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This week’s discussion was most definitely my favorite thus far; the reason being that I can appreciate fact based dialogue more so than philosophical dialogue. I find I leave the classroom with a stronger sense of satisfaction when I have concrete facts presented to me, or at least theories that have been accepted as the “least wrong” ones. In other words, speculation does little for me and, while I wouldn’t call myself “power hungry”, I won’t say that I don’t believe some truth holds to Francis Bacon’s old quote: knowledge is power.

However, I won’t pretend that I have any interest at all in how the universe began. While the “Big Bang Theory” is interesting on paper, at the end of the day, I find myself thinking- why did anyone waste their time on this? Who cares…? There is no doubt in my mind that many people in the past have dedicated their capable minds to exploring the topic of the universe but I’ll be so rash in stating I think they wasted their time. If Earth was made as a result of an explosion or if a giant whatever, alien for example, created it- what difference will it make? How will that change the way we live? Simply stated, in my opinion, it should not.

Finally, I want to address the fact that we have been referring to the theories accepted by the scientific community as “scientific stories”. Quite honestly, I do not agree with calling them that. These theories are not “just theories” and calling them “stories” reduces their value, making them seem like mere hypothesis. When, in reality, theories like “The Big Bang Theory” or Einstein’s “theory of relativity” are accepted as truth within the scientific community because they are based on observations and testable ideas. They are the result of extensive research and testing, not just the result of a few peoples’ creativities running wild on paper- leaving us with perhaps fascinating but nonetheless improbable and improvable stories. Until a theory is disproved by new observations and tests, I think it deserves to be accepted as the truth or, at the very least, the least wrong idea of our time.