The Increasing Interest today in things spiritual is becoming evident in perhaps unexpected places. Doctors are investigating and affirming the effect of prayer on bodily health; theologians in greater numbers are beginning to accept that prayer can actually bring physical healing; and physicists and other natural scientists are increasingly positing the existence of a directing spiritual force in the universe.
To many thinkers who lived in Biblical times, the separation between medicine, theology, and science on the one hand, and prayer and spirituality on the other, would have been incomprehensible. To the prophets of the Old Testament and to the early Christians in the New, the power of God—of the spiritual—actually was medicine; healing the sick through God's power was inherent in their theology; and aspects of daily life, such as astronomy and meteorology, which today we would refer to as "scientific," were seen by them as manifesting spiritual laws of God. God and things spiritual were integral to their worldview; the Bible records them as both listening and speaking to God. So why has this past century viewed the world with such a different perspective?
Mary Baker Eddy, the author of a book that explains clearly the relationship between spirituality and science, writes, "Before human knowledge dipped to its depths into a false sense of things,—into belief in material origins which discard the one Mind and true source of being,—it is possible that the impressions from Truth were as distinct as sound, and that they came as sound to the primitive prophets." Science and Health, pp. 213-214. "... belief in material origins which discard the one Mind and true source of being" aptly describes the nineteenth-century school of thought known as materialism, which holds that matter is the fundamental and final reality. This view of reality excluded from consideration the spiritual, relegating the things of Spirit, God, solely to the province of the Church, not to science. For many years this materialistic view has held sway, and its claim to be the only way to discover truth is only now being challenged by some scientists.
