Sciencelosophy

Across his talks, tablets, and letters, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá returns again and again to the dynamic relationship between humans and the natural world. It is no accident that Some Answered Questions opens with a statement on nature. He characterizes the human intellect as a force that allows humans to “resist and oppose nature. “Man is able to resist and to oppose Nature because he discovers the constitution of things, and through this, he commands the forces of Nature” [1] He characterizes human intellect as a force capable of “resisting,” “dominating," and “controlling” natural constraints. Most striking of all are the statements in which he describes human beings as able to “break” the laws of nature. “He wrests the sword from nature’s hand and uses it against nature, proving that there is a power in him which is beyond nature, for it is capable of breaking and subduing the laws of nature” [2] Interpreted literally, these statements could be misconstrued as suggesting that human beings possess a supernatural capacity to negate or suspend the fundamental laws of physics, elevating human beings to the status of miracle workers, seemingly empowered to override physical constraints. This article contends that his position is more subtle and nuanced than a literalist reading of these statements would suggest. Rather than treating this as a claim about miracles that suspend physics, this paper contends that it as a claim about a distinctive kind of causation tied to the rational mind. Thus, the act of “breaking” nature’s laws represents not their cancellation but their realignment: the capacity to comprehend natural forces and bend them to serve humanity’s needs, most clearly exemplified in technological inventions. By examining three specific examples, namely psychological resilience in human development, and the human engineering of lunar trajectories, this paper explores the novel approach of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to human powers and complexity. ## Lawful Defiance An airplane does not break any physical law. Its engines obey conservation principles, its structure is constrained by material strength, and its trajectory is a solution to gravitational dynamics. Its success depends on regularity: predictable combustion, predictable inertia, predictable orbital mechanics. In that sense, the airplane epitomizes obedience to laws of nature, not an exception to them. Yet the airplane raises an interesting philosophical question, a question that is implicit in ‘Abdu’l- Bahá’s statements on nature. An airplane does not violate laws of nature, but can nature produce it? Put differently, can something be operationally compliant with natural law and still be “unnatural” in another sense? A logical way to draw this distinction is to separate (1) the laws an entity obeys from (2) the causal narrative that could account for the entity’s existence. Artifacts and organisms share the first characteristic: both are physical systems subject to the same natural constraints. They may diverge in the second. Many argue that a spider’s web, or a termite mound’s ventilation structure, arises through processes that do not explicitly represent goals, even if they appear to yield goal-directed outcomes. An airplane is created through an intentional chain: abstraction, modeling, deliberation, error-correction, and coordinated planning. Its distinctiveness lies not in floating above nature but in embodying intelligent-mediated processes for its formation. As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá puts it “Man is not the captive of nature, for although according to natural law he is a being of the Earth, yet he guides ships over the ocean, flies through the air in airplanes, descends in submarines; therefore, he has overcome natural law and made it subservient to his wishes” [3] This philosophical inquiry leads to the concept of “natural unnaturalness.” An artifact can be natural in its efficient causes (materials, forces, energies) while it could be “unnatural” in its formal organization, in the sense that the organization may not be plausibly attributable to an unguided physical evolutionary process across time. In this light, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s language of “breaking and subduing” can be read as pointing to a deep philosophical puzzle; not that evolution can generate lawbreakers in the supernatural sense, but whether non-intelligent evolutionary processes can generate law interpreters and law users , beings who view nature’s constraints as something to be understood and redirected. Against the Current Within: Confidence Beyond a Lifetime of Negation? To explore philosophical questions raised by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, let us have a thought experiment. Imagine a child who evolves and grows over a long time, measured in millions of years. He receives consistent negative messages: “you are inadequate,” “you will fail,” “you do not belong,” “you are a loser.” The thought experiment is deliberately extreme. It frames “negative programming” as the totality of the child’s external forces, so that adult confidence appears impossible if the child is only an aggregate of those inputs. If the child’s psychological profile were nothing more than the imprint of external influences, one must ask: why would the child try to “reach” for confidence at all, let alone ultimately “become” confident? On a purely externalist picture, the end state should mirror the long external input: shame, timidity, and learned helplessness. Yet we are asked to imagine the opposite: the child matures into a confident adult. The route to confidence is not magic but a second-order capacity: the ability to reflect on one’s own mind, step back, and intentionally reorganize one’s conditioning and upbringing. In doing so, a person can stand apart from one’s formative history and through deliberate practice, rewrite the psychological script into confidence and resilience. It is in this discontinuity between environmental input and behavioral output that the philosophical dilemma appears again. If the child were only an aggregate of external influences, why would the child ever evolve towards confidence at all, rather than ultimately mirroring the long history of negative programming? Put differently: can a child, initially a clean slate yet subjected to years of deprivation and sustained external denigration, genuinely grow beyond such conditioning, or does this require a further capacity that can rise above those immediate psychological constraints? The thought experiment becomes plausible only if the mind can step back from what has acted upon it. A reflective agent can treat repeated put-downs as evidence of the parents’ shortcomings or of the social context in which they lived, rather than as a final verdict about its own self. Crucially, the agent can consciously reorder the mind: redirect attention, retrain self-appraisal habits, and adopt disciplined practices that reshape its negative programming. Confidence then becomes but a deliberate reweighting of influence, as the person tests messages against evidence, adopts standards beyond reward and punishment, and restructures self-evaluation. The “program” remains part of the story, but it no longer governs it. This inward reordering can be viewed as a “lawful yet unnatural” redirection. Just as an airplane does not violate physics yet cannot be fully accounted for by blind physical processes alone, resilient confidence does not by itself violate psychological causality, but at the same time cannot be explained as mere reflection of external forces. In both cases, we encounter a distinct kind of causation. This concept-guided process remains within nature’s lawful constraints while, at the same time, transcends nature’s local limitations and creates entities that leverage nature’s laws against it. Escaping Earth’s Gravity: Lawful Flight, Unlikely Origin To leave Earth is to confront one of nature’s most formidable constraints. Escaping Earth’s gravity is daunting, to say the least. Near the surface, gravity continually “pulls back” at every instant of ascent, while atmospheric drag compounds the burden. Achieving orbit already demands velocities of several kilometers per second, sustained by controlled acceleration and precise timing. Escaping Earth’s gravitational pull requires even more energy and even tighter tolerances. The problem is not simply going upward. It is sustaining a carefully managed sequence of forces long enough to shift from ordinary falling to orbital motion, and then adding the additional energy needed to depart a bound trajectory altogether. The Lunar Module, within the larger Apollo system that delivered it. The achievement is not a loophole in nature but an exacting submission to nature’s regularities. Gravity is neither suspended nor weakened. Through careful deliberation, those same dependable laws are leveraged against their default tendencies: gravity and inertia are not resisted blindly but calculated and recruited, so the very constraints that bind the craft to Earth become the conditions that make controlled escape and navigation possible.