Nature is what science studies, but it is more and more difficult to encounter – as is the divine. Since we surround ourselves with engineered and virtual realities, it’s easier to unreflectively suppose that we have more power over nature than we do, and that we can even make reality.
What is true about the world that surrounds us? Does that reality tell us anything about what will make us find the happiness we desire? What should we do to be happy? The average guy on the internet doesn’t have the time to cross this widening gap between his career and reading mankind’s most important thoughts.
He rightly just trusts someone else, or goes based on his own experience. The answers that have lasted the test of time are worth studying. On this site, I try to make that gap between nature and those who have studied it, by exploring it, a little less daunting.
The darkness that poses a real threat to mankind, after all, is the fact that he can see and investigate tangible material things, but cannot see where the world is going or whence it comes, where our own life is going, what is good and what is evil. The darkness enshrouding God and obscuring values is the real threat to our existence and to the world in general. If God and moral values, the difference between good and evil, remain in darkness, then all other “lights”, that put such incredible technical feats within our reach, are not only progress but also dangers that put us and the world at risk. Today we can illuminate our cities so brightly that the stars of the sky are no longer visible. Is this not an image of the problems caused by our version of enlightenment? With regard to material things, our knowledge and our technical accomplishments are legion, but what reaches beyond, the things of God and the question of good, we can no longer identify. Faith, then, which reveals God’s light to us, is the true enlightenment, enabling God’s light to break into our world, opening our eyes to the true light. – Pope Benedict XVI 2012
