The (Greek) root meaning of Biology is Life-Study. In other words it is the study of life and living things.
In high school, I had a great Biology teacher. He taught us to use a microscope to study unicellular organisms.
Amoebas were fascinating, especially their ability to move about, change their shape, and reproduce by dividing into two!
Some of us liked the Biology class so much that we persuaded the teacher to offer us an additional elective course in Zoology, one of three traditional major branches of Biology. (The others are Botany and Microbiology.)
Although Biology means the study of life, studying and learning about life embraces much more than Biology, Zoology, or other related sciences. In the broadest sense, every thinking living person is studying, experiencing, and learning about life all the time.
We’re usually preoccupied by aspects of life, especially of our own lives—physical, emotional, intellectual, psychological, and spiritual to name a few.
And, it’s a course of study that never quite ends. No matter how old or experienced we may be, we’re still studying, experiencing, and learning about life!
Faith and religion are part of learning about life, too. They involve studying, experiencing, and learning about the universe we live in, life itself, living things, their relations, and their creator’s designs.
Hopefully, you had the good fortune to have had good examples and teachers of faith and religion and to have learned to use religious teachings, theology, and scripture to study the meaning and purpose of life.
Religion is more than a matter of customs, social standards, rules, and regulations that dictate and even restrict personal behavior.
Social standards, rules, and regulations are changeable and even arbitrary. A good example of this is the ten commandments.
For example, Exodus 20:8-10 says, Remember the sabbath day [day of rest]—keep it holy. Six days you may labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God…
Devote Jews observe this, but Christians do not. Instead their day of rest is the first day of the week, Sunday. Literally, this is disobeying one of the commandments.
Our understandings of many things religious always have been changing: what’s right and wrong, good and bad, virtue and sin as well as our understandings of God and the will and designs of God, the purpose and destiny of life, the meaning of scripture, theology, and church teachings.
Sometimes our changed understandings are misunderstandings; sometimes they are rediscoveries of lost or misunderstood original meanings; sometimes they are new or enhanced understandings, new insights into the will and designs of God.
If we really are studying life and living things, then we are necessarily experiencing change, for better or for worse, and, hopefully, developing and evolving.
All this is of the very nature of life. The simplest of living things—for instance, the amoebas, move about, change their shape, and reproduce and multiply.
How much more complicated and complex are our lives, our understandings of our purpose, and our limited insights into the nature of God and his designs and will.
To bewail and avoid change, always clinging to what is familiar, comfortable, and secure, is to behave like an immobile caterpillar who is reluctant to break out of its enfolding cocoon, never realizing that its ultimate destiny is to fly!
20 March 2022