“There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens….He has made everything appropriate to its time, and has put the timeless into their hearts, without men’s ever discovering, from the beginning to the end, the work which God has done.” (Eccl, 3:1, 11)
We went camping in Wyalusing State Park in Wisconsin a week or so ago, and while there, crossed over the Mississippi into Iowa to another park, Effigy Mounds National Monument, where a series of large effigy mounds have been preserved. These, earthen mounds in the shape of animals, particularly bear, were made by American Indians until about 1100 AD. I talked to some young women who worked for the park service to ask them why they think this mound-building culture came to a fairly abrupt halt. They gave me the official line that is written in the literature – that the people advanced into a higher level of agriculture, and so gave up the adulation of animals. This does not make sense, as higher levels of agricultural dependence leads to more surplus, giving more time and human resources to create public works. It also avoids the historical connection between the upper and the lower Mississippi.
I do not know why the park service used this poor archaeological theory. Maybe I am simply behind the times. However it might be, we had just come from a diner where strong coffee had been served, and as I had had three cups, I was ready to give a lecture of my own. I told them that the southern reaches of Wisconsin (and northern Iowa on the west side) marked the northern terminus of the Mississippi Mound Culture, which reached its zenith in Cahokia, across the river from St Louis, around 1100 AD – and then collapsed. At the time of the early Spanish explorers in the 1500’s (read Coronado’s account), and until a time just before the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1804, large chiefdoms still existed (smallpox put an end to those), but not as they had before 1100. Further, the Anasazi cliff dwellers of the American Southwest, whose cities were connected by road and trade and ceremony with the Mayan and other population centers to the south, also collapsed around 1100. Of this, archeologists posit the most probable reason: dramatic climate change. How this also affected the well-watered Mississippi valley I do not know, but they were intimately linked together somehow, and both probably came to an end one way or another because of this dramatic change. Great changes in weather at this time were also reflected in the writings of the Vikings, who were forced to leave southern Greenland because of the looming mini-ice age which was to last until about 1800. We have been gradually warming ever since.
It seems, then, that climate change may have had a huge impact on American Indian culture, and probably on Europe as well. So it was that I spoke at the visitor’s center, but as the caffeine continued to roar through my nervous system even after I had left, I was led to make other connections concerning climate changes. “You know,” I said to my long-suffering wife, “climate change has had enormous impacts on many civilizations. Did you know that northern Africa, where the sands of the Sahara rule, was savanna up to 3000 BC, with lions and giraffes and elephants and so on? Did you know that the Romans were still hunting elephants from their chariots in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco as late as the time of Christ? Just think of it…” From there, revelations in a coffee cup began to flow over.
Yes, think of this: Egypt began its march towards dynastic splendor during that dramatic and fairly quick climate change. Because the lands around the Nile were no longer receiving adequate rain for normal agriculture, irrigation systems had to be put into place. This required coordination of labor and the invention of higher technology and math, which led to greater class distinctions and tech development, and then to deistic leaders who needed the cover of a godly cloak to justify their increasing this-world privileges; which led to the need for great public works in their honor, including the pyramids, and more tech and more hierarchy and more public surplus and on and on in one great game of cultural dominos. After many centuries, the Greeks took from Egypt their math and technology, which was then taken by the Romans and used to dominate the western swath of the Old World for a thousand years.
As my thoughts eventually run to the spiritual, more dots connected thusly:
Without an advanced Egypt with large stores of grain, Jacob - the grandson of Abraham, the father of the Jews - and his twelve sons would have starved to death during a great famine in the Fertile Crescent. Instead, they were able to take refuge in Egypt, where they prospered and multiplied into the millions over the next 400 years. We all know the rest of the story: the Jews escaped from Egypt, were given their laws from God through Moses, and after 40 years of wandering, they made the walls of Jericho come a-tumblin’ down, and Israel was born. After another 1300 or so years, Jesus was born. Israel was then a part of the Roman Empire, which had built roads and maintained trade throughout much of the Old World. Because of this, the message of Christ was able to spread quickly to the millions upon millions in the ancient civilizations. Christ’s moral and spiritual message, combined with Greek knowledge and logic, later led to the development of Western Civilization, which eventually dominated the entire world, making us the people we are today.
And none of this would have happened without the dramatic change in climate around 3000 BC.
Paranoid thinking, perhaps, but this whole chain retains a strong element of truth. Yes, other factors were involved, including disease and the fickle fortunes of war, but climate change no doubt had a strong role. Thanks to LIDAR (laser radar), huge civilizations from the past are being discovered in the Amazon and Central America, often pointing to climate change as the major contributing factor to both ‘rise and demise.’ Today’s theories on anthropogenic (man-made) warming notwithstanding, weather is generally out of the hands of Man, part of natural cycles too vast and complex for any peoples’ understanding. One might even say that weather has been exclusively in the hands of God- and, at least until now.
So, as Ecclesiastes says, God has put the timeless into Man’s heart, making us long for the designs of the Eternal, but still, unable to discover “…from the beginning to end, the work which God has done.” The connections I made above might sound like the ravings of a man after a three-day jag on crystal meth, but they are not far-fetched, and really only scratch the surface of all that happens that makes what happens possible – and, if we believe at all in intelligent design, what makes it all planned. Overall, we can never see how events happening now will cause those tens or tens of thousands of years in the future. No science, from astrology to particle physics, could ever reveal how the present will form the future. Such work is formed by greater hands. This does not mean that we should lie about helplessly in the face of cosmic forces, but it does show us where our place is in our collective destiny: relatively small and dependent. Flail and bellow as we might, we are like babies in a crib, dependent on powers far greater to relieve our needs. These needs, ultimately, reside in the timelessness that God has placed in our hearts, and it will be within the parameters of the Great Designer that they will be fulfilled.
A little screaming does get momma’s attention, though - that we know. But we all have to understand that Rome was not only not built in a day, but was built in part because North Africa became a desert through natural, not human, means. Our agency in the natural world is so small that we might want to better contemplate the admonitions of the great prophets: that what most lies in our hands is our moral behavior and the focus of our intentions. This is where the most important aspect of our will begins and ends. The rest lies dormant in our hearts, waiting for the time beyond time when our longings will be fully revealed and answered.
“There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens….He has made everything appropriate to its time, and has put the timeless into their hearts, without men’s ever discovering, from the beginning to the end, the work which God has done.” (Eccl, 3:1, 11)
We went camping in Wyalusing State Park in Wisconsin a week or so ago, and while there, crossed over the Mississippi into Iowa to another park, Effigy Mounds National Monument, where a series of large effigy mounds have been preserved. These, earthen mounds in the shape of animals, particularly bear, were made by American Indians until about 1100 AD. I talked to some young women who worked for the park service to ask them why they think this mound-building culture came to a fairly abrupt halt. They gave me the official line that is written in the literature – that the people advanced into a higher level of agriculture, and so gave up the adulation of animals. This does not make sense, as higher levels of agricultural dependence leads to more surplus, giving more time and human resources to create public works. It also avoids the historical connection between the upper and the lower Mississippi.
I do not know why the park service used this poor archaeological theory. Maybe I am simply behind the times. However it might be, we had just come from a diner where strong coffee had been served, and as I had had three cups, I was ready to give a lecture of my own. I told them that the southern reaches of Wisconsin (and northern Iowa on the west side) marked the northern terminus of the Mississippi Mound Culture, which reached its zenith in Cahokia, across the river from St Louis, around 1100 AD – and then collapsed. At the time of the early Spanish explorers in the 1500’s (read Coronado’s account), and until a time just before the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1804, large chiefdoms still existed (smallpox put an end to those), but not as they had before 1100. Further, the Anasazi cliff dwellers of the American Southwest, whose cities were connected by road and trade and ceremony with the Mayan and other population centers to the south, also collapsed around 1100. Of this, archeologists posit the most probable reason: dramatic climate change. How this also affected the well-watered Mississippi valley I do not know, but they were intimately linked together somehow, and both probably came to an end one way or another because of this dramatic change. Great changes in weather at this time were also reflected in the writings of the Vikings, who were forced to leave southern Greenland because of the looming mini-ice age which was to last until about 1800. We have been gradually warming ever since.
It seems, then, that climate change may have had a huge impact on American Indian culture, and probably on Europe as well. So it was that I spoke at the visitor’s center, but as the caffeine continued to roar through my nervous system even after I had left, I was led to make other connections concerning climate changes. “You know,” I said to my long-suffering wife, “climate change has had enormous impacts on many civilizations. Did you know that northern Africa, where the sands of the Sahara rule, was savanna up to 3000 BC, with lions and giraffes and elephants and so on? Did you know that the Romans were still hunting elephants from their chariots in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco as late as the time of Christ? Just think of it…” From there, revelations in a coffee cup began to flow over.
Yes, think of this: Egypt began its march towards dynastic splendor during that dramatic and fairly quick climate change. Because the lands around the Nile were no longer receiving adequate rain for normal agriculture, irrigation systems had to be put into place. This required coordination of labor and the invention of higher technology and math, which led to greater class distinctions and tech development, and then to deistic leaders who needed the cover of a godly cloak to justify their increasing this-world privileges; which led to the need for great public works in their honor, including the pyramids, and more tech and more hierarchy and more public surplus and on and on in one great game of cultural dominos. After many centuries, the Greeks took from Egypt their math and technology, which was then taken by the Romans and used to dominate the western swath of the Old World for a thousand years.
As my thoughts eventually run to the spiritual, more dots connected thusly:
Without an advanced Egypt with large stores of grain, Jacob - the grandson of Abraham, the father of the Jews - and his twelve sons would have starved to death during a great famine in the Fertile Crescent. Instead, they were able to take refuge in Egypt, where they prospered and multiplied into the millions over the next 400 years. We all know the rest of the story: the Jews escaped from Egypt, were given their laws from God through Moses, and after 40 years of wandering, they made the walls of Jericho come a-tumblin’ down, and Israel was born. After another 1300 or so years, Jesus was born. Israel was then a part of the Roman Empire, which had built roads and maintained trade throughout much of the Old World. Because of this, the message of Christ was able to spread quickly to the millions upon millions in the ancient civilizations. Christ’s moral and spiritual message, combined with Greek knowledge and logic, later led to the development of Western Civilization, which eventually dominated the entire world, making us the people we are today.
And none of this would have happened without the dramatic change in climate around 3000 BC.
Paranoid thinking, perhaps, but this whole chain retains a strong element of truth. Yes, other factors were involved, including disease and the fickle fortunes of war, but climate change no doubt had a strong role. Thanks to LIDAR (laser radar), huge civilizations from the past are being discovered in the Amazon and Central America, often pointing to climate change as the major contributing factor to both ‘rise and demise.’ Today’s theories on anthropogenic (man-made) warming notwithstanding, weather is generally out of the hands of Man, part of natural cycles too vast and complex for any peoples’ understanding. One might even say that weather has been exclusively in the hands of God- and, at least until now.
So, as Ecclesiastes says, God has put the timeless into Man’s heart, making us long for the designs of the Eternal, but still, unable to discover “…from the beginning to end, the work which God has done.” The connections I made above might sound like the ravings of a man after a three-day jag on crystal meth, but they are not far-fetched, and really only scratch the surface of all that happens that makes what happens possible – and, if we believe at all in intelligent design, what makes it all planned. Overall, we can never see how events happening now will cause those tens or tens of thousands of years in the future. No science, from astrology to particle physics, could ever reveal how the present will form the future. Such work is formed by greater hands. This does not mean that we should lie about helplessly in the face of cosmic forces, but it does show us where our place is in our collective destiny: relatively small and dependent. Flail and bellow as we might, we are like babies in a crib, dependent on powers far greater to relieve our needs. These needs, ultimately, reside in the timelessness that God has placed in our hearts, and it will be within the parameters of the Great Designer that they will be fulfilled.
A little screaming does get momma’s attention, though - that we know. But we all have to understand that Rome was not only not built in a day, but was built in part because North Africa became a desert through natural, not human, means. Our agency in the natural world is so small that we might want to better contemplate the admonitions of the great prophets: that what most lies in our hands is our moral behavior and the focus of our intentions. This is where the most important aspect of our will begins and ends. The rest lies dormant in our hearts, waiting for the time beyond time when our longings will be fully revealed and answered.
RSS Feed