Opus 2022-306 Thought Walks: It Started with the Clouds: Part 2 of 4, Welcome, Straw Man

3.  From there my mind wanders again.  This time I am thinking about how intricate the universe is and how everything works together in such harmony.  I wonder how people can reject the idea of God and creation and I drift into my first Plato dialogue of the morning.

I am in a discussion and my straw man, call him Tares, asks me how I can reconcile evil in the world with a belief in a good God.  After a discussion of the place of free will and being made in the image of God we get to a place where I ask myself a question that I can’t answer.  Oh, I can give an answer but even I am not satisfied with how complete it is.  Since I need to be honest with myself and Tares, I confess that I don’t have the answer now but I sure that somewhere in eternity I will find it.  He is obviously not satisfied with that.  In disgust he says, “How can you believe something that does not answer all the questions?”  

That is a good question and I have an answer for that too.  Isn’t it wonderful how these Plato dialogues work so well?  Using a technique I learned from other teachers, I answered his question with questions of my own.

“Do you believe in science?” I ask.  Since I am the author of this discussion he falls into the trap and answers, “Oh course I do.  What does that have to do with anything?”

Everything.

What most laymen who were not paying attention in 8th grade don’t remember is the scientific method.  Even when I taught history I had nothing but praise for the scientific method.  It is based on two rocks.  One rock is the belief that the laws of the universe are consistent.  The other rock is that there is always something you don’t know.  This leads to two bits of method.  First, you start with a question, a hypothesis.  Then you proceed to try to prove or disprove your statement.  Either way you learn something.  If you find that your hypothesis stands the test of experiment and evidence then you don’t stop and say, THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED.  No, you ask what that points out that you don’t know.  You assume there is something you don’t know.  You live with the reality that there are some things you will never know.

Think about all the “settled science” over the years.  Things like you can’t travel faster than the speed of sound.  We moved from Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein to Max Plank.  We have possibly gone beyond and I probably missed steps in between.  The point is that science always assumes the field is bigger than they are.  

This is the reason I can believe in science.  That is genuine science I am talking about, not the political grant seeking that is masquerading as science today.  It is why science and Christianity go well together.  Both are based on the concept of truth and the eternal questioning.  For science it is “How?”  For Theology it is more often “Why?”  But in both cases you never reach the end of the sequence.  Modern scientists are often little more than pagan necromancers or medieval alchemists.  


To be continued...

homo unius libri