The Five Manifestations of Natural Phenomena
| by | Jeff Miller, Ph.D. |
For over a century, scientists have recognized that all natural phenomena in the Universe can ultimately be divided into interactions between five basic, fundamental “manifestations.” In 1882, staunch evolutionist Herbert Spencer, an English philosopher, biologist, and sociologist who was a prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era, recognized “likenesses and unlikenesses among phenomena…, which are segregated into manifestations…, and then into space and time, matter and motion and force…” (Soylent Communications, 2011, emp. added). In First Principles, under the chapter heading, “Space, Time, Matter, Motion, and Force,” he wrote, “These modes of cohesion under which manifestations are invariably presented, and therefore invariably represented, we call…Space and Time,…Matter and Motion [action—JM]” (1882, 1:171, emp. added). “Though Space, Time, Matter, and Motion, are apparently all necessary data of intelligence, yet a psychological analysis…shows us that these are either built up of, or abstracted from, experiences of Force” (p. 169). So, time, force, action, space, and matter are the five manifestations of all scientific phenomena.
This truth—fundamental to understanding science—was articulated by an agnostic in the 19th century, and yet these fundamental principles were articulated in the very first verse of the Bible millennia ago. “In the beginning [time], God [force] created [action] the heavens [space] and the Earth [matter].” It is truly amazing that a renowned apostle of agnosticism would be the one to verbally articulate this discovery from science—a discovery which gives significant weight to the contention that one can know there is a God and that the Bible is His inspired Word. And further, it is notably ironic that the very man from whom Charles Darwin took the phrase, “survival of the fittest” (Spencer, 1864, 2:444), would be the man that unknowingly found evidence specifically supporting the inspiration of Genesis chapter one—the very chapter of the Bible that relates the truth about man’s origin. Acts 14:17 rightly says, “Nevertheless He did not leave Himself without witness, in that He did good…” (emp. added).
REFERENCES
Soylent Communications (2011), “Herbert Spencer,” NNDB: Tracking the Entire World, http://www.nndb.com/people/013/000094728/.
Spencer, Herbert (1882), First Principles: A System of Synthetic Philosophy (New York: D. Appleton and Company), fourth edition.
Spencer, Herbert (1864), Principles of Biology: A System of Synthetic Philosophy (London: Williams and Norgate).
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