Lecture
William Shakespeare’s sonnets have long been a source of inspiration for love. Sonnets 18, 116, 137, and 147 are often cited. Click here for a link to his sonnets. (These are not required readings.) (Image credit: Microsoft clipart)
Well, let’s get to it. Often when people debate Scientific and Religious points of view on how human kind came to be, someone will bring up: “So, you believe that we came from monkeys.” This often leaves the other person flabbergasted and speechless. To keep the debate from getting to this point, we have to remember what we learned in the Scientific Method module: Science is just one of the ways that we come to know. As McLelland states, “Science does not prove nor disprove religious belief, nor does it replace either. Science is a method of understanding the natural world” (page 7). Science is not the only way that we can come to know about the world; nor is it always the most appropriate way to learn about our world, especially, when it comes to the human experiences.
Let’s get back to how we started our last module and discuss the idea of love. Hopefully, we all have some experiences from which to draw some comparisons. To answer the question: “What is love?” we would not use the Scientific Method. Love is not an idea that is knowable through Science’s way of knowing because love is a human emotion, not a physical, tangible, and measurable thing. While can certainly make observations about a person who claims to be in love, we cannot allot some measurable phenomena to explain that love, and science is all about creating explanations about how phenomena happen. Sure, we could measure how many times a mother kisses her child or the amount of flowers that a person gets for Valentine’s Day, but does that really equate to how much that child or person is loved?
No. Instead of using Science as a way to know about love, we really should use a more appropriate discipline. You certainly would not take a physics class for instruction on how to make that girl you like fall in love with you – although, you might take it because she’s in that class. The disciplines of Literature, Art, Philosophy, and Religion are much more appropriate ways of knowing to learn about love. They are overflowing with explanations, examples, and definitions of love. You can recite Shakespeare’s Sonnets, contemplate Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, debate the Greek philosophers three “loves” (eros, agape, and philia), or read St. Thomas Aquina’s opuscula, “The law of divine love.” This does not mean that love is an invalid idea; it means that love is not a scientific idea. (The links in this paragraph are not required readings.)
Let me repeat: Just because an idea isn’t scientific does not mean that the idea isn’t valid.
How does this all relate believing that we come from monkeys? Well, firstly, we don’t. (And that is not what the Theory of Evolution states.) It relates to how we think of the question or statement as it was originally phrased in the first paragraph on this page. Science is not about belief. It is about ideas that can be supported by empirical evidence. It’s not that a scientist “believes” that Evolution is correct; it is a matter of the idea of Evolution being the most accurate, most well supported scientific explanation of species diversity. It has never been falsified; and, to date, there are no species (plants or animals) whose current existence and genetics cannot be explained by the Theory of Evolution.