Science, intelligence and liberal education.

Science is an endeavor of the mind, heart and the hands that seeks to derive from our confusing experiences some order and underlying commonality to the world we inhabit.

More than opinions, or interpretations, the facts of material existence have transformed our understanding of the earth, the cosmos, life and our own capacity to improve or degrade the societies in which we coexist.

As an often transparent, methodical and skeptical task, the knowledge gained from scientific inquiry is open to scrutiny. Indeed, without scrutiny and challenges to the assumptions that an authority makes about the subjects that we can investigate, the value of the knowledge we gain is diminished.

Of all the forms of knowledge that since the ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, Greeks and Chinese until today that human cultures have discovered and nourished, rational and mathematical science has upset the conventional and comfortable beliefs we have about other people, our planet and tour universe. The price of technology, like scientific knowledge that spills out of newfound technical capacities, is discomfort.

Added to the anxiety and uncertainty of being a limited human in a frighteningly indifferent world, scientific findings have challenged us. Since the time of the Renaissance, discoveries of mathematicians, physicists, chemists, biologists and geologists have continually shifted human beings from the center of their childish day dream world of cushioned entitlements. Instead, events have pushed us unceremoniously into the adult world. With this shove may also emerge a healthy realization of our dual capacities for either wonder or detrimental interference in existence. As a free person of conscience, you may believe any credo, but you deny uncertainty at your peril.  

We persist in our endeavors to outwit the follies of our own making only so far as we are willing to confront our idols, examine our trained incapacities, and bear witness in order to always give voice to a sense that we need the cosmos far more than the cosmos needs us.

JVS.

April 27, 2006

325 words

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