I'm sad for youby Mischief Maker 10/01/2011, 12:44am PDT
ndd wrote:
Since you seem to have difficulty seeing through my evasive style of communication, I'll spell this one out: I stopped siding with the strict materialists a while ago; aside from the whole "dead to wonder" thing, they are dicks and sometimes unconscionably shallow.
Last Christmas I bought this CD for my niece and was telling some people excitedly about it, singing this song as an example. Their response was a wistful look and comments about how I was taking wonder out of the poor girl's life. I was stunned. On one hand, you have a model of our solar system as a process in motion, a great coalescence of matter into an enormous fusion reaction producing heavy elements, surrounding matter coalescing together into planets whose relative size and distance from this star create radically different worlds, devouring smaller matter that passes through their orbit. Though mostly clear, there is still debris from the blazing birth of our solar system wandering into the orbit of our world, caught up in the gravity, then streaking in a flaming bolt across our sky in a dazzling display of the wonders of our material world.
On the other hand, you have the "wondrous" explanation where you lie to a kid and say, "every once in a while one of those stars hanging up in the sky comes loose from its moorings and *thbbbt!* falls down."
While I agree that your friends are shallow dicks, I can't believe that you would prefer the rather bland and pedestrian myths of "spirituality" to the kaleidoscopic wonders of the material world. What Fairy's glen is more awe-inspiring than a stellar nursery? What haunted house is more mysterious and terrifying than the ocean abyss? How dull is the numerology of Kabbalah next to the code of the DNA molecule, where the letters form more than just words, but the very structural skeleton of the molecule itself? How boring is past-life regression hypnosis compared to hubble telescope images where you are literally looking millions of years back in time? Demonic possession? Big Whoop when you consider that every single cell in your body has an invasive aerobic bacterium whose symbiosis with our own cells is so strong that bits of our DNA are shared between both our genomes. The ice queen bringing winter storms with a wave of her magic wand is not nearly as fascinating as the ice nucleating bacteria that grow surface structures mimicking the shape of ice molecules to hasten the crystallization of freezing temperature water. What's so neat about fire-breathing dragons compared to life in oceanic thermal vents that have created an ecosystem completely cut off from the energy of the sun? You see dead people? Materialists can listen to the very echoes of the birth of the known universe itself!
Even your own body is a thing of wonder! Harnessing fire has been a part of our species for so long that our brains and bodies are built around it, our digestive tract ideal for ingesting foods cooked with fire, our minds fascinated by the sight of flames that would scare off more sensible animals. Want a more descriptive name for our species than Humans? We are Fire Apes!
The public impression of scientists as being cold and emotionless is completely undeserved. Just as Georgia O'Keefe painted hundreds of pictures of a door, driven by passion to examine this mundane object from every conceivable angle, so too is a scientist examining hundreds of corn plants for color abnormalities driven by a passion to understand the process of lateral gene transfer. It is this very passion that science attempts to check through its passionless double-blind methods. Though some individual scientists may affect a cold logical persona for the sake of appearances, this same scientist analyzing specrographic data in raw number form from stellar phenomena is driven by the same passion that made those musicians consider the sound of a viol to be akin to the whining of a trapped soul.
It is this acknowledge of human passion and the humility to set mechanisms in place to prevent that passion from overriding the actual data that is to me the key difference that separates Science from religion and philosophy. Albert Einstein himself, the quintessential face of 20th century genius, the man who threw down the very nature of time, famously battled against the newly emerging field of quantum mechanics with the quote, "God does not play dice," because he just... didn't... feel that it was right, seeing how the random chance quantum mechanics brought to the nature of reality did not jibe with his classical deterministic philosophy. Here was a man whose authority and influence among scientists was a thousand times that of the world's foremost Unitarian minister... and his word had to be disregarded, no matter how passionately believed, because it didn't fit the data.
Cam you blame me for finding it awful that you would perpetuate a mythology that blinds people to the wonders of the natural world, or that I would find it infuriating that you made pronouncements about the nature of the universe based just on your philosophies and gut reactions? Don't let a couple of dicks trying to pretend to jaded and high status chase you from the awesome splendor of the material world into the mundane world of goblins and unicorns.
