Thank You, Mr. Johnson

by Karen Bauernschmidt

“So I will resort to common sense…,” he begins, thereby bypassing his own central platform of the scientific method in order to worship it.  In the absence of both logic and science, the remainder of the discourse can serve no rational purpose.  The unabashed plot, sport, is revealed in the next sentence, “I’m sure many will contest my simplistic view….” 

One could easily, as Johnson jousts, contend that equating organized religion with illness in general and infection in particular is fatuous, and I do.  In saying, “I find it foolish to spend time studying what early on proves to be baseless,” he iterates his subtitled clue: this is a personal not a scientific boundary.  Proof, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.  Arguing that reality is exactly that which can be willfully reproduced by man is no less fanatical than arguing that the earth is flat.

It is fanaticism and not religion that is dangerous.  For it was in full accordance with the scientific process that the Nazis dropped Jews into ice water to measure the lifespan of hypothermia.  Taken to extremes most human actions fall far too short of useful.

I’ve read some interesting research in the name of science.  One was a study that claimed human breast milk has insufficient iron when compared to manufactured baby formula, another claimed a high-fat meal can cause fatal vasoconstriction, and last month there was a report that sleep kills.  Now, the breast milk study was funded by Ross Laboratories, makers of Similac Infant Formula, in the late 1970’s; it failed to mention that although the gross weight of the formula’s iron compound exceeded that of mum’s, the breast milk had a significantly higher amount of bioavailable iron than the artificial sort.

The 2001 Yale University study fed one group of post-menopausal women cold milkshakes and another warm bowls of oatmeal, seemingly ignorant of the remote possibility that homeostasis in geriatric warm-blooded mammals may involve vasoconstriction or dilatation as life-saving reactions to thermal changes in its environment following the attrition of subcutaneous tissue.

Last month, Boston University School of Medicine reported findings that ‘in one study of 4,541 men and women, people who slept for nine hours or longer were 70 percent more likely to die over a 14-year period than those who slept seven to eight hours.’  Perplexed by the lethal connection between sleep and death, lead author Dr. Daniel Gottlieb was at a loss as to why ‘there’s no good physiological explanation for long sleep causing death,’ obviously unimpressed with the fact that only the medical files of patients with major cancer or heart disease were used in the sample.     Such studies practicing strict, orthodox scientific methodology lead me to two conclusions.  First, the death rate is 100%.  Second, researchers should disclose their DSM diagnosis codes, blood alcohol level, and funding sources along with any conclusions proffered for publication in a peer-reviewed, professional journal.

“A common symptom of religion is delusion,” saith Johnson.  “Another is irrational self-importance.”  Some of my favorite Mensans fall into this maelstrom.  Some like it there and stay.  Although I find Mr. Johnson’s comments a repugnant assault against the dignity of man’s soul, I defend his right to say so.  As distasteful as bile is, it has a distinct role in support of the body.  As bitter as some opinions are, they serve the purpose of keeping ideas flowing in the human species.  I like that.  By my empirical data, more mental illness and microbial infection are caused by stasis than by flux; more knowledge and innovation are generated by flux than by stasis.

Yet we humans, some bent toward philosophy, some toward science are as intangible as we are tangible, and thus arise the most profound differences between us.  The scientific method is precisely designed to measure merely the measurable.  One’s soul and one’s beliefs are a matter of personal nobility, an unalienable right of sentient beings, in my view.

Even though I can’t prove it scientifically by way of a double-blind, cross-over, scientific study, I believe I have a soul.  I believe my angels and demons wage both war and sport within my universe, that I both participate and spectate, that both victory and defeat are as ethereal as clouds in the sky and hellish as lava in a volcano.  I know a number of other things I could never prove.

Science without philosophy is a thorny stem without the rose.  Not all that matters is measurable.  Not all that’s rational can be reproduced.  While science is built on education, philosophy is based on value.  The wholesome scholar of life must balance the gait of education from atop a variety of foundations, with one foot now on the cold rock of science and the other then in the warm sands of philosophy.  Willful ignorance can be crippling.

So, thank you, Mr. Johnson, for stirring up my juices, all be they digestive.  And although I believe you’re serious in your assertions, how can I possibly take them seriously?  By the way, if you offered me a thousand dollars and all that’s measurable in Mensans I couldn’t prove it: but this rebuttal is directed to the unscientific gleam in the eye of a soul who worships science fanatically.