Strange and Astonishing Things

Excerpts from an article by Wendy M. Heller, published in the Bahá’í World on 31 July 2026: https://bahaiworld.bahai.org/library/strange-and-astonishing-things/

While we recommend reading the entire essay, the following passages are selected and arranged for busy people to have access to its highly interesting and important content. They only include a few references. Go to the essay to see all the sources.

The essay revolves around the following words of Baha’u’llah:

Wendy Heller tells the story how these words were utterly incomprehensible to the people living at that time. She also provides a deep reflection on the meaning of wisdom and the difficulty for humans to understand radically new things that are beyond anything they have previously experienced and that don’t fit into any existing concept or scientific theory.

In an opening paragraph, she points out: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá once assured the Bahá’ís that the wisdom of a perplexing stipulation in the Sacred Scriptures would “erelong be made manifest as clearly as the sun at high noon.” (2)

The quote containing the “strange and astonishing things” is introduced in this central paragraph:

[Bahá’u’lláh] warned of the danger of abandoning the principle of moderation, stating that “if a thing is carried to excess it will become a source of evil”—as evidenced by the alarming tendencies displayed by Western civilization, which was already harnessing the power of modern technology to invent ever more deadly weaponry. “An infernal engine hath been devised,” He wrote, “and hath proved so cruel a weapon of destruction that its like none hath ever witnessed or heard.” He may have been referring to the Maxim gun: invented in 1884, it was the first automatic machine gun, could fire over five hundred rounds per minute, and would become one of the deadliest weapons in modern history. The “deeply-rooted and overwhelming corruptions” represented by such armaments, Bahá’u’lláh asserted, could not be expunged until the peoples of the world became reconciled and united in a common aim and a universal faith. Then He wrote: “Strange and astonishing things exist in the earth but they are hidden from the minds and the understanding of men. These things are capable of changing the whole atmosphere of the earth and their contamination would prove lethal.”

Today we have no trouble making sense of that statement; if we are perplexed, it is not by the statement itself—because we know it is true—but by the fact that He wrote it in 1889, decades before anyone else knew it was true. Those “things” in the earth that can lethally contaminate the atmosphere are now such an established part of humanity’s common knowledge that it is not even necessary to name them, because the answer is so obvious as to be clear as the sun at high noon. But that was not always the case.

Wendy Heller then explains in depth the history of Physics and the evolution of human understanding of the atom.

Afterwards, she tells the story of how Baha’is have wondered about the meaning of "strange and astonishing things": 

In 1908 Bahá’u’lláh’s statement in Words of Paradise puzzled two American Bahá’í women, Helen Goodall and her daughter Ella Goodall Cooper, who, on a pilgrimage to ‘Akka, asked Him about the meaning of this text.

They recorded in their notes that He began to talk … about the fundamental forces of nature, saying (in the words of the Persian translator):

…We do not know how He explained, on that occasion, the connection between the strange and astonishing things in the earth and the physical forces of composition and decomposition, because the notes stop there.

… ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Who possessed a profound and prescient knowledge of the realities of things and was well versed not only in the theories of the philosophers and with Bahá’u’lláh’s statements such as “within every atom traces of the sun have been made manifest,” but also with the words of the eighteenth-century Persian mystical poet Hátif-i-Iṣfahání: “Split the atom’s heart, and lo! / Within it thou wilt find a sun.”

… in His account of the nature of material phenomena, it is implicit that, at the most fundamental level, the atom is not the indivisible constituent of matter. If the axiom that all “forms of existence in the material universe … are the result of composition” is true, it also applies to the atom, or the atom would not be a material phenomenon.

While en route to New York on the R.M.S. Cedric, a discussion over tea turned to the topic of dirigibles and airplanes. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is recorded as telling those present that airplanes would be used for military purposes and that “There will come to exist such instruments [of war] as to cause all the means of destruction in the past to be looked upon as children’s playthings.” In San Francisco, while conversing with a group of Bahá’ís including the Goodalls, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá suddenly began to speak about the statement in Words of Paradise, saying that an element in the earth would be discovered that was so destructive that it could obliterate entire cities and would become an impetus for peace, as the nations would fear the destruction of humanity. (3)

On another occasion, in Paris, He brought up the issue when He made a point of calling on a visiting diplomat whose wife had expressed a wish to meet Him. That diplomat was Viscount Minoji Arakawa (1857–1949), the Japanese Minister to Spain. As later recounted by Lady Blomfield, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá spoke to him on topics including the importance of Japan, the abolition of war, and scientific discoveries, adding: “There is in existence a stupendous force, as yet, happily, undiscovered by man.” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said He hoped this force would not be discovered by science until civilization became spiritualized because “in the hands of men of lower material nature, this power would be able to destroy the whole earth.” (4) In 1919 He was reported as describing it as being a power like that of dynamite.

Although today we readily understand and appreciate the wisdom of those warnings, the existence of such a force within the earth—of elements whose decomposition (which releases radioactivity) could change the whole atmosphere of the planet and cause lethal contamination—was not definitively proved until July 1945 when, in the New Mexico desert, the scientists of the Manhattan Project detonated a plutonium implosion device, demonstrating the power of the energy concealed within the heart of the atom and making Bahá’u’lláh’s statement a self-evident truth as clear as the sun at noon. In this case, uniquely, the figure of speech was literally true because there is nothing else on earth that is so much like the noonday sun; an American army general who observed the Trinity test that day wrote that the blast light had an “intensity many times that of the midday sun.” But until that moment, not even the scientists themselves really knew—to a certainty—what was going to happen. …

Frederick Soddy was one of the first scientists to understand the terrifying practical implications of the “gigantic forces” latent within the earth and in 1903 had written that “the knowledge of their existence must … make us regard the planet on which we live rather as a storehouse stuffed with explosives, inconceivably more powerful than any we know, and possibly only awaiting a suitable detonator to cause the earth to revert to chaos.” The carnage of the First World War would present him with evidence of the devastation and death that modern technology could deliver when harnessed for military use: in 1916, on the opening day of the First Battle of the Somme, more than 19,000 British soldiers were killed—a large proportion of them by the German version of the Maxim gun. In a lecture in 1915 Soddy raised the alarm about the potential danger of weaponizing atomic energy:

Wendi Heller then elaborated that, at first, scientists rejected Soddy’s views. Just an example:

In 1932 Einstein said, “There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.”(6) In 1946, after it had been proven that it could indeed be done, Einstein wrote: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe…. a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.”(7)

The phenomenon of radioactivity—and the sheer immensity of the power within the atom—were discoveries that scientists were unprepared for, and many reacted first with the reflexive denial that greets the shock of the new and unprecedented, which does not conform to anything they know or believe to be true.

From this account of the emergence into human consciousness of the reality of the power hidden within the atom and its implications for the future of humanity and the planet itself, we have seen that what is radically new and unprecedented cannot be properly understood by forcing it into the received categories of conceptual structures based on prior experience. If the radically new is to become intelligible, enter the body of shared knowledge, and become part of social reality, a process must take place as events unfold over time and new experiences are subjected to conscious analysis in a reflective collective enterprise of critical sensemaking. First, we instinctively try to fit the new information into the available categories in our mental representation of the world. If the new information does not fit into those categories, it will appear anomalous. If we persist in interpreting it in terms of inadequate categories, then anomalies, incoherence, and dissonance will proliferate. If we are committed to the preservation, at all costs, of the conceptual structure and its categories—whether it is that of science, of religious tradition, or of ideology—we may … try to force the data to fit the theory. Or we may … misinterpret the significant unknown as an insignificant known. Misjudging the radically new by miscategorizing it can lead to catastrophe, …

… In retrospect, it can be all too easy to think, as Thomas Huxley did on being told of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that.” But at the beginning of the process, the end is not at all obvious, much less as clear as the sun at high noon—not even to (or especially not to) experts, who tend to have a vested interest in the conceptual systems, discourses, and paradigms that undergird their own claims to expertise. Even those who perceive—whether through scientific intuition, creative imagination, or divine inspiration and wisdom—a truth of the reality of things that is not yet generally known, will not be able to produce irrefutable evidence to convince all doubters, because no matter how accurate the warning or how valid the conclusion, the evidence only emerges as the consequence of a sequence of events in time and the discourse that strives to make sense of them, which has not yet taken place.

In the late nineteenth century, there were others, such as Jean de Bloch (who published his six-volume work The Future of War a decade after Bahá’u’lláh had warned, in Words of Paradise, about modern weaponry), who had also concluded that future wars would be far more devastating than previous wars. Bloch was disregarded by many experts, and it was widely assumed that international developments, including the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration as a result of the first Peace Conference at The Hague in 1899, and even the fearsome power of modern weapons, had made war “unthinkable.” A professor of history assured Frederick Soddy in 1900 “that there would never be another war.” So, people did not believe ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s warnings that the approaching storm would be an unprecedented cataclysm for the world. In 1914, after the war had begun, He commented on why His warnings had been dismissed:

Many of the themes in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s talks and Writings explaining the dynamics of international conflict, including the massing of military force, the accumulation of armaments, and the lack of trust among nations, closely parallel what would, in the years following the Second World War, be conceptualized in International Relations theory as the “security dilemma,” while His prescription for arms reduction, a binding system of collective security, and an international tribunal anticipate the measures that would eventually be proposed to mitigate those dynamics.

Although it was naively hoped that the Great War would be (in the words of H. G. Wells) a “war to end war,” after the guns had fallen silent the root cause of conflict still festered. In 1919 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was reported to have told visiting pilgrims that the peace was only a “false dawn.” Until the oneness of humanity and the ethical implications of that fact were universally recognized, there would be more war; peace conferences alone would be ineffectual. In 1920 He wrote: “The Hague Conference held before the war had as its President the Emperor of Russia, and its members were men of the greatest eminence. Nevertheless, this did not prevent such a terrible war. Now how will it be? For in the future another war, fiercer than the last, will assuredly break out; verily, of this there is no doubt whatever.” (9) And indeed, the Second World War would not only see more devastation and death than the First, but also the weaponizing of the “stupendous force” about which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had warned Minister Arakawa, and its use against his own country.

Was there anything that Bahá’u’lláh, a religious prisoner in a remote backwater of the Ottoman Empire, writing seven years before Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity, could have said to audiences of the nineteenth century—or ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to those of the early twentieth (even to a representative of the government of Japan)—not merely to warn against war but to prove the existence and nature of atomic energy in a way that would have made them understand the wisdom of the warnings and take action to prevent the catastrophic consequences? In November 1918 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote to a Bahá’í in Iran that He had warned the people of the West:

And whatever rational explanations or reasoned arguments might have been offered would also have been futile because a context within which the warning—or even the proof—could have made sense, much less be properly appreciated, did not yet exist.

In fact, in an even earlier reference to the strange and astonishing phenomenon of the power concealed within the atom, written in 1881—eight years before Words of Paradise—Bahá’u’lláh had made that very point:

REFERENCES

For seeing all sources, read the entire original article here: https://bahaiworld.bahai.org/library/strange-and-astonishing-things/

1. Bahá’u’lláh, Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh, 6.31, bahai.org/r/803562132
2. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (Bahá’í World Centre, 1978), 38.4, bahai.org/r/324741256
3. National Spiritual Assembly of the United States to Shoghi Effendi, cable dated 24 February 1946, Bahá’í World Centre Archives, Haifa, Israel
4. Lady Blomfeld, “Some Memories of the Sojourn of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Paris, October-December, 1911,” The Bahá’í World 6: 656–7, bahaiworld.bahai.org/library/memories-of-the-sojourn-of-abdul-baha-in-paris
5. Frederick Soddy, “Physical Force: Man’s Servant or His Master?” Science and Life, 36
6. Quoted in “Atom Energy Hope Is Spiked by Einstein,” Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 28 December 1934. 
7. Quoted in “Atomic Education Urged by Einstein,” New York Times, 25 May 1946, 11.
8. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, “No Sane Person Can at This Time Deny the Fact that War Is the Most Dreadful Calamity in the World of Humanity,” Star of the West 5, no. 16 (31 December 1914): 244.
9.‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Selections, 228.2. 
10. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Tablet dated 2 Rajab 1337 [3 April 1919] to an individual, Bahá’í World Centre Archives, Haifa, Israel (provisional translation).
  11. Bahá’u’lláh, Tablet dated 17 Rajab 1298 (15 June 1881) to several individuals, Bahá’í World Centre Archives, Haifa, Israel. I am grateful to Omid Ghaemmaghami for bringing this passage to my attention.