chance. There are impossible probabilities for Chaos to flow seamlessly from the Big Bang to “you and me” without design. What this design might be is entirely a different story, though man stands in awe before the wonders that surround him, from galaxies and sunshine to flowers and babies. After launching machine into space – until recently the domain of celestial beings – man is convinced of being the centre of it all. He refuses to believe what he cannot see and this leaves him with an emptiness science alone cannot suitably fill. Dostoyevsky wrote, “The whole law of human existence lies in this, that man be able to bow down before the infinitely great.”