Scientist or Magician

We learned during the pandemic the mantra trust the science.  But, of course, science did not have definitive answers.  It had clues and presumptions and postulations but the aftermath of Covid proved that some of what we thought was most true was not and some of the things dismissed as utter rubbish was, well, true.  The science did not help as we thought it would because science was reacting along with us to what was unfolding around us.  Yesterday's conclusions proved to be poor starting points for the heated rhetoric about distancing and masks and the danger of outdoors and the need for shutting down nearly all human interaction.  Worse, we repeated the same tired old postulates when it came to a vaccine that was not simply new but a new process for a vaccine to use.  My point here is not to argue the past but to see what it might be that we could learn from it.

Trying to make science black and white and to give it the penultimate role of judge over all things proved to be a misuse of science based upon misconceptions -- misconceptions not simply from the simple but from the learned as well.  Instead of shining light, we only increased the darkness.  We did not need any help in that area.  The whole modern movement has slowly being about dimming the light and increasing the shadows.  Instead of knowing clearly who we are, our place in the world around us, and what laws govern us and that world, we have been rendered so confused that we cannot even define the basic terms of man and woman.  Science, or at least those who trumpeted their idea of it, insisted that where religion and Scripture had sown darkness and left us captive, they were liberating us from all things foolish, prudish, and primitive.  Progress would be our savior instead of the God-man Jesus Christ -- as if progress were reasonable and religion were not!

In reality, it is upside down.  Religion brought clarity and this clarity allowed for the simplest of the simple to know God and themselves and the world.  Now there is only confusion or the imposed confusion of modernity.  The lights are dimming all around us as institution after institution becomes suspect and its truth subject to the unassailable truth of feeling and desire.  It was so plain that the worker could order his or her life around it and so profound that the wise sage could meditate upon it for a lifetime and still not come to its end.  More than this, it was a reality that was and is and will be until God intervenes to change it.  

In place of it all, science offers the present conclusion subject to adjustment.  Reason must give way to the presumed science of invented categories like gender and the ordinary shape of life must bend to the imposed shape of our new idea of family.  Science offers us no anchor in the storms of change and instead only releases us from the moorings of religion, morality, and reason to see where it all might land.  Land it did.  Culture and society are a wreck in pieces on the shore but no one will admit it.  Instead the naysayers who would refuse and refute this illegitimate science are labeled hate speakers and banished from the public square.  

It turned out that the only thing that was stable and enduring was religion -- the religion of the Book of God in which a world was created for life and then rescued from death not by reason or imagination but by the love that sacrifices and empties itself in death.  This was all simple and plain enough for a world to get until science made it suspect, racist, and against the reign of desire (and its whim).  We have been sold a bill of goods.  Science, or at least what passes for it, is able to give us nothing but question marks where religion put periods and exclamation points.  We pulled back the veil of religion and God was there.  We pulled back the curtain of science and it was a mere man parading as the magician with all the answers.  Maybe we chose the wrong curtain.