Knowledge gaps, and those things which rule therein

Here are thirteen things Science, as it is, cannot explain.
These things should not exist. But they do.

Scientists believe these are the frontiers of knowledge, to be braved and understood. Critics of secularism believe these are the latest in a growing list of reasons science is fundamentally wrong. Why science can never explain things as well as the Bible does.

Scientists and creationists alike often assert that we, knowing about such things, and such opinions, have a decision to make. It's science vs. the Bible, winner take all. I don't think it's like that at all.

[Thus begins the childhood reflection that had a point initially, but whose structure folded under its own girth and can now be read primarily as a cautionary tale against excess sentiment. Skipping to the conclusion is advised.]

As a child [and, as I think about it, also as a adolescent, teenager, young adult], science was considered by certain family members to be, at worst, the subversions of Lucifer, and, at best, the dangerous and capricious acts of mortal hands.

To watch Nature or Nova or National Geographic with my dad was to court a lecture:

TV: . . . the ground sloth became extinct 10,000 yea--
Dad: Ha! That's about 4 thousand years and seven days too early pal.

Wild America with Marty Stouffer was generally free of evolution talk and hence a demilitarized zone.

The evenings I drew up the courage to ask questions went something like this:

Me: But, dad, what about the dinosaurs?
Dad: What about them son?
Me: Well, didn't they have to live before us? How could we fight a T. Rex? [After I read Jurassic Park 'T. Rex' became 'Velociraptor' and the argument gained power]
Dad: No son, they lived right here with us.
Me: But [and there would be any number of questions to this, the most enlightening of which was] the bible doesn't mention dinosaurs. Does it?
Dad: Sure it does.
Me: Which ones?
Dad: . . . Triceratops.
Me: Where?

I'm still waiting on the answer to that one. The behemoths of Job chapter 40 not bearing any descriptive resemblance to a Triceratops.

My father has a naturally suspicious nature, dubious of the unknown, the novel. He moved here from California because he didn't like being around so many people. Before meeting my mother in Spokane, and striking the bargain of settling down in a town called Elk, Washington, he lived in the more isolated Rathdrum, Idaho. There being no jobs in Rathdrum, he still had to commute to Spokane daily.

Spokane being just larger than the town in California he'd sought to escape.

Here atop our foothill, quarters of miles from our closest neighbor, some twenty miles from any population center, up an imposing private drive with signs warning against entry without prior approval, father is constantly on the lookout for people looking to take his things. People like an easy score, father says. Easy being a half-mile drive up a rutted road to a house that might not even exist, but in which, upon discovery, one would find two large dogs, heavily dead-bolted door, guns everywhere and, you know, almost nothing of value.

My father is not a stupid person. There are times when his intelligence frightens me. My mother isn't dumb either, nor is her youngest brother, her sister, father. Nor are my dad's brothers, sisters.

They're believers.

They watch the news, see death upon death, murder upon murder and believe people are trying to kill them. They listen to talk radio and believe that taxes should be lowered, and that our borders must be closed, our language preserved from swarthy encroach [my father being, himself, half Mexican]. They believe there is a vast conspiracy against America's collective values, homogeneous as they are. The conspiracy involves faggots and college professors. They see thousands of angry Arabs with guns shouting down America on television and believe, as is suggested, that Islam, as a whole, is out to get us. Us being we, specifically, up our driveway, invisible from the main road. We with our dogs and guns and lack of strategic importance. Terrorism can happen anywhere.

Also, primarily, they listen to their pastors, read the bible's delicate and varied poetry--written by so many hands, re-written by so many more--and they believe.

They believe not only that God is who he says he is, and that God sent Jesus, the word made flesh--part of but also separate from God himself--they believe each word of the bible is utter and immutable, unchanged yesterday, today and tomorrow. Most critically, they believe that this homogenous truth is to be understood literally. They believe, also, as every generation of Christian has before them, that the end times are near. They point to wars and rumors of wars as signal that God's return is nigh.

Against that kind of truth, that juggernaut of prophesy and tradition, and in such dangerous times, the come-lately guess and check uncertainty of science holds little weight. Some people, understandably, are uncomfortable with the ideas that today's truths might be proven wrong in the future.

Yet it is exactly that intellectual nimbleness that scientists (and science fanboys) believe is their great strength. Anything as turgid and inflexible as dogma, religious and otherwise, cannot hope to adjust to change at any speed, let alone at the breathless pace of [technological, population, ethical] expansion in the contemporary world.

Until college this dialogue, this difference of viewpoint, was totally unknown to me. Christians were right, scientists were morons. My World History teacher told us to skip the first three chapters, prehistory to Egypt loosely, because they were anthropological speculation, not history. My biology teacher [runner-up to Bill Nye for that coveted PBS gig] taught evolution but prefaced it the way certain Georgia school districts tried to. It's a well-accepted theory, but still a theory, as such . . . In hindsight it was a brilliant survival strategy within our school district, but the effect on me personally was to view evolution as in direct conflict with the Bible's teaching, varied as it was.

[The conclusion, more or less, begins here]

The perceived insolubility between science and [ostensibly, my] religion didn't end until I met some very intelligent and very religious people in college. They suggested that the faith of my parents and the science of most everyone else wasn't in conflict.

The Bible, really, has nothing to say about science and science, insofar as it concerns itself with only the experiential, only those concrete things we can touch and see everyday, has nothing to say about the religious experience.

Whatever tension exists, then, stems from an arrogance on both sides. On one hand, it is a reach to suggest that a book written between 3000+ and 1500 years ago can still tell us things about how our world works [most people agree, after all, that Aristotle's physics suck, and I trust him more than whoever wrote Joshua]. Similarly, it's an indefensible leap of logic to assert that not being able to observe something [i.e. God] is not sufficient to exclude it entirely. Such people overreach their explanatory realm.

It is equally dishonest, intellectually, to say, "this book says X, and this book is true, so X is true," as it is to say, "We have not observed Y, therefore Y cannot exist." Both these assertions can be defended the same way.

To "this book is true" and "Y cannot exist" just say:

"Prove it."

Of course that's never good enough for hardline anti-scientists and staunch atheist/secularists, but really, no one could hope to reform either group anyway.

The experiential world is not a thing to be taken on faith. It can be observed, and understood. This process is continual, and ongoing. Everything that is known was once unknown. Those things we can know will, one day, be known. Those things that remain, then, being not of this world--unknowable--are matters of faith and carry no less power.

So let us rejoice

and concern ourselves accordingly.