Warning: Words Have Letters In Them
I’ve (at least intended to have) written quite a bit regarding the place of “science” and “faith” in the days and lives of “people”. Often, when donning the (stylish) hat of an empiricist, looking down upon the amalgam of human endeavor, I wonder how anyone can find any indication that we, as an organ of Everything, are working toward any kind of goal or useful eventuality. That might be a trap, however, sprung on folks who presume that “evolution” necessarily means “transformation into a state absolutely superior to the current”. In the colloquial sense, during informal conversation, I don’t think there’s much of an issue; but when the resolution of an idea might cut on how tightly one manages the semantics of his arguments, that’s a sloppy implication to allow. I should then prefer something without connotations of improvement as measured against some objective standard, like: “Evolution is a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations.”
Yet, just today I found cause to question my possible cynicism. In the break room at “work”, I was “preparing” my lunch, and I know I’d've forgotten the fact that I’d ravaged my Lean Pockets Meatballs & Subs with 1,300 watts of electromagnetic radiation for several minutes had it not been for Nestlé’s prescience. Right there, on the cardboard “crisping sleeves” was printed, “Caution: Product Will Be Hot”. This, I find later, is the secondary source of caution for the wary, as the same warning is printed on the outside of the packaging itself. Hoorah!
Clearly, by my estimation, we today stand as the pinnacle of the human being. Any society whose members require multiple reminders that they have subjected their foodstuffs to streams of photons cut from the microwave subspectrum, specifically for the purpose of heating foodstuffs, and further that such will have resulted in hot food, must be as advanced a people as can be hoped for. We’ve been trekking down this path for a long time: I remember in the early ’90s when a woman sued McDonald’s after she poured hot coffee on herself—surely only a primitive would expect that a hot-brewed fluid, stored in thermally insulated containers, delivered in thermally insulated cups, might remain hot long after she careens away from window #2. [Ed. note: It appears, on cursory inspection, that drive-through service was once conducted through a single window, rather than the current two-window standard, which housed both the cash tending and food delivery operations. I, too, was aghast. Oh how far we've come!]
I sit here, docile and transfixed, consumed by incalculable awe.
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