A new 3D-printed material boasts a strength-to-weigh ratio of 803!
Big deal right? Unless you are familiar with engineering this means almost nothing. If we add that the ratio for titanium is 509 and stainless steel is 61, that might help a little. We now have a little bit of context but most people don’t really use titanium on a daily basis. “Tougher than some forms of steel and lighter than water.” Ok, now we are getting somewhere, we have more meaning, that is more relationships between words. Words that most likely have relationships with normal people. Steel and water are very common, they are part of our lives, we know them. And so this new thing can be part of our story now because it has been related to our story. This is the reality of all things science. Of course the numbers are important, if you actually want to study and build complex things with any material. The ability to measure and create things precisely has given us all sorts of time saving and life saving devices, vehicles and buildings. But without the metaphors and the story communication about science would not be possible, science would not be possible.
Since modern times, there has appeared a dichotomy between the scientific and the metaphoric. It extends into a split between hard science and religion or physical and metaphysical. The physical is what we really know, and the metaphysical is just feelings and emotion, so the modern says. If your senses can detect something it’s real and everything else is just lies. As if this were not a story. Can you touch a story? We all but worship science because of what it has enabled us to created. The way it allows us to manipulate this world for our own good, it is almost magic. Which is why many historic Christians compared science to magic as the industrial revolution began. But the so called ‘scientific’ really is nothing without the story.
What good does it do you if your senses detect that this new material has a strength-to-weight ratio of 803, if you have no way to express it to others? A necessary part of the scientific method is the ability to reproduce results, this requires communication. On a larger scale a story paints a picture made up of metaphors made up of words. But even a word is a metaphor. The word ‘red’ is not red, it is three characters from the English alphabet, representing sounds, yet they make us understand redness. They are a set of symbols that stand in for something else. We understand red even though our senses have not perceived anything red. Maybe red is all a metaphysical lie.
Every group of people, large or small inevitably communicate and make their own language or dialect or technical diction. Without this there is no advancement, there is no science. There are just meaningless events happening. We as Christians know there are no meaningless events, every event is speech, the speech of God.
And all this is still just the fundamental level, this is still inside the operations of science. The real problem these days is what happens as the scientific community tries to communicate with the greater public. They can say almost anything and we ignore the fact that they are not giving us science they are telling us a story. That story may or may not have any relationship to what actually happened in the lab. But their words and the words of the media reporting it are not infallible, cold hard, empirical data, they are a metaphoric, poetic, retelling of the data. With huge political and monetary incentives to tell a certain story there is really no reason to believe any of them. They come to the people with a supposed problem, which they claim to have observed, and they want millions of dollars to study a solution. Or they come to the people with a solution and they want millions of dollars to implement it. Since the people with money these days are the politicians, because they stole it from us, for the children, then scientists are forced to be political. If you want the money you have to tell the story the right way. None of this sounds very scientific to me. It’s almost as if we have been putting our faith in a big lie, instead of empirical evidence.
We do the same thing with the Bible. We talk about literal vs. poetic or metaphorical interpretations. Usually these sorts of comparisons are made by people trying to tell you how their interpretation is correct because it is the most literal, while that other guy down the street is just a crazy allegorizing fool. Really there is no literal meaning, as if you could have meaning sitting in a box in a room separate from anyone. Meaning is relational, that’s how it works, because thats how our God works. He is three in one. He is love because he has relationship within his person. The Bible is real words written by real people. It’s authors were relating truth to a specific audience. We are a different group of people and relating that truth to us takes a deep understanding of the metaphors used then and how to use our metaphors to relay the truth to us now. There is no literal as a real or objective thing. But you can almost guarantee that people who talk of ‘literal’, have gotten it wrong, because they don’t know how words work they won’t be looking for the right things.
True empiricism might evaluate the actual results of all this so-called-science. It’s hard to get more empirical than the free market. If your problem was real, people would know about it. If your solution worked, it would be obvious. This is reality, if you don’t meet the demands of the real world you fail. Which is why innovation and business have always gone hand in hand. And why politics, waste and lies all go hand in hand–in hand. Innovation is dealing with the constraints of reality to find something that actually serves a purpose. It’s like a powerful computing device without Steve Jobs, it might be interesting in theory but what good does it do anyone? The device has to actually work or no one will buy it. Not so with this new political scientific alliance. Whole fields such as the social sciences can be completely fruitless, or worse, counter productive and yet they are kept alive in the name of science. Money is spent on schools and professors raising up students who raise up the next generation of students. Nothing is ever accomplished, no one is ever benefitted. But the money keeps on being spent. Then we need jobs for all these students so we create huge bureaucracies that do nothing. They provide jobs for all these people with their fancy degrees but the net effect on GDP is negative as they annoy the people actually trying to innovate. As we watch billions of dollars disappear into ‘green’ programs. What have we to show for it? The economy of Spain was all but bankrupted in the quest for green. Here we have Solyndras by the dozen.
True empiricism doesn’t quite work with spiritual matters. We are to live by faith and not by sight, because we can’t see the whole story. The little bit that we do see often looks bad like a bad military campaign in a greater war. The war will be won but that fact can be lost in the pain and suffering of now. But on the other hand we are given real benchmarks for success in the Church. The fruits of the Spirit love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self- control; against such things there is no law. Well until this becomes popular for 2000 years and corrupted to what we have now, where accepting sin is ‘love’, and ‘peace’ does not mean peace with God but getting along with sinners. There are also other benchmarks, Paul criticize the Corinthians for still needing milk when they should have matured to solid food, I Corinthians 3:2. Jesus tells us you can recognize them by their fruit Matthew 17:15-20. He seems to be implying here that we already know how to evaluate good fruit. But he also tells us there will be lots of fakers, darnel among the wheat planted by the enemy, Matthew 13:24-30.
On the other hand evolution or global warming aren’t all that empirical either. Who has seen evolution? Have you seen global warming? Have you even seen an atom? Have you seen the earth go around the sun? The story is the key. And we, as Christians, have the correct story. It is proven itself over and over. Jews and Christians are the most blessed people on this earth. Those who leave the word of God do so at their own peril. So the next time you are tempted to believe a different story masquerading as literal science, think twice.