I do not hate science

Nor do I think STEM is a vast communist conspiracy.  Nor do I pine for the good old days of Medieval medical treatments and outhouses.  As I've said plenty of times, I'll forever be grateful that I was born on the leeward side of the invention of toilet paper.

I also don't hate scientists.  My late father-in-law, a wonderful man, was a chemist.  Several of my friends over the years have been in the field of science or medicine.  Two teach or have PhDs in science - physics and chemistry.  And I'm personally fascinated by science, from geography and geology to astronomy (though on a very amateurish level to be sure). 

I say all that because a comment that was made on this post some years ago.  I sort of hope it was a comment meant for a good laugh or perhaps a bit of facetiousness.  Because the suggestion that I hate science, scientists and regard STEM as a vast Commie Pinko plot is simply bone headed wrong.  I obviously don't.

Do I think it's time to rethink our modern approach to science in light of religion?  Sure.  And I'm not talking about the laughable 'follow the science' or 'settled science' buzz phrases in modern political discourse.  Nor do I mean science as it is often misused in the atheist community as some trump card that once and for all proves there is no God.

I do mean that even when we reject such things as political or atheistic misuse of science, we can sometimes still be dragged into a rather material, secular vision of the world nonetheless. Oh we still speak of demons and angels and miracles, especially on Sundays.  But through the week, we can often seem as beholden to the secular spin on science and scholarship as the alpha and omega of reality as any devotee at a Richard Dawkins seminar.

That's also not to say we need to swing to the other extreme and assume I can't find the TV remote because a devil (or perhaps, on a better day, an angel) hid it form me.  Or think the best thing to do when my wife is having a heart attack is to break out the incense and pray that an angel appear to heal her..  Throughout most of history, believe it or not, people may have attributed more to the spiritual than was warranted, but people understood there was a natural part of the world as well.

It isn't as if you could go to a farmer in the darkest of ages and see him sitting next to a field, waiting for God to send angels to grow the crops.  Farmers worked on ways to plant and harvest, to fertilize and increase yields since the beginning of farming.  They understood that there were things you had to do within the world because that's life.  They may not have gotten molecules and DNA or genetics, but they understood that the best way to avoid getting trampled by a horse wasn't to stand in its way and pray that an angel appear and stop the horse, but rather to step aside and get out of the way.

I merely think that we've learned so much about how the universe works, we sometimes forget that the omnipresent 'Invisible' part of creation is still there.  I saw a scientist teaching science for my son's coursework a couple years ago.  Lab coat and everything.  It was part of a Christian curriculum. When teaching about the definition of science that begins every science class in the history of science classes, he used the example of people once upon a time believing you got sick because of demon possession, but now we know it's because of viruses or other infections.

My point is, perhaps saying 'she's sick because of demon possession' misses a few natural marks.  But maybe saying we found the virus means it obviously has nothing to do with anything but the virus misses another mark as well.

As we realize we're at a sort of flatlands right now in terms of leaps forward STEM-wise, and as it becomes clear that there are some problems associated with our 'tech in the morning, tech in the evening, tech at suppertime' culture, maybe it's time to rethink things.  Maybe try to find ways to rethink many elements of our faith that some today have jettisoned because 'Science.'  Perhaps focus on the spiritual senses of the Invisible creation a little more often than just those famous Five physical senses. 

And in the process, perhaps stop following the world around and waiting for the latest theory that we then assume demands we rethink the Church's worldview because Science!. Take, for example, one of the things I got while sojourning with the Orthodox that I will forever hold dear. 

During a Q&A, an Orthodox bishop was asked what the official Orthodox approach to Evolution is.  He said there isn't one.  The POV of the Orthodox is that if, by God's grace, the world is around in 2000 years, then people at that point will look back on our time and barely recognized 90% of everything we've come up with over the last couple centuries.  Either the theories will long before have been debunked, or new scientific revolutions will have completely upended our understanding of things in such a way that in 2000 years they'll barely be recognizable. Oh, there will be some that will still be accepted in 2000 years.  But it's the height of hubris to think it all will, or even most will.  Especially as we watch things only recently floated as obviously true that are now being thrown out the window. 

That's all I think.  As I sit on my computer and type for the Internet, the trick is to remember that the Visible is the small part of the small universe in a big, wide Creation.  The big part - the "Invisible" part we say in the Creed - is the big part of Creation. And the important part.  Understanding how a computer or nervous system or nuclear fusion works doesn't change that.  Any more than developing better irrigation methods did so thousands of years ago. 

Training ourselves to remember that the two - Religion and Science - are not exclusive, and that perhaps we've become a bit too secular in our approach to science  in light of revelation (or revelation in light of science), might be something worth thinking on.  Especially as we see more and more Christians abandoning the Faith because, in the end, they believe that God stuff went out with the coffee makers because obviously it did.  No hating science about it.