#fixed laws

I was blinded by the idea that to be king was to obey. That laws were some fixed, holy thing, unchangeable, irrefutable in their wisdom. But they aren't. The world changes, the wheel spins, and so we must change as well. That is what it means to lead--finding the wisdom to bring change when it's needed and to hold fast when it's not.

When modern science emerged in Renaissance Europe during the sixteenth century, early researchers such as Kepler and later Newton were deeply convinced that natural order reflected a vast divine plan, and that they were exalting the glory of God by revealing it. So Western science was triggered by the idea that there are laws imposed by a Creator. Renaissance Europe was imbued with the idea that God manifested himself in the rationality of nature. This perhaps explains why science didn’t take off in the East—in China, for example, even though it has an ancient culture that is complex and sophisticated, and was technologically ahead of the West in many fields. Gunpowder and the compass, among other things, were invented there. In the Chinese notion of nature, the world wasn’t created by a god who handed out laws. It came about from the mutual dynamic interaction of two opposite forces, yin and yang. Since the notion of natural laws was foreign to them, the chinese had no incentive to look for any!