In response to Evan Jones' earlier comment: As a scientist, I'm afraid I cannont set aside the rational part of me--even for a moment--to focus on the mystic or spiritual. Science deals with words and ideas that have concrete meaning. Spirituality deals with words and ideas whose only meaning is what we give them. And we each seem to give them whatever meaning we feel comfortable with.

When my advisor tells me to go extract some plants, structurally identify a new metabolite or run principal components analysis on our data, I know for certain what he wants me to do. When my brother tells me to park on an incline so the gas tank doesn't leak as bad or check the oil--not only do I know exactly what he means, but I understand the rational behind the advice.

But when somebody tells me to "find your inner self" or "open your heart to Christ," I have no idea what they mean. Frankly, I suspect nobody does. These are nonsense phrases we make up to fill our lives with purpose. It'd be like if my brother told me to "speaker the transmission." It's ridiculous--sure, the individual words have meaning of their own, but you can't just string random words together and arrive at a coherent thought.

So until somebody can inject the spiritual with some concrete vocabulary, I'll have to stick with the rational. The rational may not be able to provide every answer I'm looking for and that's fine--mysteries are fun. But fabricating a creation myth or some supernatural spiritual force to explain away the problem of free will isn't going to get me any closer to a real answer than fabricating data will get me closer to my degree.

Posted by Hey Paul   |   Thursday, December 16, 2004