Tag Archives: belief

“I Believe In Science” (Wait! Let me Explain)

bttf

“Doc” Brown (Christopher Lloyd) in a scene from the 1985 movie “Back to the Future”

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For years, the concept of “science” as been politicized, as if it were possessed ONLY by one political party, as if the other political party and its members were still in the literal stone age.

Worse, this party says “I believe in science” as if science were a theology or philosophy. A Christian would say “I believe in Jesus” because the Bible says belief alone in Jesus is significant and leads to eternal life.

But how can you “believe” in science? What is science?

According to the Understanding Science page at the UC Museum of Paleontology at the University of California at Berkeley (just to assure my critics that I’m not citing from some far-right, dodgy, unintellectual source):

Science is both a body of knowledge and a process. In school, science may sometimes seem like a collection of isolated and static facts listed in a textbook, but that’s only a small part of the story. Just as importantly, science is also a process of discovery that allows us to link isolated facts into coherent and comprehensive understandings of the natural world.

I tend to reframe that definition to say that science is a standardized, methodical examination of anything in the observable universe. It’s a lot of asking questions. It’s also continuing to test information believed to be substantiated even decades ago. Nothing is static in science. We’re learning new things and upgrading our understanding of our world daily.

The Berkeley source also says:

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The Cherry Blossoms Are Blooming

garden

© John Brand

I used to hate gardening, but that was before. Now I find it gives me a sense of peace. I remember that he liked gardening. He found it relaxing, even in the heat of the day, which used to drive me crazy.

I wear his old gardening hat. The brim shields my face and removes the glare from my eyes.

It’s springtime, the season of life. The cherry blossoms are in bloom. I have to clean them up of course, but now instead of just being work, it’s a duty and a privilege. I use his old wheelbarrow, the one that reminds me of the difference between belief and faith.

I hadn’t realized how deep his faith ran, while all I had to fall back on was belief and an intellectual’s arguments to defend it.

His death shook me in a way I hadn’t anticipated. It’s tremors disturbed my beliefs and threw me into the deep waters of faith. I drowned in that faith, and rose again like my Dad will someday in the resurrection, just like trees bloom again in the spring.

I wrote this as part of the Sunday Photo Fictioner challenge. The idea is to use the photo above as a prompt to write a piece of flash fiction no more than 200 words long. My word count is 183.

As some of you may know, my Dad died suddenly last Wednesday afternoon. My brother and I have been going through Dad’s things and our Dad never seemed to have thrown away anything. It’s been quite a chore.

But it has let us know our Dad in a way we never really did before. We discovered his passions, his habits, and how he saw his life. Unlike the story above, he wasn’t quite the avid gardener I’ve painted, but in viewing the green and growing things in my parent’s house, and now it’s my Mom’s house, I find hope for the future, a transition from belief to faith.

Oh, in the body of the story, I included a link to an essay I wrote based on a parable of a man who pushed a wheelbarrow across a tight rope. I think it is quite illuminating.

To read more stories based on the prompt, go to InLinkz.com.