King James Bible, Chapter 12, Verse 54
“And he said also to the people, When ye see a cloud rise out of the west, straightway ye say, There cometh a shower; and so it is. And when ye see the south wind blow, ye say, There will be heat; and it cometh to pass. Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time?”
My Comment
The notion that you could look at nature and “read” it is part of the so-called “hermetic” tradition of the West and very much a part of eastern religion (Buddhism, Hinduism) as well, from where they might have been derived partially. In the hermetic tradition, the world was conceived of as a complex fractal system in which each part reflected the whole in a succession of patterns that extended from the stars in the sky down to star fish in the ocean. This way of looking at nature holistically in symbolic terms is not necessarily diametrically opposed to the scientific method, a truth that is evident from the fact that leading scientists from the Renaissance to the twentieth century have managed to pursue impeccably empirical research, while holding beliefs that the intellectual class today would call obscurantist.