Is this ivory tower accessible?

I realized last night that I have been living a charmed life. Someone somewhere (I can't be expected to remember all of the people who dislike me and my opinions so I am not crediting it) accused me of living in an ivory tower of idealism, or something like that. In a way, it's true. I don't have uneducated friends, my students are remarkably bright and open minded, and I tend to live my life in my head thinking about the nature of things, the larger questions. The recent confrontation by the reality of the state of intellectual thought and science I've been through has made me profoundly sad, almost to depression. How is it possible that there are people who are still denying the fundamental difference between belief and science in a country that guarantees a certain amount of education to all of its citizens? Is this an upsurge? are the people behind the movement in some way profiting from the idea that fact is theory and belief is certain?

I am forced to conclude that there is profit to be made in the propagation of ignorance. I mean "profit" in the most Nietzschean sense: the grab for power in all things. I refuse to believe that people are so base as to force a population, or section of population, into ignorance based solely on greed. I must believe that the people behind the swell of miseducation are true believers themselves. These people surely must think that what they believe to be true is true in the physical, biological role given to laws and a priori knowledge. There is a problem with this, though; rather than accepting the world as it is presented, a belief is interjected where there is no room for belief and a false dichotomy is created: what we know to be true can be contradicted by what we believe to be true. How can this have happened? How?

I've stated over and over that faith is an important part of the life of a human being. It doesn't have to be faith in a deity, but faith in something outside of ourselves is as important to humanity as understanding and reason. If we believe ourselves to be the individual without context we have no reason to live a purposeful, ethical life. Where is the necessity for ethics if we are the greatest thing we can conceive, if we are all that matters? It would make us beings of pure desire and death; we would act without consequences, which is impossible because we are fallible, so our initial acts would be acts of death through desire. In choosing ourselves we would not choose man* because we are man, we are entirety without the boundaries otherness applies to our existence. As you can clearly see, without the faith in something greater than us (supernatural or physical) we are action without thought, something we cannot be if we possess reason. My conclusion must remain: faith in something is necessary.

This is NOT an argument for the necessity of a deity. Faith in a deity is one road to take but it is not the only, or perhaps even the most ethical one. An accountability to something that we participate in and fit in to the biology of requires a far more intimate understanding of consequences and the betterment of the organization we are acting in and through. If our faith is in something we can point to, understand and know, we are far more likely to adhere to the dictates of the consequences and rewards of that thing. Who are you going to obey, your parents/teachers or the parents/teachers of others? A direct relationship between cause and consequence, person and greater than, possesses more integrity than a belief in something we cannot understand or know; this is because we are tactile beings who begin to know through a posteriori knowledge. If we know by understanding what presents itself as fact, then basing a belief in something other on something we cannot present factually is not only illusory, it must be supremely frustrating. If I push on a physical entity, mass resists my action, forces it to exist within a context, within boundaries. And it isn't something I think exists, it is something that forces perceivable shape to keep me in place. If you push against something that is not perceivable or knowable in any way, something without boundaries, how can you help but not feel the emptiness of context and the force of design? It is akin to hearing of an infinity of love but never experiencing its effects directly. It seems like something akin to despair, to me.

To me. That is the key phrase in the above paragraph. I believe it to be true that faith in something perceivable is more comforting and justified and ethical than faith in something boundless. That is the difference between faith and science; science proves that which exists, whether we believe in it or not. We don't have to believe in it, to be sure, but it will exist either way. Faith, or belief, is something we choose. We can choose to believe that a book represents fact, but until we are able to prove such a thing scientifically, it will be a matter of faith. And even if we don't prove it, the factual nature of the book and its contents exists, or does not exist, independent of our understanding. Clearly we must continue to proclaim: faith and science are inviolably separate.

The separation of faith and science seems so entirely clear when you accept the fact that we are biological beings who think.** Notice I used the word "who" rather than the traditional "which;" I did that to point to the notion that we are fundamentally people, thinking people, who are more than the biological processes necessary to create a thing which thinks. I am asserting my faith in an unquantifiable "essence" that, while originating and ending in biology, may exist as a further part of consciousness and will, rather than a purely biological process. I don't know that this is the case, and as I pointed out, it is unquantifiable. The fact that I accept this, though, does not mean I am going to require fact, or science, to force itself into the box designed to hold this idea; science can't be forced, science can't be rejected when it doesn't fit into our perceptual ideas. Science is nothing more than the process by which we understand what Is. If we cannot understand a thing, if a thing, by its nature is further in quantity than our understanding can go, then trying to subject it to the process for understanding is kind of silly. Are we meant to understand God? How? We cannot understand infinity, we cannot understand perfection, we cannot understand creation out of nothingness. How could we possibly understand the being that exists because of all of those things? It's unworkable, which is why we have to rely on faith when we seek to understand our meaning in or to something larger. I will state it again: there is nothing wrong with the separation of faith and science. They both accept their boundaries (as inanimate, humanly understood things are forced to do) and they both fill their function in the only way the function can be fulfilled.

How have people become so confused? It seems so simple when you reduce it to its constituent parts: science is the process by which we understand and accept what Is, faith is the process by which we understand and accept what we believe. I know I'm being redundant, but I am experiencing some higher than normal incredulity. The problem I think we are facing is the idea that one or the other (science or faith) does not measure up on its own. People are pairing them together as if that will make for a stronger, more knowable process. It's ironic that the search for understanding has begun to favor this unworkable solution; it is, itself, the thing which destroys thought, understanding and faith. It's as if you are trying to combine a human and dog. The result would be the opposite of the creation you are attempting to work; it would be the annihilation of the either thing. For, a dog cannot be a dog if it is half human and a human cannot be a human if it is half dog. These two things are entirely separate, though they share the basic function of biology. It is the same with faith and science: they are separate, though they share the same function of understanding. What's wrong with that?

I'm going back to my ivory tower, now. I can't take the assault on reason that is manifest in the willful ignorance of miseducation. Oh, who am I kidding? once a thing is known, it cannot be unknown. (let's leave brain injury out of it for now) Perhaps I will just go rail against the boundaries of will for a bit. It does so suck to be human sometimes.


*Existentialism Is a Humanism, by Jean-Paul Sartre
**Meditation II, Rene Descartes