Thoughts On Science And The Supernatural

Seven Rambling Paragraphs While Approaching Christmas 2004…
I hereby confess, I believe in things that are inaccessible to empirical science, things that scientists, no matter how smart they are, will ever be able to wrap their omniscient tentacles around. These things don’t fit under a magnifying glass. You can’t track ‘em from outer space. And laser beams and X-Ray machines can never penetrate them.

Call it supernatural. Call it metaphysical. Call it God. Call it what ever you want to call it, but science will never be able to reduce, for example, the concept of beauty to numbers, formulas, systematic predictability, and shove it into a robot-like computer. Science will never be able to weigh and measure the feelings I have for my family and friends, heat ‘em up, cool ‘em down, and slice ‘em into a countable number of pieces.

Science will never be able to throw its empirical rope around ideas like optimism, pessimism, adventure, purpose, hopes, dreams, and/or some people’s relentless pursuit of them. Science will never be able to understand or explain the creative process of writing a simple poem, an eloquent essay, the lyrics to a ballad, the notes to which they’re attached, a symphony, or an opera.

The Girl From Ipanema?
Science will never fully appreciate or understand The Girl From Ipanema, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, Rhett and Scarlett, Bogie and Bacall, Butch and Sundance, Ms. Saigon, Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera, Knute Rockne, George Halas, Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth, Roger Bannister, Bill Russell, Mohammed Ali, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Little Prince, and yet I truly believe in every single one of them. To me they’re every bit as real, (maybe more real) than E = MC square, or Newton’s laws of physics. *

They are the kinds of things that make life interesting, colorful, meaningful, fulfilling, and eventually…worth living. They are, for me, the locations in which the supernatural resides. And science, in its wildest dreams, will never be able to reduce them, understand them, or explain any one of them…empirically. That’s why I personally have no problem believing in the supernatural, the metaphysical, God, or what I like to call just plain…Good.

Creationism or Evolutionism?
Does that mean that I believe in creationism instead of evolution? Absolutely not! I believe that creationism is a creative, poetic, literary, and religious interpretation of how life here on earth began, while evolution is a scientific interpretation of the same subject. I also believe that both of them have their place, that I can fit both of these concepts into my brain, understand them in the way they’re intended to be understood, without being schizophrenic, without insulting either position, and without taking sides. And if anyone would care to explain why I cannot do this, I’m all ears.


*P.S. (I must admit however, that the processes of developing these miraculous pieces of hard core scientific data were certainly creative acts in themselves.)