The Knowledge of the Glory

Ray Bradbury. Photo by Alan Light.

It didn’t take me long to find an example.

Over the years I had noticed a great deal of hubris among sci-fi authors. I needed an example for this blog, and found it in the first book I cracked open.

In his introduction to Science Fact/Fiction, (Scott, Foresman, and Co., 1974) Ray Bradbury, a brilliant Sci-Fi author, crowed that we in the United States were a nation of blasphemers, “measuring not only how things were, but how they ought to be…if death and disease got in our way, we raised medicine up to its greatest disciplines in the history of the entire world and chopped death down and cured disease and invented pain killers.”

Sorry, Ray. Last time I looked, death was still chopping us down, not the other way around. Many of the men who struck the first strong blows against pain and disease were European, not American. Several, such as Joseph Lister, were humble Christians. I document 36 others at length in my book Doctors Who Followed Christ, with thumbnail sketches of dozens more.

Not a scientist, doctor, or science fiction writer alive has anything to boast about. Not one chose his or her own genes. Not one had a word to say about what era they would be born in. Not one even had a say whether to be born or not. Furthermore, all owe a debt to the inventors, and manufacturers, explorers, scientists and teachers who came before them. Marcus Aurelius, honoring his mentors in the first paragraphs of his Meditations, showed a greater wisdom than any boaster with millennia of discovery and technology behind him or her. A similar thought caused St. Paul, dealing with the boasters of Corinth to ask, “What do you have that you did not receive?”

By all means tackle the problems of mankind with gusto and verve. But let it be done with a humble recognition that we are all contingent beings, whose bodies break down and whose minds will ultimately fail. Let us show some respect for those who mentored us, to the God who created us.

The truth is, unless we are among those blessed few whom Christ will catch heavenward at his second coming, death will chop us down, too, however great our achievements.