This thing called science troubles me…

            I have studied many things and this night I am pondering the comments of my past teachers as I myself plan or rather hope to one day teach.  I can remember my enthusiasm for science but my apprehension of how it is used and fear that one day we might have a science as strict in governing what is knowledge and what is truth as that of the Roman Catholic Church in the high Middle Ages, but before both sides of the spectrum should shoot me down or burn me at a stake I beg the impartial reader to hear my concerns.  Foremost, I am not overly religious.  Although I cannot as a Lutheran bring myself to believe in a-biogenesis I do believe in evolution as I believe in a non-literal translation of the bulk of the Judeo-Christian religious texts and try to put them in a historical-moral framework.  I put faith in those things science can’t prove or disprove and practice what religion has no natural right to govern.  Let it be known, this thing called science troubles me…

            Let me rephrase that.  Science, or rather the acquirement of knowledge in and of itself does not bother me in the least.  It is something that both people of fundamentalist faith and the upper crust of academia do all the time.  The two groups read and write, and teach what matters to them to their students.  Some independents of both groups such as myself have taken it upon themselves to read between the lines of both.  What scares me is the fundamental separation of the human from that which is being studied (or the lack of trying to glean knowledge from the collective human experience in a logical and impartial manner).  With this I mean studying human evolution by tracing faulty genes which cause disease (because there is funding for this rather than for pure research on this topic until very recently) and applying them in broad articles like national geographic etc. without making sure the human society which reads them has the understanding of what they mean.  Likewise, I do not like studies which make religion to be a defective portion of the less evolved portions of the human mind. 

            Perhaps this is what troubles me the most about our modern search for new information (this has a long history- how else would I be typing on a PC right now) leaves us without personal meaning let alone a concise group meaning or purpose.  I fear a new wave of neo-rationalism which would be used to disavow the power of the human spirit and the work of the common community, the common community to be replaced by biological determinism and the belief that we can measure humanity.  I, however, would never argue that we should not give modern medical treatment to people or stop clinical studies which may save lives.  I believe that education, but moreover the teaching of open-mindedness will be paramount in our future survival and peaceful coexistence with one another.   I encourage the teaching of evolution in the classroom, but I believe that a-biogenesis which has not been tested through a century of study like the work of Dr. Darwin should be left out till highschool and that families should be left to teach their traditions both religious and cultural to their children and grandchildren.  Evolution is a harmless observable phenomenon; our misuse of it's knowledge is not.  

            To paraphrase Albert Einstein, I believe that our ability to play god has now outgrown our ability to seek greater meaning in ourselves to help the broader community.  I believe that the hardest questions for us as a species in the future will not be how to cure cancer or how to travel to the stars, but how to properly value the collective human experience without jealousy, prejudice, or greed.  This was the ultimate reason (although others may claim falsely to the contrary) why I strayed from the path of geology and chemistry into the social sciences.  It is also the reason why I value my research projects involving the modern development of time management in western society.  I find it heartening that the problems we have had today have already been faced in the past, you just have to pick up the right book and be open-minded enough to read the pages.  I find it heartening to read how we as a society have developed over the last 500 years, and I believe that we can learn much in regards to how to bridge the supposedly insurmountable gap between the acquirement of knowledge (science) and the ability to value the collective social experience (religion) from our own turbulent but overall successful history.

            As a child I walked to the new Glen Allen Library to read these things called books.  Now we have the internet, but I fear this realm of boundless opinionated information.  Not for the reason of having the ability to disseminate knowledge for which I have and will always stand for, but for the fact that much of this knowledge must be taken with a grain of salt, for it is written for a purpose other than that of disseminating altruistic knowledge.  Math, Chemistry, Physics will always be in my heart as they are altruistic languages, as is listening to my own emotions or the emotional based concerns of others.  A swinging pendulum does not care if the owner is a liberal or a conservative (although if you go to house museums in the United States you will invariably find that Federalists bought and used Connecticut woodworks clocks while liberals like Jefferson in the example of Monticello have large quantities of French clocks).  Similarly, I will hold in my heart the hundreds of families that my father and I have helped to gain a lost connection to their memories so that they can hear their parents and grandparents clocks tick and strike the hours of their own past again.  Both science and religion have value for us in the future…what that will be I don’t know.