Thing Two

Now for my second lesson of the day.

It relates to Biology. Now, I'm sure I've mentioned before that I am totally and 100% not a math or science person. I am an English/Philosophy/Religion type of person. I want to be a writer, an artist.

There have always been two things that bother me about science classes. First of all, I don't mind telling you that I am religious. Actually spiritually Christian might be a better term, I dunno. Also see "pantheism" and "Diest." I go by Emerson's essay about nature in which he says that nature is where he finds God. All that stuff, right? I'm just telling you this so you see where I'm coming from sitting in a Bio class.

So I believe in God and I believe in science. Evolution makes sense to me. But there are some things I obviously don't believe, like that everything came from nothing. To me, that doesn't work. I don't believe that God waved a magic wand and created everything, but I don't believe that He isn't anywhere in the picture, either.

Now the second thing that bugs me about science is that I know that half of what we believe today is probably wrong. Like a few hundred years ago when everybody thought that Earth was flat and that the sun revolved around the Earth. These things were accepted as fact, and now we look at those beliefs and we laugh. We think, "how ridiculous!" But that's really what they believed, just like there are things that we really believe today.

So these two things have always turned me off about science. And I was trying to explain the former one to my friend last night while I was reading my Biology chapter for class today. This friend--we'll call him "Ryan"--is first of all a science major, and second of all one of those people who get a great kick out of contradicting everything you say just to make you mad, while pretending they just want to "debate."

There is nothing that I hate more than people who do this. It is so annoying, and I have two guy friends who do that. Ryan describes it as, "I just like to play devils advocate, stimulate debate!" But it's not a debate if you take an opposite side just to argue to be annoying, obviously.

Now in this case he really did believe what he was saying, so I'll give him credit for that. But Ryan likes to try to convince me that religion is stupid and that it's illogical of me to adhere to it, because I'm just "blindly following what I learned when I was young." In other words, he gets very insulting and condescending about it and likes to question your mental capacities. It's really quite annoying.

But he made a fatal mistake in his arguments last night, I learned today. He told me that he can prove that the world began by electric charges and all this other stuff because of this that and the other scientific information. Now what irked me about this was more the second point that I made earlier, that I know half of these theories and whatnot will be proven wrong later. So I stopped the argument before I got really mad because like I said, Ryan never concedes to anybody making any logical point, he just keeps arguing for the sake of being annoying for his own amusement.

So I was iffy about Biology. I'm not good at science and I have trouble accepting some of these things, especially since I'm no scientist and can't argue the specifics of what is right and what is probably wrong, just that history proves that a lot of it is rubbish or way off the mark. But my professor made two excellent points that set me totally at rest today, without me even having to ask her about them.

Firstly she said to us, if there is any one thing that I think you need to know, that I want you to walk away with from this class, it is this: scientific theories are NOT proven. That is impossible. They are generally accepted as true, but they are NOT proven.

She went on to explain things like "the world is flat" theory and theories about germs and things like that, that were accepted as true but that scientists later on realized were either totally incorrect, or that just weren't totally correct and need to be modified.

The second thing that she pointed out, later on, was that while there are some people who try to tell you that science is the only way to look at things, *MOST* scientists feel that science is only *ONE* of the three ways to make sense of the world around us, the other two being Religion and Art. She said that most people look at the world with a view that is blended from all three of these, and that all are important.

So it looks like Biology might be OK this year after all. It's still going to be hard and I'm definitely going to have to work hard at it, but having a teacher who seems pretty rational and who addressed these two things in her first lecture just might make it OK after all.

I know these two blogs were pretty long, but sometimes I just have a lot to say!! I want to be a writer after all, remember? :)