How much do you think of yourself as a scientist? What sorts of experiments have you conducted lately? What data have you been researching to help find the answer to a problem that needs solving? If science is about figuring out how things work, what discoveries have you made lately? If science is about understanding truth and applying the power of truth to bring out practical solutions, what answers have you unlocked that have brought greater freedom to people’s lives? For a Christian Scientist, these are important questions to be asking (while standing in front of a mirror).
I once read a book by the Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, which gave an illustration of poor science. He talked about a science textbook for elementary school children that showed a picture of a wind-up toy dog. The textbook question was, “What makes the dog move?” And the answer the textbook wanted the children to come up with was “energy.” But as Feynman pointed out, just getting kids to memorize the term for something didn’t mean they’d learned anything about the science involved.
He then indicated that a useful and scientific approach would have been to take the toy apart so the children could see the gears and the tension in the spring and how its release makes the dog move. I was struck by how true this is of any science.
