Opus 2024-400: Speculation

Should we spend our time speculating instead of investigating that which we know?  I come to this because I was asking myself how much Israel knew about the things of God when they were led out of Egypt.  We don’t have any reference in the Bible itself to written documents that they possessed.  It’s possible there was some oral tradition.  But we don’t know about any writing.  To my knowledge we also don’t have any non-biblical evidence about the story of creation, Abraham or Noah being written out before the time of Moses.

Speculation is fun.  Speculation can be a healthy mental exercise.  Speculation on certain things is a total waste of time.  I can speculate on what the Jews had, what they knew, what that meant, and so forth.  The problem is, I very quickly begin to wander out into the wilderness of ideas and my ideas are no better than yours.

Now take that into other areas of study.  I tend to think in Bible and theology.  Your area of great interest might be in science or perhaps medicine.  You might be an engineer dreaming about that next building you’re putting up.  When we move into the area of speculation, we open up doors that are possibly meant to be closed.  Sometimes you can try your ideas out by experiments and either verify them or not.  That’s the point of the scientific method.  We try things out we experiment

For instance, let’s say you are an engineer and you are trying out a new concept in building bridges.  Think of the people who first tried suspension bridges.  Honestly, I don’t know what I’m talking about here but I think there are probably places where the engineers have to speculate on what will work and what won’t work.  They don’t go out and build a multi-million dollar structure based on speculation though.  They build a smaller version or they do tests.  And that way they gather data to either verify or deny what they are speculating on.  In that case it might be useful.

As I read the investigations going on into life and where life comes from with a scientific perspective, I find that there is less and less real science going on and more and more speculation.  Part of the problem is that the biologist are getting so deep into the structure of the cell and the parts that make up life that they can’t run any experiments anymore.  Everything has to be theory.  And there are so many egos involved that what experiments might be run are not run.

Then you have the areas of the pseudoscience.  Take any word and put science after it and the scholars like to consider themselves deep thinkers with the scientific method behind them.  Take social science.  I have a credential to teach social science.  That’s pretty meaningless.  It includes history, which I accept, and economics which I have never studied formally.  I am guessing there are a long list of things that I was allowed to teach because I had a social science credential.

Some areas such as philosophy are totally speculative.  There is no way that you can know which one is actually right and in reality most of them are probably wrong.

So let your imagination go wild.  Speculate.  If people don’t laugh too hard, share.

homo unius libri