Light of Science

The Light of Science

Science.  It’s a new concept for a very old set of tools, only recently brought together.  It’s a worldview, a way of looking at the world.  It is a way of asking questions.  But we have been using those tools since we first climbed out of the trees and started banging rocks together to see what would happen.

Science is, specifically, a way to understand the world that we see.  It is a worldview.  Flamekeeping encompasses this worldview and this toolbox, seeing it as the best way we have of understanding the world around us.  Science is of the Bright Flame, encompasses the Bright Flame.

We are the Universe, trying to understand itself.  Scientific inquiry is the best set of tools we have for that study at the moment.  Without it, we have nothing more than random trial and error.

Flamekeeping is of science.  Issues of spirituality and religion are of the Dark Flame, while scientific inquiry falls into the Bright.  They deal with different sides of the same questions.  Both deal with how we relate with each other, how we see the world.  But Bright and Dark are different.  The questions of the Dark involve the whys, the feelings and the responses.  The Bright involves the whats and the hows.  Both speak to our meaning, but they do so in different ways.  When we try to use one to speak in the wrong way, we pervert the very meaning of what we’re using.  Science can’t see what’s hidden in the Dark, and religion cannot re-illuminate what’s already in the Bright.

We need science.  We need the viewpoint, the toolbox.  If we do not move, we fall into stasis.  The Universe cannot understand itself better if it’s Hands and Eyes stop touching, stop looking.  We are the Universe.  We are the Hands and Eyes that the Universe has here.  We must use what tools we have to look, to see.  To touch.  To understand what we can, and strive when we cannot.

There may be others.  But there is never another with our viewpoint.  No one else has your eyes, your hands.  Each of us builds together into a great and amazing Whole.  Each of us does as individuals what no one else can do.  The combination can create miracles.

Without the scientific toolbox, we cannot grow the same way as we can with it.  It is a toolbox, nothing more.  A way of looking at things.  But it is a way of looking at things that works.  Unless and until we find a better way, it is a set of tools we should use as best we can.

Without it, we may as well bang some rocks together and see if anything happens.  Because without the scientific toolbox, that’s all we have.