Editorial May 21, 1979 Issue

Seeing through Science, not through the senses

Geoffrey J. Barratt

A literary reviewer selected this point from a book on human knowledge: "The faculty of sight, [the writer] asserts, is not objective but interpretive; what our eyes give us is an interpretation of what surrounds us, not the absolute reality thereof."^{Edmund Fuller's review of Jacob Bronowski's The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, in The Wall Street Journal, April 3, 1978:} Though questioning the reliability of the senses, Christian Science would go only some of the way in agreement with this view. The physical senses, Science says, give us a false interpretation of being. But Science goes on to show us what is the absolute reality of man and the cosmos. This reality becomes visible, not through the senses but through divine Science.

In discussing the Christianly scientific approach, Mary Baker Eddy reminds us that this is in accord with what Christ Jesus said plainly twenty centuries ago: "Science is absolute and final. It is revolutionary in its very nature; for it upsets all that is not upright. It annuls false evidence, and saith to the five material senses, 'Having eyes ye see not, and ears ye hear not; neither can you understand.'"^{Miscellaneous Writings, p. 99;}

Though the reality and concord of the universe are not clearly visible to the senses, when they are seen through Science they make a world of practical difference to our thought and to the texture of our life. The good that to the senses may seem obscure, remote, or nonexistent, Science says is immanent and provable reality. The Bible gives a very graphic metaphorical picture of the nature of this reality: "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox."^{Isa. 11:6, 7;}

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Editorial

Christ's compelling presence