Chapter 4: A Word from Pastor Dan

This chapter was a "deeper" than the previous chapters seem to have been. Overall, the message that I took home from the article is the notion that nothing in the universe is necessarily absolute-there are arguments that can be made about nearly everything in the natural environment. This is what makes our world so wonderful-- the fact that most things not developed directly by humans are still, basically a mystery.

The discussion of the ideals and methods of Kant and Burroughs seem to emphasize this point. Despite their methods being, should we say, different, they had the general idea. They were constantly questioning the environment around them. They never took an answer seriously before verifying it themselves. They thought the beauty of the world was the chaos in it, the fact that there were no answers. Ironically, however, it would seem that they spent nearly their entire existence searching for the answers to the "unanswerable" questions.

This article is one that I truly take to heart. Being a college student for the past three years, I have come across things in my many, many science classes that I've had to take that have made me a little uneasy. By saying this, I am referring to the constant idea in science classes that there should be an answer for everything. If you can't prove it, don't believe it and so on. Being a Christian throughout my life, I often took offense to these claims. Whose to say I'm wrong just because I can't actually see what I'm referring to. Is it so obsolete to believe that, perhaps, there is a higher being that created this world? Why is it that I'm considered ignorant to these scientific "absolutists", as some of my classmates will refer to them, because I believe it's possible that a man parted the red sea? Now obviously, I understand that there are stories that I have been told in life and Sunday School that are most likely overexaggerated and perhaps straight "out of the sky." And I'm also not here to say that everyone should believe in my God, or any god for that case. However, the reason that this article hit so close to home for me is because it basically said, "believe what you will in this crazy world." Take nothing for absolute, but don't doubt everything either. Take life as it comes at you and your existence, and the discovery of new things in this world, will be a much more pleasant and interesting one.