A Word to Know-It-Alls

As a rule, birth is celebrated and death is mourned. What both have in common is that the perception and interpretation is always by those already living. Science has a way of reducing everything down to the irreducible, but even the biological explanation of the sperm fertilizing the egg does little to answer the question, where did I come from? Likewise, the cessation of vital signs doesn’t even begin to answer the question, where am I going? Science is not designed to deal with such questions. We can artificially inseminate, gestate, and even clone, but we are not one whit closer to explaining where the human “spirit” comes from. And by the same token, we have no “hard” facts—which are the purview of science—to prove or disprove that such a thing even exists. When “what you can see, hear, smell, taste or touch” governs the scope of the exploration, there is no sense in speculating about the unprovable. Hence, it doesn’t matter to science where we came from or where we are going because it cannot be proven (by mortal means). The one “fact” which science has “proven” germane to this discussion, however, is the conservation of energy: it is neither created nor destroyed but only changes state. It is widely accepted that the human body harnesses a degree of energy from the time that it is born to the time it dies. Thus faith and science can be seen to agree upon at least this one thing: birth and death are transformational. We consciously experience what lies between those two points, but that should not fool us into believing that we know what it’s all about.