AAgghh!
But seriously - Here are 2 beefs that I have been chewing on re a scientific understanding of the universe (i.e. Big Bang, planet formation, origin of life, species evolution, etc):
I am struck by an apparant glaring problem of scale. What i mean is: serious study (because come on: this does NOT count) of the natural world has been taking place for what, 400 years? at best? and the pretty-much-agreed-upon age of the universe is, what, 13.75 billion years? Now, I'm not saying the Universe isn't that old, indeed it jolly well might be, but what I am saying is how on earth can we speak even close to definitively about what has happened in this gargantuan time-period when we've only been even looking at it for 400 years! By comparison (I did the math), it would be like watching Einstein in action for the last 1 min and 13 seconds of his life (and having never heard of him or met him before), and deducing from it that he was a Nobel Physicist, a patent clerk, an agnostic Jew, the discoverer of General Relativity, and wore a blue checkered shirt on the day before his 7th birthday.
There's no way you could hazard anything more than a guess at such things! when you have only observed for 1/10^-8 of the time-frame!
Rather - with a tad more humility about the observational prowess of homo sapiens, I side with a Wendell Berry Poem I just read:
“On the Theory of the Big Bang as the Origin of the Universe” **
I.
What banged?
II.
Before banging
how did it get there?
III.
When it got there
where was it?
Beef #2:
I just realized the other day just to what degree 'science' (and by this i mean the body of knowledge thus far 'discovered' via the scientific method: empirical observation, hypotheses testing, etc) fit's the bill of being a religion. That is, when we look, sociologically, at the role a religion has in a given society, we see, among other things, that it is a body of knowledge and/or narratives that the adherent relies upon to explain the so-called 'big questions' of life. Namely, Where did the world come from, why does it exist, what is my role in it, etc. Science is happy to offer an answer to these questions, and like many religions offers itself as a foundation in which to ground all understanding and experience. Now, whereas a strict evolutionary stance does - as many christian apologists from Lewis on have noted - restrict consciousness to only being a tool to aid species survival, and not - as many scientific philosophers seem to negelct - an ability to truly apprehend the fundamental nature of the universe (itself an onto-theological claim), would seemingly lead all those who adhere to science qua a religion into a sisyphean worldview at best, the advancement of the medical sciences and tele-communication have allowed most scientific believers to re-adopt ('re' because this belief crashed and burned the first time around. cf. WWI) a science-is-making-the-world-better as their existential telos.
sorry, that sentence is impossibly multi-clausal. what can I do.
Anyway - what i am getting at, is NOT that science is just one religion among others. Because, of course, the claims it makes are indeed a wee bit more helpful than some of the claims of other religions. BUT I just think it would be helpful to realize the similarities between how our culture treats science, and how other cultures treat religion. Simply so that we don't swallow it all hook-line and sinker.
'cause, following that metaphor - you get caught and die.
**Hat tip to Zac Chastain for the Berry poem.
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