Is it possible to be optimistic about the world situation when daily there appear new areas of conflict and violence, as well as continuing problems from the past? Can one survey all these disturbances in an intelligent and helpful way and still maintain faith in ultimate and certain good?
First of all, we need to gain and sustain a proper perspective. A few years ago, an Austrian physicist wrote an article for an American magazine explaining how he, as a physicist, could be an optimist in these times. He said, ". . . comparing the almost endless time usable for further human development with the ridiculously short period of world history, we find that our civilization is in the stage of a newborn baby that opens its eyes for the first time." Then he went on to say that "all these shortcomings of our civilization—the cultural lag, the barbarism of warfare, the petty quarrels between individuals and between groups . . . —all these are nothing but the children's diseases of our still quite infantile humanity."Hans Thirring, "Can a Scientist Be an Optimist?" Saturday Review, October 28, 1967, p. 17;
Much earlier in history, when the known world was rocking under the campaigns of Cyrus the Great, and when, no doubt, many of the Jews in Babylon were apprehensive of what might happen, another writer, inspired by the conviction of God's omnipotence, said: "Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance: behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing."Isa. 40:15;
