Debunked

I don't believe in science.

I don't believe in test tubes and beakers. I don't believe in hypotheses and theorems. I don't believe in the sterile, stagnant, depersonalized chemical understanding of our universe. I've seen too much so-called science to know better.

This offends some of my atheist friends, who believe that whether or not we agree on God, we ought to at least agree on science. It is, they argue, provable. It is demonstrable. It can be replicated. That's what makes science, well...science. But what I don't understand is how so many people can look through a microscope and see science when clearly...

It's art.

Isn't that what draws scientists to the sciences in the first place? The beauty of it all. That's why we all love looking through a microscope, or a telescope, or a kaleidoscope. It's about the intricacy of things and the way they come together. The way one cell knows just where it fits and seeks out its place. The way a fertilized egg separates and begins to grow anew life. The delicate patterns on the leaves that are unseen with the naked eye. The way you can take two gases - hydrogen and oxygen - and put them together just right to create water, a liquid. 

It's the way one flower knows to be yellow while another turns toward purple. The way a single seed makes a giant tree with thousands of replications of itself embedded into its leafy DNA. The way there's always a rainbow somewhere, whether our naked eye can see it.

It's how the earth knows to spin on its axis at a "perfect 23" (an approximation, I know, but such it is). how the sun comes at just the right time, for just long enough, from just far enough away and yet, close all the same. The way it shines off the moon when it hides its face so still, we can see. The way the stars draw near and they seem so celestial yet so...intimate.

It's these kinds of things that draw us to science. They pull us in, playing on our imaginations and our intellect all at the same time. We want to know how something works. Or why it works. Or how to make it work. We want to figure out this or that. We want to take the pieces apart so we can put them back together. And we've developed the processes, the machinery, the methods to do just that; we call it science.

But all this stuff, the world around us? It's less machinated than magical. It's less methodical than mystical. It's less science...and more art.

Which is why, I guess, it's easy for me to not believe in science. To me, science is religion; they are one and the same. The common ground between an atheist and a Christian is not science, as so many of my unbelieving friends like to argue; it's art.

Science, religion....this is art theory. This is how we explain the beauty of the world around us. This is how we come to understand it. This is the paradigm by which we interpret what we see and hear and know. This is the lens through which we see Creation. This is how we figure out where things came from, how things got to be the way they are.

Science, while sometimes appreciating the incredible intricacies of the universe, exists primarily to find an explanation. Because science begins with the given, that things are how they are. Religion, on the other hand, begins with the Giver, which is the reason for all of this, and finds itself appreciating the incredible intimacy of the universe. 

Two sides of the same coin, you see. Two ways of coming at the same set of questions. It only matters where you begin.

I know, personally, many people who will tell you that you can't argue with science. That science is objective and all this other stuff...all this other stuff is subjective. But that's just not the case. In this incredible, beautiful, intimate, intricate, mysterious, mystical, awe-inspiring universe in which we live (and we all agree on that; it's what drives our questions), faith...science...it is all subjective.

Because it's art.

And whether you start with the given or the Giver, what we're doing here is nothing more than art theory.