Science Vs. God

jelewis8 — Tue, 10 May 2005 18:57:19 +0000

Oh My God particles are so named ironically because science’s big accomplishment (besides the atom bomb and the vaccuum cleaner) has been the eradication of God from the scientific discourse. It’s not God per se that bothers us, it’s the idea that God could be responsible for all this nonsense that we call science and reality and being that we find utterly bothersome and eminently unbelievable. How could God create such and such particles, or these elements, or those multi-cellular organisms? If He is God, then it follows that He is infinite, omnipresent, and ipso facto a Being unlike anything that has to do with matter. God has no place in science precisely because He is God, because he is not matter, not reality, not the slab of existence we call life. Science deals with the cold hard facts, the truisms, the axioms, and laws of nature and the design of reality. God is none of these, nor does His theoretical hand belong in any of them.
God is okay when left in the spiritual realm. Let the mumbo-jumbo believers posit the unverifiable from the pulpit. Matter is the domain of science, not a being beyond the natural order of things. And matter takes precedence over non-matter, being over superbeing, this over the other.
Or so we’ve pretty much been brought up to believe.
Yet when we curse, it’s not as if a “buddhadamned” works to instill righteous indignation in the recipient’s ears. “Jesus Christ” is an epithet more often than it is the name of a historical figure who claimed to be God. One could say cursing is the essence of dirt and matter (what do you think shit is?), since it exemplifies, characterizes, and personifies the crudity and baseness, indeed the very foundation of existence. Why do we marry the crudeness of matter to the so-called scientific invalidity of God? Why do we hasten to express our disdain, disgust, and antipathy at life in terms of the divine? Is it a complex historical human psycho-dependence on the very things we have attempted to leave behind in our attempt to discover the infinite, a pseudo-Freudian spiritual wet dream that conjures distant memories of a past time where wonder hadn’t been replaced by reason? Perhaps it is reflexive, like muscle action in anticipation of a blow. Natural. Instinctive. Life affirming.
There is something divine here. Something that sits in the spaces between the elementary particles. Not empty space, not a vaccuum of reality. But something not quite of this world, either. The infinite surrounds the finite, and our very being is infused with it.
And Science can’t explain a bit of it.

Global Warming Alert

jelewis8 — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 21:31:34 +0000

D’you ever notice how warm weather brings out the best and worst in women’s fashions? I’m not talking about runway shows featuring women wearing feathered boas or candy-striped trash cans or leather S&M-wear posing as pajamas…no, I’m referring to every day women’s fashion, the kind that makes some (most) guys turn and look twice and three times, just in case a vital piece of that clothing should suddenly find itself wanting in tensile strength and snap, leaving its wearer the subject of what can only be accurately described as “going to school naked” syndrome…a girl’s worst nightmare, a guy’s best dream, or something else entirely?
No, of course you don’t notice these things. You’re either a woman yourself and somehow unaware that these colorful and nearly nonexistent fabrics fashion designers call (and charge small countries’ GDP’s for) clothes, are actually being used in quantum physics experiments to see just how small particles can be reduced to; or, you are a woman-respecting, sexually-healthy, avert-mine-eyes-oh-Lord kind of guy who appears to be reading a magazine about Luxembourg trade politics when a gaggle (or is it a google?) of college women traipse by in the most skin-baring outfits they can dig out of their fabric-shrinking closets.
Call me enthusiastically bitter, but I can’t help but wonder just what God intended when he gave us sex drives. On the one hand, the experience of seeing 50% of the population in all the glory of their blooming gardens walking about in the radiance of an early Spring sun is enough to cause one to convert from an atheist to a God-thankin’, red-blooded MAN. On the other, you have to worry about the rapid increases in global climate each year. And I’m not talking about the weather.
It may seem odd that I’m writing this on a cold, miserable, grey, and rainy day in April, but my anticipation of the months to come is hardly deniable, not the least of which is due to a pre-screening I was privy to last week, when I made an unscheduled, unintended auto tour of the Virginia Tech campus. I may have written this before, but I have to reiterate my firm belief that God gave man college campuses as universal epicenters for the proliferation of female hotness.
Being not particularly concerned with global warming, I’m completely in favour of current and future advances in both fashion and quantum physics, nor am I worried that the fusion of the two fields has given us a world in which midriffs and thighs are now noticeably more visible than, oh say, that Mack truck that’s about to hit you because you stopped in the middle of the intersection to stare…DRIVE!!!!
Though maybe I should be.
I’m not misogynistic, nor am I a hedonist. I am all in favour of limiting the amount of skin the fairer sex may show in public. After all, public safety is necessary in a civilized society. But there’s always that pressing conflict: aesthetic appreciation versus lust.
At what point in my looking have I stepped over the line from Song of Solomon Romanticism into raging, flesh-obsessed, sex machine? Where does acknowledgement of the beauty of the female form end and the desire to “get it on” begin? Honestly, I have no friggin’ clue.
I’ve prayed about it (being a God-fearin’ but curve-lovin’ guy) and have yet to receive an answer or an indication. So the age-old story begins anew…Mostly though, this was just a way of relieving the agony of enduring yet another cold and rainy day, proving that Blacksburg is one of those places in the world where Winter maintains a stubborn hold.
Me, I’ve got to get to work reading more about the fascinating field of quantum physics. If I look hard enough, I might just find what I’m looking for.

» Fringe Blog – Writing on Film, Culture, and Things on the Fringe

Science Vs. God

Global Warming Alert