Is the world beginning to seek out more transcendent truths and realities?

Daring to make a prediction, I expect, perhaps quite soon, in the twenty-first century, a radical turning away from the Weltanschauung marked principally by biology, and this wil result from a newly acquired historical consciousness. Instead of presenting man through those traits that link him to higher forms of the evolutionary chain, other of his aspects will be stressed: the exceptionality, strangeness, and loneliness of that creature mysterious to itself, a being increasingly transcending its own limits.

  - Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry

Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.

  - Proverbs 26:5

Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz was widely regarded as the greatest poet of his generation when he died in 2004. He was loved and read from Berkeley to Warsaw and he continues to be appreciated all over the world. His poetry is filled with spiritual and Christian sentiments, even as he recounts and contemplates some of the most brutal events of 20th century history.

Milosz believed he saw a turn beginning in people's souls. No longer satisfied with thinking about themselves as mere animals, captive to the whims of chance, time, and genes, people were starting to rediscover transcendence and to think about God all over again. We heard that in Czech hero Vaclav Havel, who, though not a Christian, believed that something or someone presides over us. We heard it recently in David Attenborough, who expressed the idea that there might be a God after all. Recent Hollywood films ponder the meaning of life in a more transcendent mode.

People are thinking about these questions, and the rants of the apologists for atheism are only serving to make more people wonder what these folks are so angry about.

All major paradigm shifts need a little help from their friends. Milosz believed that poetry - exiled to the wastelands of the 20th century - could help to provide a new vocabulary and a new vision for a new version of what it means to be human. Given the plaudits heaped upon his own poetry, even by secular admirers, he may well have been right.

But that simply begs the question of what about you and me? What is our role in helping to tip the balances away from a merely materialistic, "under the sun" view of human life to a more "under the heavens" and traditional view? If we begin talking more openly about the things we profess to believe - in the world of unseen beings, that we are made in the image of God, that Christ is reconciling the world to God, and so forth - the mere frequency and unflappability of our conversation may cause many to rethink their wornout worldview and begin exploring something new.

In particular, what does this mean for Christians working in the sciences? What should we be doing to bring the reality of our Christian worldview more prominently into this strongest redoubt of secular and materialistic thinking?

Was Milosz right? Is the world beginning to seek out more transcendent truths and realities?

We don't have to wait around to find out. Each of us must consider what we can do - by our words and deeds - to impress the reality of the Christian worldview on the people we see each day. Perhaps we will be able to speak to the loneliness and satisfy the sense of mystery of at least some of our co-laborers and friends.

Be sure to visit our website and learn how intuition fits into the knowing process, or to consider whether or not we should be able to take a morality pill to improve our behavior.

T. M. Moore

Senior Theologian and Historian