I dare you to have a blank mind. Try it. Impossible, right? So, what will occupy your mind? What is occupying your mind? “Pipes,” I’m thinking, “it’s all pipes.”
 
“Huh?”
 
I’m thinking of a Seinfeld episode in which George gets thrown out of the gym for having urinated in the shower. Elaine asks, “Since when is a drain a toilet?” George responds, “It’s all pipes!”*
 
George’s defense, “It’s all pipes,” is the physical fact, but not the social one. The drain in a shower is, as everyone knows, not the toilet, regardless of the interconnectedness of the pipes. But that interconnectedness is undeniable, sort of like that interconnectedness that allowed us to become the dominant human species on the planet and to develop culture, the arts, and the sciences. In a sense, all our ancestors have used whatever drains were available in the pipes of humanity. The result has been human culture in all its diverse forms. You have an occupied mind because of all that went into the common pipes.
 
Is your mind like that of Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet, the one-time lover and protector of Voltaire? Or is it like that of Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, the wife of Antoine Lavoisier? Why do I ask? In a time when women weren’t included in the world of intellectual endeavors, both eighteenth-century women helped to lay the groundwork for the science we know today, and they did so while living very complex lives in times of political and social unrest. Du Châtelet was a genius in any standard of measurement. Pierrette Paulze-Lavoisier was also bright and helped her husband with his chemical experiments in the conservation of matter. Their biographies have been the focus of plays, stories, and films. Both women were bright and insightful. Is your mind like their minds? And do you realize that they demonstrated the interconnectedness of cultural and intellectual pipes?  Remember what I just wrote: “both eighteenth-century women helped to lay the groundwork for the science we know today….” The pipes don’t have to be today’s plumbing network. They can be the pipes of yesteryear, surprisingly interconnected to today’s pipes.
 
Switch gears a moment. According to Michael Tomasselo, “Great apes can imagine the actual content of what others perceive and know” (48).** The point? There’s an interconnectedness among members of a species. For “higher” organisms, such as the primates, it builds a culture because the members “understand” one another. Both du Châtelet and Pierrette Paulze-Lavoisier had the ability to imagine what others perceived and knew. Du Châtelet conversed with some of the best minds of her times, and Marie-Anne knew what knowledge her husband sought and learned a foreign language just to help him connect to intellects in another country. But humans also accomplish much when they aren’t very cooperative, yet, nonetheless interacting. Take Newton and Leibniz, the guys who invented The Calculus. They fought a multi-year intellectual war, but in doing so, had to further develop their ideas, their reasoning, their systems. Much of our math and science are also a product of their conflict. It’s all pipes, interconnected pipes. The good and the bad go into the network of pipes, and somewhere those pipes spill out that which is good and that which is bad: the culture as a whole with all its math, The Calculus, the physics, the chemistry, the universal laws like Conservation of Matter, the rudiments of modern Relativity and quantum mechanics and ideas about action at a distance, and also the misleading philosophies, political and social systems, and cults. All of us put something into the pipes, and sometimes what we put in doesn’t come out until a generation or even generations later. But what goes in does come out.
 
George is right. “It’s all pipes,” that’s what I’m thinking now, “pipes.”  
 
 
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s09pfBEJYHc
 
**Tomasello, Michael. 2019. Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny. Harvard U. Press. 

A little more than a millennium after the Crab Nebula burst on the eyes of humans, people will get to see a predicted nova when V Sagittae, V Sge, rivals Venus in the night sky. It will be 2083, so astronomers Bradley E. Schaefer, Juhan Frank, and Manos Chatzopoulos tell us.* Well, maybe not exactly 2083, but close. The three astronomers say they have a give-or-take value of + or – 16 years. If you’re around in 2083, plus or minus 16 years, look toward Sagitta. Don’t have the patience to keep looking for it over a potential 32 years? Don’t worry. The nightly news anchors, reporters, and astronomers will tell you.   
 
Still, if the astronomers are correct, what they have calculated will surpass the remarkable ancient prediction of an eclipse by Thales in 585 BCE because eclipses are frequently repeated phenomena. Novae occur in different parts of the sky in what previously has been a largely unpredictable set of occurrences. When the Crab Nebula or SN 1987 filled the sky with previously unseen light, night watchers were caught by surprise. The three astronomers from LSU predict with the relative assurance of college football prognosticators who listed the university’s football team as one of the top ten to watch in the 2019 season. Considering the variables, maybe the prediction that V Sge will brighten the sky six decades from now is far more remarkable, especially since LSU almost seemed to be a shoe in to play for the National Championship this coming Monday night.
 
Of course, one might say, “But V Sge is 7,760 plus 750 or minus 460 light years away. What kind of prediction is a prediction about something that already happened. If it blew, it blew over seven thousand years ago. We’ll just be the recipients of photons and neutrinos that after a long journey will reach us in 2083.”
 
And that’s an interesting observation. Those LSU guys are predicting something that already happened, like saying LSU has already won the National Championship. Would that all our predictions could be about something that already happened, like answering the questions on a Jeopardy rerun.
 
I’m writing this before LSU plays Clemson for the title. But I’m going out on a limb, and telling you that LSU will definitely win because it was written in the stars for it to win. But if I’m wrong, then unlike waiting for the prediction about V Sge to occur sometime over a period of 32 years but finding that it doesn’t occur for an additional 500 years, my football prediction will come and go in a relative instant. My guess is that as the time for the nova nears, there will be cults of people waiting for the doom they believe it will usher in, just the way Heaven’s Gate’s people awaited the doom supposedly associated with a comet, the people who thought the Mayan calendar predicted dire events, and those who thought that Y2K would destroy civilization or mark the Second Coming.
 
Of course, if LSU loses, then there will be a number of fans and bettors who will believe they have, in fact, lived in a time of doom—that I can predict with surety.
 
 
*Lavalle, Mini. Binary star V Sagittae to explode as very bright nova by century’s end. 7 Jan 2020. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2020-01-binary-star-sagittae-bright-nova.html
Accessed January 10, 2020. For published proofs of the prediction see. https://www.lsu.edu/physics/files/v_sagittae/vsge_technical-details.pdf

See also: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/09/science/betelgeuse-supernova-fading.html?auth=linked-google .  We suspect that Betelgeuse will explode "soon," but we have no accurate predictions.

We seem especially drawn to natural wonders that appear to defy gravity, such as the now-fallen Old Man of the Mountain, the symbol of New Hampshire since 1945, and the now-fallen Punta Ventana, the sea arch that broke during Puerto Rico’s earthquakes in January, 2020.
 
The Old Man of the Mountain was a face naturally carved in granite.* It was a “face” as we see “faces” in cumulus clouds, visible to vivid imaginations and seen only from certain perspectives. From about 2,500 feet below the Old Man along America’s two-lane “interstate” that runs through Franconia Notch, visitors could look up to see a Mt. Rushmore-like head projecting out from the top of a cliff. But even from far below, one could see cracks. It collapsed in this century, yielding to gravity and ice wedging, coupled with exfoliation. And unlike vain middle-aged humans who seek cosmetic surgery, the Old Man’s broken face cannot be restored by the mother of all face lifts; it will not appear in an episode of Botched.
 
Little imagination was needed to see the sea arch called Punta Ventana in Puerto Rico. It fell, having been shaken to its destruction by earthquakes in January, 2020. Of course, like the Old Man, either gravity or seismic activity was bound to fall in the natural tendency of things that are up to become things that are down.
 
The processes that formed and destroyed both landmarks were natural processes operating as they have always operated to change Earth’s surface. With respect to the Old Man, its granite was subject to exfoliation, an onionskin-peeling process that lifts off external layers once held in place by interlocking crystals and the pressure of overlying rock. Uplifted and exposed to weathering and lower pressure at Earth’s surface, the rock of Cannon Mountain exfoliates. But it was also eroded by an alpine glacier that plucked boulders and carried them away. In doing so, the massive river of ice left by chance the face, the Old Man precariously cantilevered over the glacial valley into which it eventually tumbled.
 
Those who would mourn the loss of the face on the mountain should realize that it was at best temporary, probably not more than ten thousand years old, a long time for us individually, but a short span for Nature. The same can be said for those who mourn the loss of Punta Ventana. It wasn’t a matter, as we say, of whether or not the arch would fall, but rather simply when it would fall. No doubt over Earth’s multi-billion-year history, many such arches formed and fell.
 
That we just happen to be alive when a “wonder” succumbs to natural processes is a matter of chance. Unfortunately, none of us lives long enough to see the formation of new natural wonders that take thousands of years to develop. Sea arches, for example, form as wave refraction sends wave energy into the sides of headlands. You could spend your lifetime watching waves attack a headland (land that juts out into the sea) without seeing a sea stack form, even though one might be in the process of forming. Similarly, you could wait for the next glacial advance or go to Greenland or Antarctica to see rocks being plucked to form features similar to the Old Man, but the plucking of rock by a glacier occurs under the mass of glacial ice or along its sides. Again, you won’t see in a lifetime such processes complete their work.
 
Whereas it is true that some processes like seismic and volcanic activity, floods, and landslides produce features in the short run, most don’t. The Mississippi Delta has taken 7,000 or 8,000 years to form substantially enough for New Orleans to have the land on which it rests. Farther down the river the buildup was even more recent; there are towns on the Balize Lobe of the delta that could not have existed when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. So, even if delta development is relatively fast in terms of “geologic time,” no one living today could have watched the entire development of the delta.
 
There are those who would postulate some significance to the natural destruction of natural features, as though Nature, the Fates, Evil Forces, or even God gave some sign to be interpreted in human terms. But no, there’s no significance other than the loss of a tourist attraction or a feature that lends itself to Earth studies. Rocks form, they become features, they change in the rock cycle, and they become the stuff of new rocks. Look around the planet, and you will see such features in various stages of formation or decay. There’s no moral lesson, no message from the gods in any of the processes. Relish the landmarks you see because no other critters, many of them denizens of those very features, have the ability to assign significance or look on in wonder.
 
Change is the nature of Nature. You are lucky to see a change—if it doesn’t involve injury or death, as the family of the sole victim of the recent Puerto Rican earthquakes can attest. You got to see Nature in action in the fall of the Old Man and Punta Ventana; you got to see the consequences of natural processes at work. Otherwise, the slow development or decay of features goes unnoticed in a process known as uniformitarianism, Sir James Hutton’s and Charles Lyell’s hypothesis about how ancient Earth processes parallel those of modern Earth. What rivers used to do, for example, is what rivers do now. Most such processes occur slowly; some like the eruption of a volcano, a landslide, or an earthquake can occur in a blink.
 
To any earth scientist, the tumbling destruction of the Old Man and Punta Ventana was always possible. Their destruction reveals Nature’s indifference. But look at what I just wrote. I’ve personified Nature. Am I writing an allegory?
 
Maybe indifference isn’t the correct word because it implies a choice between caring and not caring. Natural processes and features make no choices. They just are. Does that mean we should resign ourselves to suffering from processes like earthquakes or volcanic eruptions? No. What it means is that we need to understand those processes and features if we are to anticipate some of their consequences. We cannot, of course, anticipate all such rapid changes, but we can avoid building on active volcanoes or fault zones, can move back from the river’s edge or sea cliff, or refrain from building below unstable slopes.
 
“Nature,” if such an entity exists, doesn’t choose. We do.  
 
 
*https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=pics+of+the+Old+AMan+of+the+Mountain&fr=yhs-pty-pty_maps&hspart=pty&hsimp=yhs-pty_maps&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2F5%2F53%2FOld_Man_of_the_Mountain_4-26-03.jpg#id=0&iurl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2F1DgHK_3gQwk%2Fhqdefault.jpg&action=click
 
** https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=Punta+ventana+pics&fr=yhs-pty-pty_maps&hspart=pty&hsimp=yhs-pty_maps&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FBFXjzSai3oA%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg#id=0&iurl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FBFXjzSai3oA%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg&action=click
And
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2020/01/06/puerto-rico-earthquakes-destroy-tourist-spot-punta-ventana/2826863001/

We’ve all seen them, those helium-filled balloons drifting skyward either on purpose or by accident, the latter circumstance involving little fingers letting go—who knows? On purpose? But then, to what end?
 
We don’t, after the Hindenburg, put hydrogen in such containers; it’s much too dangerous as that “Oh! the Humanity” tragedy so many years ago demonstrated. But one wonders, what if, somewhere some alien races of intelligent life decided to celebrate on a galactic scale, releasing untold numbers of hydrogen-filled balloons spaceward, all puffy mylar bags drifting out of the galaxy, there to burst and free the hydrogen?
 
Well, that’s probably not the explanation for a ring of neutral hydrogen gas that the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope operators found encircling AGC 203001, a very large galaxy 260 million LY away.* In fact, astronomers are at this time a bit perplexed by the ring of mostly hydrogen that is apparently devoid of stars. The only other such ring, found in the Leo Group of galaxies, appears to have been the result of galactic collisions that expelled hydrogen and helium, making a ring some 650,000 LY in diameter. Strange, but demonstrable of our still rather elementary knowledge of all that is “out there.”
 
So, like trying to come up with the explanation about why a little kid releases a balloon—consider the possibilities mentioned above, including: Accident, inattention, and a variety of purposeful acts like “I did it because I could” (a Raskolnikov-like explanation at once arrogant and defiant), “I wanted God to have it” (an altruistic act), “I was mad” (the product of uncontrolled emotions), “I was curious about what would happen” (well, curiosity, of course), and “I got tired of holding it and my lollipop, so something had to go” (a choice of the better of two evils)—the astronomers suggest whatever they can to hypothesize the ring’s starless formation.
 
Oh! How humanity loves to hypothesize. We still don’t truly know what caused the Hindenburg to burst into fatal flames, but we can jointly guess as we have done so in articles, books, and films. We can suggest one cause or another. We can hypothesize individually or cooperatively in search of answers to mysteries old and new. We just want to know; we are driven by knowledge for knowledge’s sake. As David Berlinski writes in A Tour of the Calculus, “We are a hopelessly inquisitive species…” (63).** If we don’t know something or understand it, we believe that persistent probing will reveal what we want to know because we just have to know.
 
And we apply that inquisitiveness to people both near and far. It’s not just why a child might have released a helium-filled balloon that intrigues us; it’s why anyone did or does anything. “Why’d ya do that?” we ask. We ask it over the backyard fence, on public transportation, and especially in courts. It’s not that we just need to know. We are driven to know. At least, many are so driven, and those motivated to discover are befuddled and frustrated by those who are not. In fact, the curious are curious about why some people aren’t curious. “How could you NOT want to know?” they ask others. And they query themselves, “How is anyone content?”
 
Some might suggest that knowing how the hydrogen ring formed around AGC 203001 might not change anything. But really? Berlinski also says, “No doubt the urge to hoard facts is stapled to our genes.” Given our penchant for discovery, it seems there will never be a time when we will run out of facts to hoard, such as the one about a distant galaxy encircled (mostly) by inexplicable hydrogen. You now know that fact. You can try to do something with it as I have here (however insignificantly or uninterestingly), or you can shelve it in some engrams, putting it in storage until some unforeseen need asks for its recall. And then, that long-hoarded fact might spring to mind in the midst of a conversation or meditation, enliven an exchange, and make not only your life, but also another life all the more exciting.
 
Those who don’t wish to know everything or anything live in the temporary bliss of ignorance, making those who wish to know everything or anything exclaim, “Oh, the Humanity!” as they watch in horror the tragic end to what might have been an otherwise delightful trip.
 
 
 
*de Lazaro, Enrico, Enormous ring of Neutral Hydrogen Found around Distant Massive Galaxy. SciNews. 3 Jan 2020. http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/ring-neutral-hydrogen-massive-galaxy-07977.html  Accessed January 8, 2020.
 
**1995. Random House and in 1997 Vintage Books

How do we know what we know? What can we know if we determine that we can indisputably and truly know?  Ah! Enter Science with a capital “S.” And enter the long trail of scientists going back to, say, Archimedes, or back to Galileo and Bacon. Galileo, experimenter and theorist, seeing the math in Nature and the nature of math, still held onto his belief system. He was in search of an indisputable way to affirm his belief though his nemesis Pope Urban did everything he could to quash the science and favor the Inquisition. Religion was thereby forced into a war with science, particularly over the nature of a creative force, an intellectual battleground between religious leaders and scientists. We might argue that today, after the proclamations of Popes who have been more friendly to scientists than Urban was to Galileo, that the war is over except for those nagging questions in the minds of some about Creation, Creator, and evolution. Generally, however, science has its place. Religion has its. The two are separated as though by an oceanic rift valley, the forming plates of evolving ideas moving off in opposite directions. But then there are those nagging questions that keep bringing them together again, like plates colliding at subduction zones, some undergoing destruction, some undergoing collisions that produce violent eruptions, and some producing jumbles of distorted old rocks piled to Himalayan elevations and set as challenging slopes to conquer by the fearless or foolish.
 
If you read through archived copies of Scientific American, a magazine that started in the mid-nineteenth century, you will find statements that today’s writers would not (could not?) incorporate in scientific literature because of 1) political correctness, 2) a fear of ridicule by condescending peers who “don’t believe” in belief, and 3) a cultural change that occurred over the past 100 years to eliminate any philosophical or theological references from scientific work and a haughty disdain for any teleological explanations. Scientists have weaned themselves, they believe, from belief. And yet… And yet, there’s much that scientists must believe if not in labs, then in their lives. Not all the world is quantifiable. Not all lends itself to prediction, and not all, once “verified,” can be so repeatedly. And then there’s another nagging question: “Why?” Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is the Here and Now right here now?
 
Let me give you an example of a thought probably few, if any, contemporary scientists would write in one of today’s scientific journals. In a 1921 issue of Scientific American, the author, writing about Einstein’s Relativity, says, “Divine wisdom, perfect and boundless, if we conceive it ever to have had beginning at all, must thus have come into full being. We today should prefer to think of it as without beginning, as having always been….”*
 
Talking about an eternal God in a scientific journal is now anathema, to use a religious term. Instead, talk centers on an eternal universe. But in an Observations/Opinion section of Scientific American online you can find an article by a former editor entitled “Can Science Rule Out God?” surely a title that, in itself, probably draws condescension from many “scientists” who would, like Scrooge, exclaim, “Bah! Humbug.” It’s an interesting break from the supposed surety of experiment and formalism.
 
“Poppycock!” a very old scientist might exclaim, “science and religion don’t mix. We have traveled well past that mix with the help of Galileo and Darwin, both men of faith, but both ‘scientists’ through and through, and then with the help of Einstein and his statement that uses a nebulous reference to God. Sure, Einstein mentioned the word God, but he did so in the context of a deterministic universe—‘God does not play dice,’ he said—where cause leads to effect.”
 
And most scientists would go on to explain how experimentation, exploration, and formal math are the only avenues to understanding the universe and either its origin or its lack of origin. “The universe,” they might say, “is what it is because it made itself so out of necessity. Nothing demanded something, if one holds that the current universe had a beginning.” And in the contrasting view (belief?) if one doesn’t accept a “beginning,” they might explain, “Whatever exists today is merely a continuation of an eternal universe that keeps re-creating itself, filling nothing with something, not just in its previous image, but rather in every possible image, an endless progression of multiverses that require no conscious deity for an eternal unfolding.”
 
As the opinion-writer in Scientific American continues, “Nothingness is unstable.” Such a statement calls to mind the “quantum foam” argument that postulates energy in nothingness as though energy is itself “nothing.” Yet, by all our definitions of energy, it is measurable either directly or indirectly, as it seems to be with Dark Energy. If it weren’t, we could not determine the cost of running our furnaces and vehicles, and we couldn’t determine that the universe undergoes an accelerating expansion. Quantifying Nothing or the energy in Nothing, is a bit of an oxymoron, but there seems to be proof enough that such vacuum energy exists. In saying that Nothingness contains energy, however, we impose something on nothing: When we are told the composition of the universe, the numbers come up at 4 to 5% ordinary matter, and the rest Dark Matter and Dark Energy, the latter making up the bulk of “what is.” That’s a measurement.
 
But that’s where we are in our quest for a substitute “Creator.” Science, in spite of its warranting certitude, is surprisingly uncertain about much that is or how it came about. And always the question “Why?” shadows all scientific inquiry. We know, for example, that photons are both wave and particle. We know what they do, but we don’t know why they do what they do? We have a science of “nothingness,” but we are in the dark about Dark Energy and “vacuum energy.” And in this darkness we have yet to answer both questions: How does Dark Energy work? Why does it work the way it does? Ditto for any vacuum energy.
 
To answer me, I believe most scientists would say, “There are no mysteries, only mysteries that we have yet to explain.”
 
“Fine.” I note. “But doesn’t that include a bit of belief?”
 
“Bear with us, O ye of little knowledge, and we shall point the way to truth.”
 
“Okay,” I add in humble patience, “run this stuff past me. How will we unveil the veiled?”
 
The op-ed continues with reference to three views of God. 1) That of St. Thomas Aquinas: The chain of events—continuous change—that we know as the universe had an origin that was not part of the chain, a transcendent, unchanging Being outside Time and, therefore, outside whatever is inside. Wouldn’t an act of creation, the moment of creation, like the hypothesized Big Bang, be a singular, and not a continuous act that brought the Something into existence? If the act of creation were continuous, then is it ongoing even today, implying a presence of, for want of a better word, Providence? Therein lies a conundrum over how to think about Creation that the biblical writers tried to verbalize. The stumbling efforts of the writers of Genesis to define a transcendent Being indicate our difficulty in describing the origin of All and the Originator as a transcendent Cause. In the most commonly known English translation, “In the beginning the Earth was void and without form” are words that start with a prepositional phrase that traps the writers*** into having an ‘imperfect’ Deity spend the next ‘six days’ (the Hexaemeron) fixing up as an afterthought the initial act of creation by, for example, separating light from darkness. Is that the favored translation and therefore the favored belief? If so, then God had to work with that which He created, putting Him in His creation or somehow involving Him in it. In another Genesis translation by E. A. Speiser, “When God first set about creating Heaven and Earth” lies an expression that eliminates God’s having to say to Himself, “Shoot, I forgot to…” because the Creation isn’t a single act, but then, again in confusion, it presupposes a time before time with a dependent adverbial clause and a Creator Who is part of time because any continuous act involving change is our definition of time. Is that what the scientists argue is a vacuum energy, the quantum foam, the coming and going of virtual particles in a nothingness filled with energy? If Creation is ongoing, doesn’t that make either quantum effects and the Infinite Creator part of Time and subject to the underlying laws that govern the “creation”? If it is ongoing in a multiverse of branes, are chance encounters of branes in different dimensions the actual “creators”? If so, we don’t need God because we have a happy accident to thank for being able to thank. Thus, if we adopt the view of Aquinas of a First Cause, we find ourselves pondering whether or not the First Cause is, in fact, the Continuing Cause, something like the quantum foam or vacuum energy, something like Dark Energy.  
 
2) That of Leibniz: “a necessary being which has reason for existence in itself.” God is, in that sense, Being with no outside obligation: Existence Itself. That view calls to mind Deism and its Clockmaker God who made the Clock (the universe), wound it, let it go, and then stood back, removed from the Creation, having nothing to do with its running. Look for no miracles Here. Divine intervention, Divine Providence, is a myth because a First Cause isn’t a Continuing Cause. God might have made Nature, but then abandoned it like some heartless sea turtle mother who labors up the beach, digs the hole, lays the eggs, and then lumbers back down the beach to re-enter the sea. “Goodbye, little turtle eggs; when you hatch, run fast to the water so the seagulls don’t eat you, and once you enter, stay near the bottom to avoid the eyes of hungry sharks.”  
 
3) That of agnostic Einstein and maybe Spinoza: identifying God with Nature. That almost takes us back to the animists and definitely takes us back to pantheists. Certainly, it invokes some Native American views of the Great Spirit and our connection with Nature. As part of Creation, we are part of God, a view that has led some to say all is divine because the Divinity is in all (Wasn’t that what Heraclitus was saying with his cyclical Eternal Fire?). Nature is the self-driven pullulating force with an innate plan of laws by which it operates, chief among them that cause breeds effect.    
 
With respect to this Science-God problem, we’re in a bind, aren’t we? Our training in Euclidean geometry has made logic our go-to way of thinking. We believe inductive reasoning can never reach a final answer. Thus, no “evidence” for God can pile up to support a final conclusion. We can’t say, “But, by some miracle, she was cured. And so were many who visited the shrine. Miracles are evidence for God.”
 
Instead, coupled with Galilean experimentation and Renaissance-like exploration, deduction and its partner, formal math, have become the only acceptable methodologies for proof. All else is just faith, mere wishful thinking that some Protector watches over and intrudes and whose supposed “intrusions” we use inductively to prove His existence and his creation as a warm and fuzzy place of comfort in the midst of its random ills.
 
We deem ourselves to be rational in what we accept as truth. We are scientists, one and all, in this “modern” world of debunked myth. Yet, we accept the unrepeatable social-science “science”—all that Margaret-Mead kind of “science.” We say we want to quantify to do proper science, but now we have all those academicians doing “qualitative research”—their term for that which cannot be verified by repeating whatever it is they did to reach their conclusions, again, a Margaret-Mead kind of “science,” nondebatable and one not subject to repetitive experimentation, a “science” based on interpretation passed off as “analytical” anthropology or sociology, the surety of which seems demonstrably feeble in light of political polls that serve as prophecies like those of the 2016 American elections. Those among us who would distinguish between the “soft” and “hard” sciences would argue that only experimentation and formal math can supply undeniable truths. Think of luck at the casino. The slot machine pays, pays again, pays again, so we accept the accruing money as evidence Fortune is with us until it isn’t. Regardless of how luck runs, we can never know with surety that the next spin of the wheels will come up three sevens. And even if we have a “feeling” that our ship is about to dock, we can’t explain the feeling other than out of seven billion people wishing for luck to run in their favor, it is simple, random chance that our wish, our slot machine, comes to fruition.
 
Of course, if experimentation is a guarantee, then we’re all settled on what we should and should not eat. No conflicting studies there. Right? Eat eggs. Don’t eat eggs. Eat fat. Don’t eat fat. All the while there are those who outlive those who adopt the opposite advice. Anecdotally and inductively, I’m thinking of my own parents, one living almost to 96 and the other almost to 98. Processed meats a staple in their diets: baloney, salami, pepperoni. Butter and bread. Pasta and red meats—the cheap cuts, for we weren’t very rich. Desserts. One not exercising even with moderate daily walking for the last couple of decades of her life. The other stopped from walking golf courses by an inability to see the golf ball in his eighties because of macular degeneration that forced him to take up bowling—scoring the year’s high, almost 300, in his league, by the way. I’m thinking also of Jack Lalanne, famous exercise and juicing guru who lived less by a year than my father, the former exercising vigorously, the latter, walking daily to work and back and then in retirement the golf course until failing eyes became his handicap. And I’m wondering: If we apply what we see through experience to life and belief or what we see through experimentation and deduction, do we have a discernible trustworthy difference? Scientists would say yes. Trust the science. Look at the difference in longevity brought on by science. “Yes,” I see and add, “wasn’t the science of clean water the most significant cause of  increased longevity in the twentieth century? And isn’t it true that though average life spans were lower for millennia than they are now, there have always been individuals with long lives, long enough to at least to slightly offset the higher infant mortality rates of the past?”
 
Does science really have anything to say about God? The opinion writer in Scientific American suggests that we need more “telescopes and other scientific instruments that provide the needed data to researchers studying fundamental physics. And maybe the effort will lead to breakthroughs in theology as well.” Really? So, this is how we will unveil the veiled?  
 
I’m sorry, but that sounds naïve at best and primitive at worst. Didn’t the ancients look to the heavens as the place to find God. Could we really accept that a better telescope might have helped them see that which is unseen? Remember the “firmament,” that dome of sky on which the stars were pinned; remember the Ptolemaic cosmos of concentric, embedded spheres and the celestial music? I’ll bet the ancients would have loved a better than a naked-eye view of it. But from the perspective of the present and all that we know about myth and matter, about energy and process, and about history and process, could we really accept the principle that better scientific instrumentation is all that separates us from finally knowing God?
 
 
 
*Scientific American. 2 Jul 1921. P.8. Online at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015024546437&view=1up&seq=11&size=125
Accessed December 30, 2019.
 
**Observations/Opinions. 23 Dec. 2019. Online at https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/can-science-rule-out-god/
Accessed December 30, 2019.
 
***The “writers” of Genesis use two different expressions for God, indicating different traditions. One group or writer, for example, refers to God as Elohim, a plural that might foreshadow a Trinitarian God, and a name that occurs at the outset of the book and then throughout the Bible. Genesis contains two creation stories, however, and in the second one God is Yahweh (Jehovah, for some, “The Name of the Name” for others), a word that doesn’t contain the vowels we commonly see in English transliteration (YHWH) and that might derive from a reference to being itself.