SCIENCE AS SOLVENT OF COMMUNITY INIQUITY
By Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman
Throughout history, science has been viewed with awe, wonder or fear. Approached with trepidation or eagerness, it has been treated discreetly or rashly. Sometimes, it has simply been ignored, to the extreme prejudice of those who ignored it.
Popular science and the spirit of scientific inquiry is the solvent and the solver of iniquity and ignorance in America and in the world. By “solvent,” I mean its method and its results can dissolve contemporary doubts and fears about individual and collective capacity, as it has done throughout history. By “solver,” I mean its disciplined pursuit can render plain the answers to knotty equations that distort and demean human aspirations and expression.
The example of George Washington Carver is illustrative. Born a slave in rural, southwest Missouri, during the Civil War, whose mother was cruelly ripped away from him during infancy, by Confederate night-riders, he went on to become one of the greatest scientists in American and world history. Though a sickly child, his “masters”, the Carvers raised him as a family member, and imparted skills and values to him he was to employ throughout his life. One of those values was faith.
Dr. Carver, despite his many wonderful discoveries, was a very religious man who believed in Jesus Christ. His was not a stultifying belief, though. On the contrary, his was a liberating belief, by means of which he was able to appreciate the hand of God in nature and the spirit of God in all life. His communications with God, through science and faith, he claims, produced his myriad agricultural discoveries and innovations. These scientific creations and techniques not only saved southern agriculture from ruin, and with it southern people and property, but they also produced a wholly new science now known as “chemurgy.”
Chemurgy is the development of new industrial chemical products from organic raw materials, especially from those of agricultural origin. It is the branch of chemistry dealing with the utilization of organic products, esp. from farms, in the manufacture of new products not classed as food or clothing (e.g., soybeans as a base for plastics or the production of methane from animal waste or garbage.
The tools of science are readily at hand: eyes to see, ears to hear, nose to smell, fingers to touch, tongue to taste, a mind to understand, a soul to intuit, a heart to guide, and the whole person’s faith to believe in one’s ultimate success. Dr. Carver used these God-given tools, his innate gifts, plus certain skills acquired in school to prepare him for his life’s work, and to catapult him into immortality.
These tools are available and accessible to all. Everyone has unique, innate gifts. Everyone has senses. Everyone has access to education. Therefore, science is available to all, as it was to that sickly, motherless, black boy from southwest Missouri, who was born a slave, and who was discriminated against, but who refused to quit in his quest to become all that he could be. Today, we all are beneficiaries, directly or indirectly of his legacy, and that of others like him, and are commensurately obligated to go and to do likewise, as he and others have done. Achievement in science and in life requires application, sacrifice, refusal to say “no” when obstacles obstruct, and belief in one's self and one's purpose.
Science has the capacity to alter our lives and society for good or ill. Far too long, the ill has held sway, leading to iniquity of all kinds. But now, through the science festival movement coming to the fore in America, (see link below) the promise and potential of science can trickle all the way down to elementary school children, whose shining curiosities are primed for inquiry. They already have science fairs in their schools, which many of their parents help them to prepare for. These presentations can and should be shared with entire communities, at community facilities, and supplemented by individual, group, government and corporate presentations, annually, at the same place and time. These city or region wide “science Mardi Gras” or carnivals will not only celebrate science, itself, but they may afford an updraft for positive community-wide improvements through the institution and pursuit of new values, that of scientific inquiry and creation.
http://www.sciencefestivals.org/
