EXPLAINING HOW LIFE WORKS - DISTANT HISTORY

Human beings are born with a need to understand things, it's how we learn and how we teach - just try to teach something that you really don't understand! In explaining things that are difficult to grasp, we have a long history of using what we do sort of know to explain what we really don't quite understand.

There are other ways to look at this, but one possible view of human history is that we see Nature in the terms that make the most sense at a given time. Older societies, people without the technology to strongly affect their surroundings, saw their world in terms of the things with Power: Nature Spirits, with motivations one might guess natural processes to have if they were somewhat human, but also with the limitations that come from existing as wind, or forests, or the sun above. Later, as humans gained more ability to manipulate their own environment, as power over Nature became something in their grasp, the forces of Nature as they perceived it became much more human, in form and personality, although much more powerful - the human-like gods controlled those larger aspects of the world the same way that humans controlled the small aspects of theirs, and animal-based spirits became more human and less powerful. Today, the idea of control-from-above has slipped out of the realm of just explaining external Nature and has become more concerned with Human Nature, with those aspects of Life and Afterlife that still seem unexplainable, and the forces are less human and more like the forces of Consciousness itself. Meanwhile, centuries of small successes in explaining this or that piece of the Big Nature Puzzle have moved humanity, or a sizable fraction of it, from seeing Nature as something that can not really be understood, that must be explained in supernatural terms, to the conviction that it all can be broken down into tiny graspable bits, and all of the workings can be analyzed. We like the feeling that this has moved us somehow closer to the Truth, and scientists probably feel some of the same sense of Specialness that used to be the province of priests, of being more In-The-Know than the rest. But are we really any closer to some knowable Truth?