Editorial May 5, 1986 Issue

Perpetual peace: the law of Life

CAROLYN B. SWAN

One may sit on the shore of a lake in rural eastern Oklahoma on a summer weekday and feel very much at peace. Perhaps, one might muse, this is because one is far from "civilization," with only peaceful signs of life all around. Sunlight flashes on a school of silver-scaled minnows darting through the shallow waters. Overhead, a hawk circles lazily. On the sandy beach, ants thriftily marshal crumbs left by weekend picnickers. And all this activity includes only the evidences of life readily visible!

Awe of the apparent harmony of natural life might well bring to mind the infinite harmony of supersensible divine Life, God, that Christian Science reveals. But nature's abundance, beauty, and cooperation give at best only faint and finite hints of divine creation. For nature doesn't always behave like the creation of a purely good God. In fact, nature often presents the very reverse of the peaceful, loving creation of divine Life, Love.

Divine creation includes no destructiveness, no evil. The allness of its creator—the one Mind, Spirit, good—precludes this. In nature, however, those organisms best adapted to existing conditions seem quickly to win out through advantage, domination, and destruction over those least adapted. The theory of the survival of the fittest—Darwin's proposition of natural selection—sums up the slow-motion effects of what the code of the jungle does in violent and accelerated ways.

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