With much of life shrouded in mystery people, choose different ways to embrace the unknown. Living with uncertainty is difficult, and knowing how to adapt to new information, even more so. The pandemic unveiled a prime example of the confusion uncertainty causes.
The public wanted absolute answers and consistent directions in how to respond to covid. But the virus and our scientists playing an outsmarting each other game of chess left us not knowing who would win.
Science is based on educated guesses and testing based on suppositions. As scientists learned more about the human body and genome sequencing, as in the case of covid and other deadly diseases, they became more adept at halting its progress. As I mentioned before, the covid vaccine was developed in a year because of new gene-editing technology, but the virus kept throwing curveballs calling for adaptations. What did many people do when faced with uncertainty? They got angry at the men like Dr. Anthony Fouci and research scientists, calling them liars.
There were those who turned to God in search of absolute authority. Rather than using their brains to unpack the unknown and adjust as new information was revealed, they preferred security, and so died in record numbers. According to CDC, between October and November of last year, when Delta was prominent, unvaccinated people had 13.9 times the risk for infection and 53.2 times the risk for death compared to fully vaccinated persons with booster doses. Then again the virus changed with the Omicron variant and vaccinated people got covid.
Does this mean we shouldn’t accept science? The vaccine still reduced the chance of a serious infection leading to death due to Omicron.
Should we stop looking for cures for devastating diseases and put our trust in existential beings? And if not, how do we change our behavior so we can live with what scientists say about the environment. What will it mean if the new James Webb Space Telescope is able to see back to the big bang and the origin of the universe? Will it change people’s beliefs and behaviors? Some people still cling to the notion that humans have only been on earth for 6,000 years concurrent with the dinosaurs when carbon dating shows us that we’ve been here for millions after the dinosaurs died off.
It saddens me to see people on religious and political bandwagons leaning right or left as the wind blows rather than question and explore on their own. If we don’t accept the notion that we can be logical and rational beings as well as spiritual ones, then there is little chance we can solve the difficult problems facing us today.
Human beings let the earth’s population expand to a point of being out of control. We poisoned our air and streams for the sake of trade. We built cities with high-rise condos for the rich, allowed drugs and alcohol to mess with people’s brains, let the poor live in tents on the street, and permitted lawlessness under the guise of individuality–something that may have worked when few people populated the earth. It certainly, doesn’t work with 7.9 billion people.
There are rational ways to deals with the issues we face and ways to help us adapt to change. Religion gives us moral values and lessons in how to be compassionate so we live with one another peacefully. Injunctions, like in the Ten Commandments in Judaism and Christianity and collective morality expressed in the Qur’an, call on people to be just, fair, and responsible for their actions. Meditation focuses us inward on emotions and on thoughts outside of possessions.
Science also has a place in connecting us to the natural world, letting us live in harmony with the universe rather than fight it. Social, biological, and physical scientists along with spiritual and existential thinkers are needed to explain and find ways to change. The one thing most people agree on is that change is a constant and has to be dealt with.
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