For many of us, our daily lives involve us in primarily artificial things. We eat food bought from a store or restaurant, much of which is processed and artificial. We travel around on artificially straight roads made by machines, by means of vehicles whose speeds and environments are similarly artificial. We spend hours watching or reading things artificially presented to us, mediated through screens whose hardware and software are produced in one sort of factory or another. We are habituated to believe and feel that our whole world, anything good and worthwhile, is an artifact of human creation.
Of course, “artifice” is not necessarily bad. Human writing, a loaf of bread, and painting are all “artificial” because they are made by human beings. But there is a “threshold of artificiality” beyond which more negative effects start to accrue. Perhaps the worst effect is our increasing difficulty of seeing that God is the Maker and Giver of all things.
How can we see God as the generous Giver of all good things if all we daily use has man as its maker?
