Scientific-ishness

It is very cold today.  That is a statement of relative fact.  While folks in Fairbanks or Winnipeg would probably scoff at our 7 degree temperature as being practically picnic weather, for us here in Southern Maryland, it is cold.
Now for the narrative: Jack had a doctor's appointment at 8:20 AM, therefore I did not  have time for my morning cup of coffee.  After I dropped him off at school I swung by Wawa and got coffee, waiting in line at Wawa to pay for my coffee, a very small, but interesting conversation occurred, mostly between the cashier and a person who was apparently a regular customer, but also involving me.  It was about how cold it is this morning, and almost inevitably, about global warming.
The man made some comment about how the weather today pretty much proves that global warming is a falsehood, because, you know, one cold day pretty much invalidates years of climate data.  The Wawa cashier was more circumspect, she mentioned all those researchers that had been sailing the waters of the Arctic ocean for years, saying that the ice caps really were melting.
Not really wishing to get into a protracted debate on the matter before I had consumed the 24 ounces of caffeinated goodness that I was purchasing for $1.69, and really not wanting to get into a scientific discussion anywhere in the vicinity of a Wawa, I simply said, "I guess they're not melting really fast today," and took my leave.
Some people will tell you that science and religion are in competition with one another, but that is not true at all, in fact, that little exchange in Wawa illustrated for me that science and religion face the same principle problem: human sin.  Sin could be defined broadly as a willful ignorance of and/or disobedience to an ultimate reality, which in the case of religion is usually called God or gods, and which in science is called data.  Notice: Science's ultimate reality is not truth, it is just data, truth is sometimes revealed by the data, but not always.  If you want to know what truth is, you're going to have to find God, somehow or other and that makes what you're doing religion, not science.  What a lot of people think of when they hear the word science, is actually a religion, a religion that "believes" that somewhere out there the truth can be known and measured and reported and tested and those tests can be replicated.  Strict adherence to science is every bit as rigorous as the spiritual disciplines practiced by the monastic traditions in most major religions.  You find genuine scientists often speak with great humility about the limits of their knowledge.
You hear the phrase, "I'm spiritual but not religious" quite a bit these days.  And for those of us who are actual and unapologetic religious folk, it rubs us the wrong way.  I'm not going to try and tackle that attitude here, but I was actually moved to sympathy for actual scientists this morning, because I realized that most of the world misapprehends their work in much the same way as it misapprehends mine.  The mass of humanity likes to appropriate bits and pieces of scientific data that happen to endorse their worldview.
If something challenges say the sacred right to indiscriminately consume fossil fuels, well then the scientists must be lying.  To which the scientists, at least 90% of them, say passionately, "we can't lie, we're just collecting data!"  To which the "laypeople" retort, "Yeah, but we know that data can be manipulated and we've got some scientists who think you're wrong."  The debate between ignorance and exploration goes on for some time.  You can collect years and years of data.  But all those temperature readings and statistical analysis of long term trends and tracking the relative frequency of severe weather patterns, it's all really quite boring.  People tend to just glaze over.
Then there is one really cold day in January.
And in a lot of people's mind that solves it.
And the poor cashier at Wawa has no data to back up her vision of all those brave scientists in the Arctic trying to measure the receding icecaps and save the polar bears while they're at it.
No matter how well the scientists make their case, there will always be those who choose not to "believe."
Welcome to the club science!
This is what it's like!
You can spend, say two thousand years, developing your truth (in our case it's called theology), and the majority of people aren't going to give a hoot.  Unless you can convince them that catastrophe (in our case Hell) is going to happen, they're not going to listen to you, and these days that's not even working so great.  So, you know, if people won't come to church once a week to keep their eternal souls out of torment, I'm guessing they're not going to moderate their driving habits in order to save some penguins, but hey good luck with that.
I guess what I'm saying Science, is that we really shouldn't be enemies, we're ultimately fighting the same fight, and us religious types have been at it longer.
Don't sell out, keep your faith, collect the data, keep crunching those numbers and interpreting away, some of us are listening.
We religious types, at least the ones who don't think you're instruments of the Devil, will be praying for you.