There is a poem which begins: “God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform”. There was a time in history when people were quite comfortable with that idea. After all, for pre-scientific people, the mysterious, the unexplainable was a part of everyday life. There was so much that they could not understand that they put it all in the general category of “mystery”, and they accounted for that by pointing to God. If they couldn’t understand it, they simply said, “God did it!”

They couldn’t begin to explain night and day, the coming of the seasons, why a seed when placed in the earth will germinate, sprout, and grow to a full plant when the process begins again. They couldn’t understand why rain falls, why winds blow, what makes the tides of the ocean. Human birth was a mystery, of c…