Life doesn’t always have answers. Some of life’s greatest mysteries have been solved, yes, but many more have not. The human drive to seek out new knowledge, find answers, and lay to rest false ideas is a grand one. It’s a drive that will hopefully take us to the stars, and beyond. However, like any other human drive, it can be subverted and perverted into something that isn’t… useful. In fact, downright destructive.
I was reminded of this by a couple of examples. One, the whole mess of ‘settled science’ which is really shallow data masquerading as ‘an answer’ and that irks me. I was raised to ask questions, of pretty much anything. Not just science, things that some people say ‘people like me’ don’t question. Like the Bible. I was raised a fundamentalist, with a scientist’s heart. Think about that for a few moments. I don’t know if any of my blog readers are of the bent that can’t reconcile those two, but if you are, I hope I just broke you a little. Because it’s only in breaking that conviction that we know the answers, can you begin to find the truth. See, I believe that scientific inquiry is the way to reveal the face of God in the world around us. Therefore, to honor my faith, I must follow scientific methods. Seeking truth is important to me, and that doesn’t mean setting on a belief, pulling my feet up, and stubbornly ignoring that it’s not exactly grounded in reality while the water rushes in through the holes. Unfortunately, too much of science as a community these days isn’t practicing actual science, as opposed to, say, religion. Sorry, but if the data doesn’t support it, it’s faith, not science. Which is ok. If your faith can be proven out as mentally helpful in other ways. But don’t say it’s science if it’s not.
Maybe this is why I find conspiracy theories so dang annoying. We know, if we stop and think logically, that some big important secret that could, say, affect the lives of the families of those who are supposedly ‘holding the secret’ is unlikely to have remained a secret for any length of time. But, being human, we see that we don’t have the answer. Joe, over there, might have the answer, so we squint at him in suspicion and fume a little. Someone gets cancer. Surely, in our modern medical world, we should already have solved this little problem. Cancer must have a cure! Someone’s got to know! Find something to blame, quick, so we can ban it and then stop worrying about cancer! Baby powder!!!11!!eleventy!
Only that’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works. Sometimes the questions are far more complex than we realize when we first start asking them. Sometimes there isn’t an easy answer. Most of the time, it’s not just one answer. Why do we see more cancer now than we did? Well, because we live longer isn’t a satisfactory answer. It’s a little glib and pat. We can, and we do, treat cancers now more than we ever could before. That’s just not good enough, because we still lose that fight more often than we’d like. So quack doc… um, naturopaths and chiropractors and ‘traditional’ medicine comes along and offers to sell us the answers the vast conspiracy hides from us, and if it’s expensive then hey, you’re worth it girl!
And we fall for it. We spend billions of dollars every year on ‘nutritional supplements’ and ‘alternative medicine’ because we desire answers, and we aren’t happy with the ones we’re given by the ‘medical establishment’ so we set out looking for ones that make us feel better. Don’t look at the data, it’s all about how we feel, right? If I ate that and it made me feel bad, I should totally never eat it again. If I started taking that supplement, and I started eating better, exercising, and drinking more water, and I start to feel better, it was totally all the supplement and I should buy more. If skeletal remains of ancient peoples don’t show signs of heart disease because all the soft tissue is gone, I should totally eat ‘just like them’ and that will keep me from having heart problems. Nevermind that mummified remains of the era show the same disease and disorders that plague modern human bodies… someone said they had the answer, and I wanted to hear that answer. So now I’m sticking my fingers in my ears and saying LALALALALALA when the questions arise.
If you ignore it long enough, it’ll go away, right? Right?
Maybe I’m asking too many questions here. But I can’t help it. When I’m presented with an answer, I immediately want to tip my head to the side a little and ask more questions. Dig a little deeper. Puzzle over the ways and means the answer came into being. Like the Elephant’s Child, I’m rarely satiated. Idealogues hate that. Be they religious, or ‘scientific’ they want to cling to their answers and never have to endure the uncertainty and risk of asking questions that might break their precious answers. I sympathize, a bit. It’s easier, more comfortable, to have answers. Having more questions than answers is exhausting. Sometimes you just want to take what someone’s telling you as gospel and not question it too hard. I’ve done that. Darn near ended me.
Keep asking. Don’t settle. And if they’re selling it to you? It’s not an answer.
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5 responses to “The Human Desire for Answers”
This may just be my favorite KIND of column: take what you KNOW to be true, compare it with what you are TOLD to be true, and see how they match up.
It’s a determination to seek truth that I personally find to be paradoxically based on faith: Faith that the truth WILL be found, if I seek it; faith that the truth, WHEN found, will be liberating, not constraining; faith that the truth exists, and that I’m strong enough to take it.
Wasn’t always this strong.
I can remember hiding away some of my ‘told-it-was-true’ beliefs because I was afraid they couldn’t stand up to scrutiny.I wasn’t able to live without them, but I didn’t trust them enough to let them speak for themselves.
As it turns out, when I did apply scientific method as applicable, and logical examination (which I believe is ALWAYS applicable) I didn’t die, and the things that DID fall, just happened to be those things which had their basis in a cultural preference, which sometimes generated a denominational split, but never really a crisis of faith (at least for me; YMMV).
It’s not rare for people to ask questions about matters of faith, and it’s also not rare for those with DEEP faith to encourage that. Even in science fiction! Read the scene in the Belisarius opening novel, “An Oblique Approach.” (It’s Chapter 20, by the way; I just spent the last 15 minutes looking it up.)
Those without deep faith, when questioned, respond with “Because I said so! Go to your room!” That’s expressed in a slightly different matter by people wearing formal attire: “It’s settled science.” But it means EXACTLY the same thing: don’t ask questions, kid, it’s a threat to my authority.
Good start to the day. What day IS it, anyway?
I like Einstein’s quotation, “I want to know god’s thoughts…”
Yes! And some of Science is like that, looking under the hood at how He did it. Elegant engineering everywhere.
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