For a few days now the alarm panel in my home has been telling me the smoke detector had a low battery, only problem was I did not know which smoke alarm. Well, the smoke alarm in question decided to tell me about 4 this morning. Changing the battery turned out to be a far more complicated operation than one might anticipate, involving special resets at the sensor and the panel – a most difficult task when 1) you’d never done it before and 2) you are very groggy because it is 4AM. But then who can sleep with that incessant chirping from the sensor? It was easy to curse the complexity of the whole operation, but as the grogginess cleared and my brain engaged, I came to understand why the engineers had designed it as they had. And that got me thinking about a lot of things.

Science came to be to figure out how the world works. Engineering came to be to put that understanding to concrete use. But it was all within the constraints of how life, the universe and everything presented itself to us. We weren’t so much trying to build the world to our liking as we were trying to use the world as it is to our purposes. But somewhere along the line (I think when we fooled ourselves into thinking we had tamed the fundamental forces of nature with the atomic age) we have changed our approach and are no longer trying to use the world as it is, but to build what we think is a better world. Rather than figure out how the creator made this thing to work, we just want it to work in the way that is easiest for us.

I think this change in approach accounts for so much that seems to be wrong today. Yesterday we looked at how California keeps spending money it does not have in a fashion that only increases its deficit, as if the money can simply appear from thin air. We hire people to do things and put them into universities based on factors that simply do not indicate their capabilities. We think people that fundamentally wish to destroy other people are reasonable. We think we can control disease. We think EVs a transportation panacea when their utility is severely restricted by fundamental technological shortcomings. We think wishes will come true if we just wish hard enough.

Psalm 24:

The earth is the Lord’s, and all it contains,
The world, and those who dwell in it.
For He has founded it upon the seas
And established it upon the rivers.

This is not our world to make, it is simply the world we live in. We have to figure out how it works and live within those parameters. And that is what church is about. Science learns and teaches how the world works, church learns and teaches how we work in that world. As there are limitations to how the world works, so there are limitations to how we work. It is a good thing to learn those limitations – it is a good thing to go to church.

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