Sometimes the need to simplify science for the purposes of teaching, illustration and basic understanding is the worst thing we can do. I am a huge proponent of simplifying, putting things into everyday terms, making them easy to understand. Society demands this, with people desiring to learn things in sound bites, rather than taking the opportunity to delve in at full force. The science community suffers from being too “intellectual” in many realms, and most people tune us out when we start to talk technical and begin to look at the complexity of biological, chemical and physical systems that surround us. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about starting simple. I love to teach General Chemistry classes to freshmen for this purpose. However, there’s a difference between starting simple and staying simple. I believe that a need to stay simple has done a great disservice to science, and I’ll go as far as to say that it does a great job at hiding the beauty and complexity of God’s created world.

 

As scientists, we feel the need to tie up all of our packages neatly with a pretty bow atop them, mostly because we feel that’s the only way we can be understood. Unfortunately, the natural world that surrounds us greatly eliminates this possibility. Take a look at the area of astrophysics. Hugh Ross, a well known physicist, has assembled a beautifully detailed list showing all of the things that would need to fall perfectly into place to sustain and support life, and once you begin looking at the list, you quickly learn that the world is no accident. We teach our students the simplicity of life’s origins, knowing full well that this is no simple process. A total of 322 unique parameters, most of which are completely independent of each other, all must fall into perfect alignment to generate and sustain life on planet Earth. Truth be told, I probably lack the understanding to explain what half of them mean, and I will boldly proclaim my ignorance in this area of science. The trouble is that instead of talking about the complexity of these parameters, we simply eliminate teaching this kind of thing at all. Nowhere in any curriculum in any high school or college is there material that incorporates the complexity of our existence and maintenance as a planet. Astronomy courses don’t address it, physics courses don’t touch it, and chemistry and biology certainly steer clear. It seems that we’re reluctant to teach these deep, overarching concepts of complexity of life for the fear that we might have to admit two things. We don’t know everything and we can’t explain everything. I’m okay with that, and I believe that it’s okay to continually quest and search for answers. However, we can’t lose sight that the answers sometimes might be the ones we don’t want. Einstein found God with his theory of relativity, and for years, tried to disprove his own findings that the world was finite and had a clear beginning. When asked why he was so opposed to this notion, he said something to the effect of, “I hate God because I can’t outthink Him.” We need to stop perceiving a turn to the divine as the less intelligent answer, and start realizing the amazing complexity of this universe that often comes without answer. If we find a need to fall back on shrugging our shoulders at the miraculous, that’s not a defeat to science, but simply a reality of the amazing complexity of all that surrounds us.