Ovid, Christianity, and Physicalism on the Whether the World is Getting Better or Worse

Ovid poses four ages: gold, silver, bronze, and iron. To him the ages are successively, morally worse. In the golden age there is no need for laws because people are universally kind to one another; therefore there is no fear of punishment. There are no warships and there is no warfare. There is not even a need to plow the earth, because she yields her fruit freely and without coercion. Spring is the only season, and in it the milk flows, the wheat is abundant, there are streams of nectar, and honey drips from the trees. In the silver age, Jove rules the world. There are four seasons now, and people are forced to live in caves and crude shelters. The earth is abused (it is plowed and grain is sown and the earth is forced to give of its fruit). The bronze age is crueler and there is savage warfare, but it is not yet “corrupt.” It is in the age of iron that evil bursts forth, modesty and faithfulness are thrown to the wind, truth is discarded, and in their place we find fraud, guile, deceit, violence, and shameful lust to get more and more of everything. Trees are slaughtered to build ships, and the land itself is divided (private property is introduced). The earth is forced now to yield more than just food as men mine its depths for precious metals. Family strife runs rampant and evil is everywhere. Ovid is eager to associate his own day with the worst of the ages.

The Bible says that the original creation was good. At the Fall, sin entered the world; since then the world has gotten worse, morally. This does not imply that the Christian would deny the advance of technology or the progress of academic disciplines, etc. But the moral decay of the world has affected more than just humanity, and the creation itself groans in eager expectation of redemption.

Physicalist science does not pay central attention to morality as it judges the advancement of the world, partly no doubt because of the belief that morality cannot exist above the physical universe; morality to the physicalist, like humanity itself, can only be self-originating, self-creating. But center place in the judgment of advancement to the physicalist is the development of the sciences. These two things together—a diminished concern for the moral and a highlighted focus on the development of science—are why the fact that there are nuclear or chemical weapons proves to the physicalist that things are better than they used to be, even when those weapons are used to kill more people at one moment than would have ever been possible in the history of the world. So the Christian and the physicalist can look at the same facts and arrive at the opposite answer to the question of whether the world is getting better or worse. Some seem to think that pointing to the latest technology (and the past 200 years of technological development) is all that is necessary to prove their point; others point out that the technology has only given greater more deadly weapons for violent people (that is, all of us) to use.