Saturday, November 13, 2004 ;
11:19:00 AM
"One man's 'magic' is another man's engineering. 'Supernatural' is a null word."
- Excerpt from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Robert Heinlein's "Time enough for Love"
We see products of engineering everyday - high-rise flats, composite buildings, elaborate structures coupled with the art of architecture. Man, being a creature of competition, always tries to do something better. Build a higher building, make a stronger materia,...the categories for excellence created by man could always go on. And ever so often we will marvel at the new products on the shelves: microchips that can act as your identification as well as process transactions, computers that can already simulate artificial intelligence, and so on.
As Christians, we all know that whatever we do, no matter how hard we try, we are still a far cry from what Our Creator has done. The tower of Babel comes to mind as an example. Man trying to reach God's level, but failing miserably. Is that what man seeks continuously to do? Looking around at the need for innovation and creation, it seems that the world has already been trying to so do for the last few centuries. What may have seemed impossible a few decades back is now commonplace, and the cycle will continue through the ages. Yet man can never reach up to God's level, not through the tower of Babel and definitely not through our HDB flats. Play God? Forget it.
We want to create something new, but have we ever considered that we live as the created? All we can do is recycle what we already have in this universe and mould it to our uses. Even Newton in his days knew that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it is only transferred from one form to another. But as the created, we continually try and play the creator, amazing ourselves with mere imitations of what God has already done. We 'create' fusion and fission, only to find out that it had been done at the beginning of the universe already. We 'make' Laws of Physics and Materials, but in truth all we did was notice that they existed; they were already made. (Newton actually claimed credit for things that aren't his!)
Yet all we can seem to strive for is to make something that seems new. Some may argue that new is relative, and therefore at Newton's time, the Three Laws of Motion could easily have caused a commotion in the intellectual circle. But relative to what? God is eternal - try doing something relative to that! Oh, and try we do. Backbreaking work in labs, hours on the writing-boards of theory, testing equations one after another after another to do the seemingly impossible. But compared to God's Mount Everest, our buildings seem both dead and puny. Everything we create is just a reproduction on a much smaller scale.
Have you seen the sunrise recently? Our creation of the world's largest man-made waterfall at Jurong Bird Park can barely hold a candle to the worst of sunrises. Can we create such a spectral array of colours using air moisture and atmospheric particles? Are we able to measure distances with such precision that our planet Earth revolves perfectly around the Sun, never more and never less? Yet it does. And even though you might not have seen it, a different sunrise comes up every morning, marking the day with rays of coloured light that pierce through the clouds.
Play God? I think not. If we tried, we'd struggle the rest of our tiny lives trying to reach it and like Babel, fail miserably. I'm sure He has better uses for our energy.
After all, He created it.
--ok those werent my words.. (obviously) haha.. but jonathan's.. he sent it to me and i like it so much so here it is! haha its really a great article my friend, dont always think only arts pple can write! you're the living "argument"! haha
every day is a new day ♥
