Long ago, on an obscure island in an obscure part of one of the Seven Seas there was an obscure village where there lived a wise old woman who invented Science. She was quite excited by the discovery and gathered the villagers around a camp fire to tell them about it.
“Science,” she said, “Reveals the workings of Fizzix, our omnipotent creator! Science is the tool he has given us to understand the mysteries of the cosmos!”
The villagers didn’t understand anything she said but her enthusiasm was quite contagious so her announcement made them generally giddy. She spoke with such passion that nobody could doubt her sincerity.
The old woman went to work using science to explain all sorts of inexplicable things. Whenever the villagers noticed something inexplicable, they would bring it to the old woman for her scientific explanation.
“How does a spider know how to weave a web?” they asked.
“It is the magic of Fizzix,” she responded.
“How does an oak tree grow from a tiny acorn?”
“The magic of Fizzix,” she replied.
“Why do we dream? Why do we love? Why do we ponder these things?”
“Fizzix makes all dreams, all loves, all things,” she explained.
As the old woman sat under a tree using a rock to scratch her theory of gravity into a coconut shell, an obscure tidal wave hit the island and killed all the villagers. That’s why the credit for inventing science went to some other people.
The folks credited with creating science changed the spelling of their deity’s name but kept most of the old woman’s theories. Gradually, they stopped referring to stuff they didn’t understand as ‘magic’ and began calling those mysteries, ‘the laws of nature.’ They passionately proclaimed science as the only tool to unlock the secrets of the cosmos. The villagers believed every word they spoke.
The End
(Acts 17:23) For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.”