“They’re a communist country,” she said. “Are you sure you’re going to be safe?”

And that’s where it gets tricky. Well, not the safety. Life for expats in modern cities like Nanjing could be a lot worse. But what about the assumption behind my grandmother’s concern – is China a communist country? Well, the last revolution was won by a decidedly Marxist group. The government in control now is led by what is called the Chinese Communist Party. But today, the way things are, things are very different than anything that could honestly be called communism.

A brief history lesson: Mao Zedong was the leader of the communist faction during the Chinese civil war that lasted from 1927 – 1950. (His opposition, the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek, were losing the war and so retreated to Taiwan. That’s where Taiwan comes in as a separate country, according to some, and a rebel province, according to others.) Mao led a pretty much totalitarian communist state from 1950 until his death in 1976. If you want to talk about an attempt to put pure Marxist thought into practice, you can see it rather well in this era. Businesses, factories and basically all the means of production were owned by the State, interactions with foreign capitalist commerce were for the most part non-existant, and other communist ideology on the social policy end of things was institutionalized. Theoretical ideas form Marx and Lenin about religion, society, and even gender equality became official government doctrine.

In the 1980s, however, things began to change. The leader who followed Mao was Deng Xiaoping, and he made some radical changes to the way China viewed business and economics. Maoism, quite simply, wasn’t working. Most of China was still impoverished. Poor relations with the outside world left the nation hopelessly behind. And so in an effort to improve the country’s situation he put forward some rather startling new policies. Certain areas of China were set aside as special economic zones, in which privately owned corporations were allowed to set up shop. In a famous quote to quell doubts from his Marxist countrymen, Deng Xiaoping said, “It doesn’t matter if it’s a white cat or a black cat – as long as it catches mice it’s a good cat.” In short, communist ideology is still the official doctrine of the State but if it’s not working, well, let’s let in a little market capitalism to see if it can help us out.

China today is nothing like the Marxist utopia early communist revolutionaries had envisioned. We might say Mao is rolling in his grave, but he’s actually lying embalmed in Beijing in a glass coffin, so if he’s doing so he’s managing it pretty discreetly.

So, the great irony of China today is that it is a country known as one of the last remaining communist nations and very few of the social and economic realities are communist in nature at all. If you want to get technical, China never reached actual communism – that was a state predicted by Marx that no nation on earth has ever achieved. But its socialist policies, which were supposed to lead to this great takeover by the proletariat and an ideal situation where workers were no longer oppressed and exploited by the upper class, never panned out, and now we’re left with a China that is even less socialist than it began.

In fact, I’m going to argue that China is a sad and poignant example to us today, not of what the evils of communism can do to a people, but of what true unregulated capitalism produces.

True, we’ve already seen what unregulated capitalism can do – over and over again. There was, after all, a reason that Karl Marx felt like sitting down and writing a book. Industrial Europe was not kind to the working classes. Even in the United States, we went through our own lessons in the school of hard knocks. Ever read The Jungle? Ever hear of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire? Standard Oil? Ever seen Norma Rae? We’ve come to learn, after a century of turmoil, that there’s an undisputed advantage to being a blue-collar laborer in a system where a history of unionization and careful painstaking legislative intervention by your government has ensured you a comfortable wage and decent expectations about what you can be reasonably expected to give in terms of time and physical toil to the company that employs you. There are reasons consumers express a preference for buying American-made goods. There are reasons people sneak across our borders to try and find jobs here.

But once you walk into a factory in Shenzhen, the mother of all of Deng Xiaoping’s special economic zones, the years roll back and the history we fought to overcome is replayed in dizzying magnitude. Perhaps I’m letting my rhetoric get away from my reasoned judgment here. But this is what the recent fuss is all about. In the past few months, print and broadcast media have been paying more and more attention to a specific case – the electronics manufacturer Foxconn that is a major supplier of Apple products, among others. (And I don’t say “others” lightly – Nintendo, Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia – almost all of our technological playthings have their origins on a Shenzhen assembly line.) One of the most poignant purveyors of this story is Mike Daisey, whose story took off in popularity when it was broadcast as a This American Life special.

Before I first listened to Daisey’s tale of his journey to Shenzhen and his interviews with current and former Foxconn employees, I thought I was at a place where I understood pretty well the realities of sweatshop labor and the price of rapid industrialization in Asia. China’s got some problems now, sure, but it may all be part of the growing pains of a developing nation. Japan was once cranking out our cheap factory merchandise, but the Japan I lived in for a couple years was a place where people worked in humane, if a little perfectionistic, corporations that provided them with an excellent standard of living. Who’s to say China isn’t just on its way in 20 years to being where Japan is now?

But listening to Daisey’s interviews brings back the same painful tales of Chicago meatpackers and West Virginia coal miners, but this time on a frighteningly immense scale. 14-year-olds explain how the company sneaks them around the audits by reassigning them during shifts that would be inspected by external officials. A man who can no longer use his hand talks about how much faster the production line was able to go when his superiors had him start using n-hexane to clean iPod screens because it evaporated faster than alcohol, adding a lustrous shine to their quotas and output statistics as it ate away at his nerve tissue. How can we be accepting of this? You have to wonder.

But for me, at least, this recent glimpse into the great tragic underbelly of our insatiable consumer culture raises even bigger questions. How can we sit comfortably debating politics and resort to the sort of idealism that defines corporations as people and criticizes any kind of government involvement as meddlesome attacks on the “job creators?” Foxconn is a job creator. The People’s Republic of China, notorious as the biggest of the big brother governments in existence, does remarkably well at being a small government when it comes time to enforce child labor laws or to allow workers the right to report grievances without being blacklisted, hounded and driven to suicide.

Some are calling for a boycott of companies like Apple who turn a blind eye to situations like those at Foxconn in their supply chain. It isn’t any more heartening to hear that Apple is far from the only electronics manufacturer relying on these producers or that these producers and the work environment there are far from being unique in the endless manufacturing districts throughout China. It’s even more discouraging to realize that as the standard of living and, therefore, production prices, are rising in China, factories like this are moving to even cheaper markets like Vietnam. It seems like we’re helpless in situations  where the population of workers being asked to pull an 18-hour shift at a given electronics factory one evening is larger than the population of your hometown. To tell the truth, I don’t know what can be done. I don’t know whether it’s within any of our power to make even the tiniest change. I do know that the Chinese government is responsible for the welfare of its people and until they have the same protections, rights to unionize, and enforcement of the laws and policies already in place that workers in the West enjoy, things are going to remain very difficult for a very large number of our fellow human beings. There are things happening, seemingly thanks to the increased publicity brought about by the likes of Mike Daisey. Apple had previously banned the use of n-hexane and it has recently agreed to join the Fair Labor Association in an effort to demonstrate its commitment to righting the human rights violations found in the factories of its suppliers.

But what I hope can come out of all of this is a dialog that will influence the wildly polarized ideologies we have flying around in our discourse right here in the land of the consumers. I hope we can turn off the two-team mentality, the idea that “my people are morally good and your people are morally bad” that seems to be leading those social conservatives who would otherwise take a great interest in the welfare of the working class to instead support radical ideas about the inherent benevolence of rampant unregulated capitalism that have been proven so very false in our own history.

Of course I wouldn’t want to see China go back to Maoist socialism. Of course I think the progress the country has made in the last three decades is remarkable and hopefully portends greater things to come. But I still find it painfully sad that a nation known the world over as the last great example of everything bad that comes along with ideologies that promote governmental protections for the working classes is now the nation in which some of the most depraved exploitation of those classes is taking place. We know that Marxism didn’t lead to anything that worked in the real world. But we also know, through painful experience lived out here on our own soil, that we have a duty as a society to protect those who are most vulnerable among us, to keep a check on the wild free-spinning wheels of big money that tend to mow down all that stand between them and profit, and to be our brothers’ keepers. The results of ignorance and inaction on our part will come back to face us again some day. I pray we can do all we can to avert that.

Does this mean that there’s no objective reality out there? Of course not. There’s a real, physical world out there doing things without stopping to consult its little human inhabitants about what they believe. There is really a truth. But it is good to be aware of our own approaches to meaning-making. It’s a sticky, messy reality!

We have chances while we’re still here, though, to at least get a glimpse – we can look around us at the magnificence of nature. Some of us are lucky enough to live in breathtaking mountain valleys where the heart of the earth seems to have been sliced open and thrust upwards. We are dwarfed and awed by the size and scope of it. We are humbled by its magnitude and age.

But fundamentally, there is mystery that shrouds it all. When we look at the natural world, populations grow too large, rocks grow too old, numbers reach too high for us to be able to comprehend and picture them all, to be able to have a cognitive handle on the existence that surrounds us. Some people encounter this feeling and decide that all of the mystery must be the magic of God. They picture a God of the Gaps. Others look at the natural world as if it were a puzzle. They poke it, prod it, turn some pieces upside down and try to figure out where they fit. They try to explain it all, to figure out how it all works as if the universe were one giant, incomprehensibly complex mechanism that you could take apart and tinker with and, eventually, figure out how it works.

And somehow, in the place where these feelings and approaches overlap, we ended up with a cultural war of sorts over one of the most fundamental questions: where did life on earth come from and how did it develop? Throughout the years as theology, politics and sociology have all gotten tangled up in this, we’ve ended up picking teams and framing the debate in terms of creationism vs. evolution.

Where do Lattter-day Saints sit in the middle of this controversy?

Because we are a morally conservative people and because we are Christians, many Latter-day Saints feel a little threatened by the idea of evolution and listen sympathetically to the ideas of creationism that have come out of 20th century evangelical Christianity. I was there – I grew up LDS in a small community and friends showed me movies about creationism that sought to unpack all the lies and deceits of science and I saw it from their point of view. I even did a research project in my 10th grade AP Biology class on creationism, a little frustrated that the only sources I could site were these videos I had seen, but convinced that that was good enough and that a good, believing Christian girl had a duty to take on topics like this anyway.

However, through the years, I’ve begun to see subtle things that pointed toward something else, not simply by listening to voices that oppose religion and champion positivism, but within scripture and my religion itself. I’ve begun to look at the natural world and let that overwhelming awe of age and complexity return – to realize that the ancient lake shore on which I’m hiking shows evidence of bizarre beasts swimming there millions of years ago and that that’s not a heretical thought. And that realization has not limited my religious faith, but actually reinforced it and broadened the sacred awe I feel when I think of what God actually means and what He is capable of.

For a slightly different look at these ideas, I’d highly recommend this 2-part podcast series by fairlds – it’s an interview with BYU Biology professor Steven L. Peck. The first part is a general discussion of religion vs. science (and he explains, as I love to, that the “vs.” has no business being there) and the second addresses evolution specifically, and from a Latter-day Saint point of view. I really hope this can be read and discussed without becoming a divisive issue. I know we all come into it with a lot of preconceptions and baggage. But Dr. Peck speaks eloquently and boldly and I think this is really a conversation worth having. He mentions that once on his personal blog a commenter was enraged at the discussion going on and said “If evolution were true, they would teach it at Brigham Young University!” Dr. Peck chuckles awkwardly at this point. I wonder how he worded his response to the comment? Because, you see, they do. And there are faithful Latter-day Saint scientists who not only “believe in,” but contribute to the field of evolution research. And it’s not just a few – it’s kind of the entire biology department at BYU, as well as many other believing scientists of LDS and other faiths around the globe. It’s time that we took this issue head-on and confronted our assumptions and fears about it, because it’s not only a matter of theological hobby and Sunday School discussion anymore. It’s driving people away from religion.

(Sidenote: Dr. Peck’s blog is fantastic and approaches this conversation far more professionally than I ever could, so I’d like to link you there if you’re interested in further reading. However, I want to point out that I’m not interested in creating the kind of cult of scientist personality that we often see religious people with a pre-conceived agenda make when they find a “legit” source with a Ph.D. who they can quote a lot and make themselves sound credible. This discussion isn’t about Steven L. Peck and whether is or isn’t the arbiter of all true knowledge. He makes some excellent contributions to the conversation, but I think the most important thing to focus on as writers and friends here is on opening the conversation, in involving whoever we can, and getting many voices we can listen to and learn from. I don’t want to come across as a science hobbyist (which I am) with a fossilized fixation with one thing I heard on a podcast that one time (which I’m trying very hard not to be.))

My current contribution to the conversation at hand goes back to the scriptures I mentioned at the start. The account of creation in Genesis, that lovely, slippery, vague bit of arcane writing that we really have a hard time teasing out. But I’m going to bring in here the fact that we as Latter-day Saints believe in the restored Gospel and continuing revelation and that this is a very big asset here. We don’t need to just be looking for “answers in Genesis” – there is material of worth there, and after I made the connections I’m about to discuss I went back and saw a shadow of it in Genesis as well, but what has really helped me understand this issue on a theological level is the account that we have in the Pearl of Great Price.

We don’t see very great textual differences between Genesis 1 and Moses 2. The speaker is clearer in the account in Moses, because He identifies Himself as “I, God.” But the creation of the earth still seems to proceed in the same order. The same details are mentioned. The earth, the water, the lights in the sky, the plants, the animals, and finally mankind are all created by a seemingly omnipotent creator.

But there are subtleties in the next chapter that really bring to light the great differences that lie in scripture itself when compared to our traditional understanding of scripture. God creates the earth, it takes Him 6 days, He rests, and then human life takes off, Adam and Eve, the whole story unfolds from there, right? This is where young-earth creationists have to base everything they argue for. If the Bible is literal, it only took 6 days to create the earth and then it was time for human history to start. 6,000 years from beginning to now. This is really troubling, then, when you start talking about fossils and dinosaurs and things that are millions of years old. Some Christians give a little leeway – the Old Testament timeline isn’t that clear, so maybe we have like 10,000 years to work with. I’ve heard LDS people bring in the concept that “one day to the Lord is a thousand years.” They phrase the “days” of creation in terms of “creative periods” so we can have some more time to work with. Maybe it was on one of those really long God-days that the dinosaurs came and went and left some fossils.

But what I gather from further reading of scripture (and I put this forward as nothing more than my own interpretation) is that none of those timelines even matters. Let’s look at the very next chapter: Moses 3. God looks at His creations, pronounces them good, rests on the Sabbath, and then,

4 And now, behold, I say unto you, that these are the generations of the heaven and of the earth, when they were created, in the day that I, the Lord God, made the heaven and the earth,

5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew. For I, the Lord God, created all things, of which I have spoken, spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth. For I, the Lord God, had not caused it to rain upon the face of the earth. And I, the Lord God, had created all the children of men; and not yet a man to till the ground; for in heaven created I them; and there was not yet flesh upon the earth, neither in the water, neither in the air;

6 But I, the Lord God, spake, and there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.

7 And I, the Lord God, formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul, the first flesh upon the earth, the first man also; nevertheless, all things were before created; but spiritually were they created and made according to my word.

The six-day creation that we read about is the spiritual creation. After it was all over, there was nothing on the face of the earth. Nothing on land, in the water, or in the air. At this point in time the earth could have been the swirling, cooling ball of matter that we see in our 4th grade science textbooks. And then, after all of that, the first life arises on earth.

Do we understand much about the story of Adam and Eve? No – a lot of it is figurative. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Do we understand how human beings came to be? Do we understand what happened when God breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul? No. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Meanwhile, we live in a world where the advances of science have done miraculous things for us. Faithful Christians don’t have a problem trusting the work produced by the scientific community when they’re taking an antibiotic or insulating their house to save energy or vaccinating their children against life-threatening diseases. Why should they drum up fears about a massive, world-wide godless conspiracy to make fake fossils and teach our children that they’re monkeys as soon as the scientists start talking about biology?

Evolution is not just a theory, when you think of a theory in terms of something you’re allowed to sit around in your living room chatting with your friends and make up your mind how you feel about. Evolution has a lot of evidence for it. It was originally posited on evidence of the fossil record, years before anyone knew how heredity actually happened. Darwin didn’t know anything about genes and chromosomes and how sexual reproduction works, but he saw evidence in the natural world around him. Later, we discovered the building blocks of life when we discovered DNA and the genome began to unfold and we could see right there – in the chemicals and molecules in front of us – that the “family tree” of plant and animal life on this world was, in fact, related just as evolutionary theory had posited it would be. There is more evidence for evolutionary processes, Dr. Peck says, than there is that the sun is made of hydrogen. And in terms of practical use as well – our understanding of evolution helps us create medicines to fight antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, it helps us develop new cancer cures. It is the underlying principle of modern medicine and biology.

There is nothing evil or heretical about the science that seeks to explore how our DNA works, how species change and adapt to survive in their environments. Conversely, it is a beautiful and breathtaking process. Looking back on the evidence we have of the life forms who have walked this earth is staggering. Do I know what the difference between a Homo Erectus and Adam was? I don’t. Do I know what it meant when God endowed him with the breath of life and he became a living soul? I don’t. But I don’t need to know in order to understand that Adam possessed the power of free agency and the responsibility to be a moral arbiter of right and wrong and the destiny to be held accountable for his actions and what he became during his mortal life, and that lesser animals didn’t.

I don’t need to understand everything in the natural world: the destiny of animals, the justice behind the harsh realities and the brutal lives and deaths of creatures that the earth has produced. It’s OK to live with and to work with the gaps. What I do need to understand is my own course in this world and how to be a responsible stakeholder during my period of mortal existence. And if I seek to explore, to puzzle, to tease out the incomprehensibly complex mechanisms of the natural world around me, I need to understand the necessity of honesty and truth in that endeavor. I am happy to see that there are those of religious faith who choose to pursue careers in the sciences and are willing to set aside their own preconceptions in the pursuit of knowledge that enhances our experience here on earth. I don’t think it is helpful to hold to fears of a worldwide conspiracy of intellectuals and to make myself and those I teach feel that they have to choose between rational thought and religion.

I am excited to see where my church is going in this new century – I hope that as learning and understanding expands on the earth, we will not be afraid to take an active role in it and be part of the exploratory teams. Truth be told, they need some of us in the vanguard there with them. And we need them.

But the odd thing about that memory is that I remember it being the first in a series of stances I would take on the environment as reactions to what I thought I was supposed to do. Good kids want to save the earth, right? Of course!

Well, a few years later, I was a young teenager and had become aware (I’m not sure if someone ever told me these things or if I just assumed them) that my family was super conservative and that we didn’t like environmentalism and we were Republicans and that country music was the only music that wasn’t of the devil. Thinking back now, and looking at my mother’s disco moves, I’m pretty sure that at least some of that I dreamed up on my own and only ascribed to my parents. But for whatever reason, I stepped over onto the “environmentalists are bad, we’re going to grow our own food and hike up into the mountains and learn how to survive with boxes of shotgun shells and dried potato flakes when the end of the world comes” side of the line.

It’s funny how everything was a package deal in my young mind. Being a Mormon, being a country music fan, being a survivalist, being sure the end of the world was going to come before 1994. And it all meant I was supposed to be against communists and ecoterrorists and nuclear weapons and evolution, which were all going to come get us at the end of the world anyway.

But then I had a moment that made me examine what was really going on and question what all of this joining of ideological “teams” was all about. I was at Girls’ Camp and was probably 14 or 15. Girls’ Camp in Montana is glorious and idyllic. You live in giant army tents and have to wash yourself in the cold mountain creek and eat things you burned in the fire. And I was sitting on my own in a little corner of the forest one afternoon, lashing a rock to the end of a stick to make a little golf club. (We had been learning lashing that afternoon and had a chance to create something with it.) And as I sat there and looked around at the pine trees and smelled the sharp scent of campfire on the breeze, it reminded me of all those years growing up in the Rocky Mountains and learning to love being outside, hiking across empty mountain valleys, even the summer vacations at Mesa Verde National Park where I determined that no matter what anyone said I was going to be a park ranger when I grew up. And I compared those happy, sunlit memories with the political rhetoric I’d been happily agreeing with in recent years and the concept that recycling, hugging trees, and the like qualified you as a rabid Liberal and therefore an enemy of all that was right and good in the world.

Why did there have to be that dichotomy? I pause in my own story now to present a video by a professor of Geology at BYU who has something similar to discuss.

I think Dr. Bickmore makes some really vital points here and manages to put them across without any bitter political agenda behind them. He’s a conservative – in fact, a card-carrying Republican, and yet he’s realized that it’s OK to “believe” in global warming. He points out pretty astutely that many people who are politically opposed to big government and raised taxes see something presented by “environmentalists” and automatically see it being a reason for them to increase government and raise taxes and so they therefore oppose it. But in Dr. Bickmore’s case, he was able to separate the issue from the tendency of political groups to stand in the gym and “pick teams” and look at what was going on from a more objective perspective.

I hope this is something we can take to heart no matter what our political leanings. One of the biggest frustrations of a two-party system is that every single issue becomes polarized and you’re expected to side with one team or the other, and then to mercilessly taunt your opponent. I’m probably not right about a great many political things, but I like to think I’m right when I urge my friends to do this: consider issues conscientiously and prayerfully. Don’t be quick to make decisions based on something you heard about what somebody said about somebody else’s ideas. Don’t be afraid to tell people you agree with certain tenets of a political party but not others. In your zeal to support what you believe is right and oppose what you believe is wrong don’t throw the babies out with the bathwater. Don’t subscribe to the belief that this is all about the cool kids in school picking you for a team. Be willing to take off on your own and climb the mountains that your own study and good sense tell you to climb.

When I was in Numazu, Japan, I met a couple from Malaysia. They were very friendly and kind and liked to talk to us missionaries. They took us on a drive around the base of Mt. Fuji on our preparation day and showed us the beauties of nature in that particularly lovely corner of the globe. I still remember the sight out the car window of bamboo forests waving surreally on the side of a mountain like a giant field of grass that looked to me like a scene from another planet. This couple was educated, interesting, and insightful and paid us a lot more time and attention than the average person we met, listening respectfully to our introduction of the gospel of Jesus Christ. However, they didn’t believe in the usefulness of religion and shared their viewpoint with us quite frankly.

I still remember what the woman said to us. She had been raised Catholic in Malaysia and, living in a poor area with her only education coming from her Catholic school, had very naïve views of not just religion but reality. She had been taught at school that God lived in the clouds.

When she was married to her husband, a wealthy, successful man from another country, she had never been in an airplane and was excited to take the first trip with him to Japan on their honeymoon. She was eager to look out the windows of the airplane and finally get to see God, because she knew He lived in the clouds.

She was deeply disappointed, disillusioned, and hurt when she looked eagerly out of the airplane windows and couldn’t see any trace of God or His heavenly kingdom and when she shared her thoughts with her world-wise, savvy new husband he tenderly told her that the religion she’d been taught her whole life was immature and naïve and that there was no God nor Heaven out there – just billowy clouds made of water vapor.

I often think of my Malaysian friend when I join discussions about the conflicts between science and religion. I think there are many who struggle with the seeming impossibilities and paradoxes that religion teaches and others who cling firmly to their faith and are hurt and threatened by those who point out that what they believe isn’t reflected in the natural world.

But I think the problem with both of these mindsets, and the source of all of their contention, is the mistaken underlying assumption that our airplanes can fly high enough to answer the question.

I mean this metaphorically, of course. We’ve learned a lot over the past few centuries through careful and deliberate work through the scientific method, and we’ve even sent humans up in vessels that can exit the earth’s atmosphere and look down on it from above. We have marvels of technology like the Hubble Space Telescope that let us peer into the unknowable beyond. We are on the verge of breathtaking new discoveries both without and within the earth’s vast biosystem every day. But in our reason-making; in our processing of the meaning of it all, we have to make assumptions and accommodations to fit new understanding into our personal views of the world and it is those assumptions that get us into so much trouble with one another.

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget taught that learning is not just the accumulation of knowledge, but a process that he called “equilibration.” Equilibration is the act of reconciling the world as we know it: the internal reality, with the world as we observe it: information coming in from the outside. Each time we are presented with information from the outside that is different from the things that we previously understood, we are set into a state of disequilibrium and have to rectify that so we can get back to a state of mental harmony. To do this, we adopt one of three strategies: we assimilate, we accommodate, or we avoid. Assimilation means taking the new information and filing it into a pre-existing category or structure in our mind. The young fawn Bambi sees a butterfly flitting around his head and eagerly assimilates it into an existing concept – “Bird!” If not corrected and coerced by his peers, Bambi may well have gone throughout his life understanding that a butterfly is a bird. When assimilation is not satisfactory or not possible, we turn to accommodation – creating or modifying an existing concept to house the new understanding. Bambi’s friend Thumper tells him – “That’s not a bird! That’s a butterfly!” Bambi says, questioningly, “Butterfly?” and a new concept and category is formed in his mind. Finally, there are some things we encounter in the world that are so uncomfortable to our understanding of the way things are that we simply avoid them. We are not ready or willing to deal with them, and so we ease around them, leaving them completely out of our inner concepts, and continue on our merry way. This is a dynamic process and creates a vastly different world within the mind of each individual. But we can see how these practices characterize different worldviews and the approaches we tend to take to knowing.

First is the worldview informed by religion, or traditional belief of any sort, that is threatened by new and incongruous ideas. These were the girls in my friend’s Catholic school who heard what the nuns taught and built an inner understanding of the world that included a God who sat upon a great gilded throne among the clouds and angels that flew from His presence back and forth to earth. This understanding was based on their naïve concept of the earth and the sky; they placed God in the clouds because that was the existing concept in their minds that made the most sense. This is also the worldview of those who have been taught that the Bible is the inerrant word of God since childhood and know that the Bible says that the Earth was created in six days.

People who tend to hold this first worldview do a lot of assimilating and avoiding of new scientific findings. They hear about dinosaurs, but the timeline that exists, in a very real way, in their internal understanding of the world, doesn’t date back far enough to allow for dinosaurs to have roamed the earth millions of years ago. So they assimilate that concept into something they’re familiar with – animals living in the Garden of Eden. They see the dinosaur bones at the museum, they accept the fact that animals like that must have existed, and they decide that those must have been animals that were in the Garden of Eden. Maybe they all went extinct because there was a global flood in the time of Noah. They make new facts fit into pre-existing categories. Or, alternately, they avoid them. There are some things that we are exposed to in our modern world that are so uncomfortable that people don’t want to make room for them. The idea of global warming being caused by humans and potentially leading to our impending destruction seems like it doesn’t fit well into the concepts some people have of the world and so they dismiss it; they decide that it must be a hoax or a conspiracy or a mistake or blown way out of proportion.

And though it’s easy to point to examples such as the above, this is going on frequently, even with little everyday things, and it has been going on throughout human history. Before we held our current understanding of astronomy, some people had interpreted their religious teachings to create a concept of a world where the earth was at the center of the universe and the moon, sun and stars were painted on glass spheres that revolved around it. Any evidence they saw in the sky could be assimilated into that understanding. And since assimilation and avoidance are often a lot quicker and more comfortable than accommodation, getting to the point where many people were able to accept and conceive of ideas discovered by those who, like Galileo, were using new and very technical methods to observe and assert new phenomena, was a painful and arduous process.

It’s easy to see, once you have a little experience in the world, how new information can quickly render your society’s previous understandings obsolete. It’s easy to see how continuous observation and experimentation on the world gives us new information and how important it is for us to be able to accommodate our previous conceptions of things to include what we have observed and tested, as uncomfortable as that may be. It’s easy to point out the window and show the poor, heartbroken girl that there is no God in the clouds.

But those who get too carried away in pointing out others’ inability to adjust and learn are often unaware of their own propensity to do the same things.

I love reading and following scientific publications. I get issues of National Geographic in the mail every month; I subscribe to two fantastic RSS feeds: ScienceBlogs Select and Scientific American. It’s fascinating to be able to keep up with the latest research and happenings in the science world.

But I’m saddened when I see people take the approach to science that simplifies and belittles, and is even hostile to, religion. A lot of this is based on the underlying ontological concept of positivism. It’s become almost status quo to associate good science with positivistic thought, and many prominent scientists have voiced the necessity of this philosophy when dealing with personal belief. In a nutshell, positivists would say that only things that have been experienced through sensory input, and the scientific and mathematic treatment of those things, are worthwhile pieces of knowledge. The idea rejects the kind of metaphysical and philosophical speculation that allow for different religions to put forward their teachings on truth. Positivism tends to be very hostile toward religion because religion doesn’t put forth experiences and phenomena that can be empirically tested. The basic premises of positivism are outlined here: there are many very eloquent explanations of this philosophy from Stephen Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell to Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion to the parody religion the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

But my main problem with equating science with a positivistic view of the world is this: as wonderful as it was that you invented the airplane, your airplane doesn’t fly high enough. You’re criticizing religion on very simplistic grounds, and while some of these specific criticisms are very worthwhile, you’re assuming first that the details define the whole of it, and also that all religions, all religious people, and all ontologies that allow for thought and experimentation on the unknown and the unknowable are the same phenomenon, and are equally simplistic and dismissable. You’ve assimilated some very complex beliefs into one pre-existing category in your understanding of what religion is, and that’s probably based on your own personal experience. (And while you may have extensive personal experience with one or several religions, you haven’t lived long enough or experienced enough personally to truly understand even a handful of them, much less the great span of experience we see across the globe.)

To go back to our metaphor to illustrate this: you can point out that God doesn’t live in the clouds, or at least that there’s nothing we can see, feel, or measure of a person or being fitting our comprehension of what a person or God should be, that can be detected in the clouds. And you can produce ample evidence that there are indeed no visible, tangible, measurable people or beings as we understand them to be, in the clouds. This is all true. But then you go on and make the entirely indefensible assertion that the Catholic religion is therefore untrue.

There are some huge assumptions in this belief. One is that the Catholic religion is what you understand it to be. (A Catholic in Ireland might disagree that what you remember hearing taught by Catholic nuns in Malaysia is representative of the Catholic religion.) Another is that you can fully comprehend the “concepts” – the internal worlds of a religious person, and are qualified to reject them or call them mistaken. This assumption is based on a deeper assumption – the assumption that the existence of knowledge and reality that are perfectly objective and independent of the observer’s mind and that it is possible for one person to “transfer” this knowledge, perfect and intact, to another. There is an assumption beneath that that there is one unchanging reality in the outside world and that it is measurable by sensory input, and there is a corollary assumption that this is the only worthwhile information.

I’m not arguing that any of these assumptions are wrong. Some of them may be correct. As things are at this point, I have no way of knowing.

But neither do you.

You can put up a pretty good argument for positivism: when it comes to making decisions on questions of technology, of medicine, of engineering, it’s pretty essential to have an assumed understanding of truth, and that’s why I would argue the importance of sticking to empirical evidence on the issues that matter in our day-to-day lives. Frankly, it’s the best we can do in situations like the global climate crisis. We can sit around all day and argue about how my concept of the world is different than yours, but meanwhile, we’ve got thousands of scientists taking measurements and building models and coming to pretty much the same conclusions about what is probably going to happen as a result of this. And we’ve got millions of people in Bangladesh who are probably going to be underwater in a few years with nowhere to go and a humanitarian crisis we may be totally unprepared to deal with. (More specifically on climate change and personal belief systems in an upcoming post.)

But there are realms in which positivism is inadequate to explain how we should live our lives or what we should prioritize. And there are realms in which it’s totally inappropriate to make blanket statements and invalidate the experience of others.

The social sciences get really slippery really quickly when you’re trying to handle everything with empirical evidence. Humans don’t come in a handy periodic table; they’re not discrete and predictable. Our models, though influenced greatly by the hard sciences, have a long way to go before they gain the ability to accurately describe how human beings and their societies work. What does a true positivist do in a fuzzy situation like that? Well, usually, he gives up on being a social scientist and goes into physics. Meanwhile, those of us back in the social sciences realize our limitations in the social realm, while continuing to search out new ways of knowing to best address the problems and realities we face.

How, then, should we approach the unseeable, untestable, unverifiable realm within the individual human mind/soul/spirit? We can ignore it – we can avoid its messiness and refuse to let it into our empirical concepts. We can assimilate it – we can try to quantify and test it, to stick infrared cameras into a room with a psychic to detect the presence of ghosts, assuming that ghosts must have a temperature (assimilating ghosts into a construct called “things that exist and are measurable”). We can accommodate – we can shift our understandings and be willing to budge when we see or feel or are taught something that’s not quite within the realm of anything we’ve been able to comprehend before.

Or maybe, we can accept the fact that our airplanes don’t fly high enough and suspend judgment for a while. We can do our best to clean out the superstitious cobwebs of our past by looking around and realizing that when we pictured a visible human man with a white beard called God living in the clouds we were wrong. But at the same time we can gaze upward and outward, not assuming that just because we haven’t been up any higher there’s nothing else that exists up there. We don’t have to put God in a little box and then write triumphant little papers when our sensors reveal that He’s not there. We can be aware and willing to shuffle around our mental constructs, to be able to adapt the wisdom we worked long and hard for in the face of something inscrutable. As smart as we are, we’re not smart enough to dismiss the experience and voices of millions of human beings who claim they’ve felt or heard or experienced something beyond our current understanding. It just might be in our best interests, and in our duty to our fellow beings, to treat their attempts at understanding their own nature and destiny with the respect they deserve and to resist the temptation to pass a hasty judgment on the validity of their experiences.