Today’s Scripture Reading [April 10, 2011]
And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. [Genesis 11:3-4. KJV]
The dependency for science and technology to solve our problems is now so prevalent that governments all over the world are turning to scientists to solve man’s problems. When man encounters drought, they turn to science for help by creating rain through this invention known as cloud seeding. It requires the use of massive chemicals like silver iodide and dry ice (a solid form of carbon dioxide). Because cloud seeding is done by dispersing chemical substances into the air, the most effective way to do this is to make use of airplanes – another modern science invention. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you that chemicals are harmful to both the environment and to the human lives. Silver iodide is no exception either. It is just as harmful. Many technical literatures have substantiated that not only cloud seeding fail to achieve the desired effect of creating rain, it also yields very harmful consequences which include rain suppression or deprivation (which, ironically, cloud seeding was meant to solve), flooding, tornadoes, and silver iodide toxicity.
In the newspaper yesterday, it has an article titled “Appetite for biofuel = more hunger?” This article addresses the concerns by many critics that using crops for fuel will lead to soaring food prices. Converting crops to fuel requires the use of the state of the art technology. Again, we don’t need a ‘rocket economist’ to tell us about its negative effect on food prices because simple basic economic principle will tell you that it will happen. The demand for crops like wheat, corn and sugar cane which are being used for biofuels will increase the demand of these crops and it will put a great pleasure on food prices. Corn and wheat are basic raw ingredients for making food stuffs like corn flour, cooking oil, and wheat flour. Sugar is almost a stable food stuff for everyone on earth. In addition to the biofuels’ negative effect on food prices which has responsible for 30 per cent increase in food prices in just over the 2 or 3 years, there are several other harmful consequences for using biofuels. For example: (a) it has been estimated that the amount of corn needed to fill one motor car petrol tank with oil could feed a person for an entire year and it will inevitable cause world-wide shortage of fodd and famine; and (b) using fossil fuels are less harmful to the environment than biofuels because burning down forests to create land for biofuel crops releases more carbon than just using fossil fuels.
We could all go on and on to list down all the modern inventions and their harmful effect. Indeed, it is quite an impossible task to list them all. Even though much of the technical literatures have substantiated some kind of harmful consequences on our over-dependency for science and technology to solve our problems which usually turns out to do more harm than good, it is going to become more prevalent. Governments and corporations all over the world are going all out to attract high caliber scientists and technologists to boost up the research for new process and in search for new products.The reason is simple: What choice do they have? Frankly, none. The world has now reached to the point of no return! Whether the multinational corporations break or succeed, especially those from the first world nations, will largely be dependent on how they capitalize on the use of science and technology to produce new products for their companies. The fate of our dependency on the knowledge of science and technology to solve our problems is already fully sealed at the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve, our First Parents decided to make their own decisions, to make their own rules, to determine what is right and what is wrong by themselves rather to let God make those decisions for them. Remember what the deceptive serpent, Satan, had told Eve “that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” Sadly, as descendants of our First Parents, we got more than what they had bargained and decided for us. Men are now playing gods, deciding what is good and what is evil by themselves and for themselves, rejecting the True God, and wanting to do what is right in our own eyes (Judges 17:6; Proverbs 21:2). Like Adam and Eve, we want freedom, freedom from God’s rule, freedom to do what we want. But alas! It is this freedom that brought us all into this tragic state of the creation because man simply couldn’t handle it without God’s guiding hand. As we all know, freedom and liberty in whatever form comes with a heavy price. Just go to some of the famous freedom speeches such as the freedom speeches by Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela, you will see these are not just simple political speeches but ‘bloody speeches’ in every true sense of the word. We see that these speeches were made with the motives to free people from the political or social bondage and of political and religious abuses, but in the process many lives were being sacrificed, all in the name of "Freedom." Right here in Singapore and for those who were born in the 1930s, 1940s or 1950s, they could well remember a Malay word “Merdeka” which means “freedom” or “to be independent.” The political rallies in the 1960s would never come to a close without the politicians bravely shouting” Merdeka! Merdeka! Merdeka!” What comes to the mind of the people like me when we heard of this word is something that no one would like to go through again. It reminds me of racial riots, of political unrest, of industrial unrest, of student unrest. It reminds me that in order to be free or to be independent, we need to pay a heavy price. This is what we are paying for right now and I am not talking about the fight for our independent or for our political freedom. I am referring to our struggle and our fight for freedom from God’s rule. We want to be free from God’s rule; to be completely independent; to seek science and technology for answers to our problems but we fail to understand that mankind’s problems are not of science or of technology. In the last 50 years or so, we have made so much progress in science but it all devoid of humanity. We have progressed so much on our understanding of acknowledge in just about everything, except God. All our understanding of knowledge truly lacks character. Our main problem is not of science but of our wickedness, our evilness. It is our deceitful heart that causes all our problems and it can never be solved by science nor technology. It can only be solved by God and God alone! We all are in need of spiritual-heart transplant. Our deceitful heart is bravely – albeit erroneous one – continuously shouting “Merdeka! Merdeka! Merdeka!” rising our fist not to gain any votes from the voters but to willingly submit to the will of Satan who is always whispering to us to be free from God’s rule.
The Tower of Babel that was built and later destroyed by God is a plain reminder that reaching heaven is beyond the means of human race. Since the construction of Tower of Babel, the construction industry has progressed so much that man could build towers higher than the highest hill in our country. In fact, the tallest building, Dubai Tower, is five times taller than Bukit Timah hill our tallest hill. Compared to Dubai Tower, this hill is just a piece of rock! Just like science and technology could not able to solve man's problem, creating or building the tallest building does not help to solve housing problems. Rather, it has only solved rich people’s problems and made them richer. We can see that multimillionaires all over the world have become rich because they are big time property owners or developers. We can see that many of the tallest buildings around the world were built by financial institutions like banks and insurance companies. Just like high rise buildings that have failed to solve man’s housing problems, the countless ‘newest’ electronic gadgets that we see them could not solve man’s various problems. Instead, many of these are creating the very problems that these gadgets are supposed to solve them. These newest products are in the market almost daily are created to generate revenue and profit for companies, nothing more, nothing less. For once, we should now ask the scientists which problems they have solved rather than giving them problems to solve because as we go through the list of solutions from science to solve our problems, we will soon discover to our dismay that these ‘solutions’ have created more problems than what they were intended to solve. For example, the antibiotics which was discovered 100 years ago is now causing bacteria to mutate to become drug-resistant bacteria known to scientists as superbugs which are deadly and incurable. Plastic which was invented more than 75 years ago has created massive problems in waste management. Ironically, one of the uses of plastic is to solve the problem of packaging by offering it as cheap and durable substitutes to other more environmental-friendly materials. Instead it is now creating one of man’s greatest dilemma in waste management. Just go to any beach and you can see that it is contaminated by discarded plastic cans, plastic bottles, plastic toys, plastic eye-glasses, plastic costume jewelries, plastic boats (broken one, of course). Plastic is one of the most toxic chemicals because extremely toxic smokes are released when plastic is being burnt. Furthermore, it takes 400 to 500 years to breakdown plastics in landfills, and while this process of breaking down of plastic to manageable microscopic molecular units is hardly taking place as plastic was just invented 75 years ago, the earth is being used continuously as a dummy ground for discarded plastic wastes. Million tons of plastic wastes are dumped into the landfill every year.
The above are just two of the countless examples to illustrate to us that to depend on science and technology in fixing our problems is just a wishing thinking. We must therefore go back to the very basics, right at the time when God created the First Man, and before the serpent tempted Adam and Eve to sin. God then saw His creation was very good (Genesis 1:31) because that was when His creation was free from sin. And when God created the First Man, there was a complete harmony among all God’s creations. The choice that the First Man chose to eat of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil has landed the First Man to possess all the knowledge but without character. Part of this knowledge of God’s creation soon evolved into something what is now known as science. There is really nothing wrong with this except that it has excluded the most crucial part - humanity. The plain truth (or the hard truth is you want to call it this way), it that science without humanity will bring destructions that are totally beyond man's comprehension. Perhaps the ultimate expression of science without humanity was the Manhattan project which saw the invention of nuclear bomb. The fruit of this Manhattan project led by a brilliant scientist, Robert Oppenheimer, culminated when two nuclear bombs were dropped into the island of Japan destroying thousands of lives, and at the same time seriously and permanently injured just as many others. Dispelling the warning by God that ‘for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die (Genesis 2:17)’ the First Man took the first and the last bite of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Not only did they die spiritually, they eventually die physically although God’s intention was for them to live forever and to enjoy the beauty of His splendor creation at the Garden of Eden. Just like the First Man, death is inevitable to all of us. We are all soon to die, and at the risk of being offensive to many people because of what I am going to tell you: We are all born to die. The first moment we came out from our mother’s womb, the surest thing that is going to happen to us is death. But we have great hope if we are to live our lives and to submit ourselves to God and to live according to His ways. One of the very purpose of our Living God, Lord Jesus to come to live as Man is to give us life abundance (John 10:10) but the problem is that the world is treating as if God is dead and hence many of us are living like spiritual zombies. As one famous German philosopher, Friedrich Netzsche, once commented “If God is dead, everything is permissible.” This is exactly what is happening in today’s world. Many of us live like as if God is dead and so everything is permissible. For many die hard violators of rules or laws, their principal way to live is simply this: "We can do anything and everything we like, so long we don't get caught!"
The bible prophecy on the use of science and technology that can be read in the book of Daniel (Daniel 12:4) which says: “But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” provides to us one of the best prophetic hints of that end times is approaching. Rather than trusting and putting our dependency on science and technology to solve our problems, all the knowledge and it’s applications to generate new things that we are seeing today are pointing to us to the signs of our Lord’s coming. We are all going to hear more and more of these inventions, and many of these are going to frighten us to death, quite literally. The new invention of genetically-modified food could end us all eating dead corpse that could be genetically program to become ‘edible meat!” I pray that I will not see this in my life’s time. Each time as we look upward towards the skyscrapers, we must be reminded of the Tower of Babel that no matter how great our construction technology can be, we can never reach the heavenly dwelling by our own hands, by bricks and mortar. We can only achieve this by the blood of Jesus; only by our complete dependency on the finished work of Christ on the cross; only by obeying His words; and only by our daily acknowledging that we are sinners and desperately in need of His forgiveness that we can finally be restored to His image, His likeness that God has intended for us when He created man (Genesis 2:26).
