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Science and Christian Healing.
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54
In Eratosthenes' case the absurdity contradicted the then universally experienced notion that the earth is flat, which was disproved by the power of the intellect, so that the true shape of the earth was not perceived but could also be accurately calculated according to the newly discovered truth. And this he did with an astounding accuracy 2,200 years before the shape of the earth would be fully seen by the physical eye.
Lyndon LaRouche writes about Eratosthenes' journey of the mind into the deeper aspects of truth, that is typical of the human approach to the unknown. He writes, "What did we measure? We did not measure what we saw. We measured an error in our observations, the difference between two angles. So we created the idea of curvature we had never seen..." Lyndon LaRouche states that two things can be learned from all this. "First of all, that knowledge is not based on experience. Knowledge is based in discovering the absurdities in our opinions about our experience. Science is based on those kinds of ideas which pertain to what we have not seen, but which we can then demonstrate to increase man's power over nature."*(Fidelio, Fall 1995, p.13)
Mary Baker Eddy was faced with an even greater absurdity to resolve than that which Eratosthenes had faced. Her own momentous healing that came about literally at an instant of time, at a moment of great need, contradicted all accepted experiences relating to God and man. The common knowledge had defined a God the was remote, and man as fundamentally at the mercy of material realities and left to his own devices, which gap prayer was supposed to bridge but hardly ever did. Then, all of a sudden, with the momentous effect of her healing a totally different reality came to light. The difference of this reality to the accepted knowledge, pointed to a vast void in man's knowledge about the nature of God and the nature of man. She concluded that this lack of knowledge could be overcome by a reasoned scientific approach of investigation. One thing was certain to her, that the healing that had occurred was real. It was more real than all the knowledge that had created an apparent paradox. Thus she set out to discover the underlying principles involved, that had enabled her healing, which knowledge would then increase man's power over diseases and other ills found in human experience.
As the result of this work she produced three structures. The first of these comprise her writings in which she documented in broad statements what she had discovered about the nature of God and the nature of man, which discoveries she had been able to proof by healing others through the application of that knowledge. This structure also includes the broad based application of the knowledge of what Christ Jesus called "the truth," which as such could be taught to others, who were then able to apply that knowledge again in their own healing work. This general structure eventually included the founding of her own church for the promotion of that knowledge, as this knowledge was too revolutionary to be universally acknowledged by other churches which generally found it impossible to break away from the old accepted notions that defined man as limited, impotent and sinful, and God as a remote and largely irrelevant to the immediate human experience.
The second structure that she created is the structure for a scientific approach to reality, that she merely outlined as stated earlier. She provided a fundamental architecture for it and a lot of building blocks that pose an infinite array of questions that urge the discoveries of the principles that she had presented in broad terms in the first structure. At this point, however, she withdrew herself from the scene. She imposed no final resolution, but merely opened a door for a path to be created to the infinite through individual discoveries of reality.
The third structure that she created should have opened another door, but has so far failed. In the final stages of her career she founded an international newspaper, not as an organ of her church, but as a structure with a specific mission "The bless all mankind, and to injure none." This task can only be fulfilled by focusing onto the policies of individuals and nations through the lens of a continuously unfolding knowledge of the truth and its underlying principles that come to light through creative discoveries.
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