Thoughts on life

Graduation report: the ceremony itself was quite as expected- long and boring. I was one of the last people to graduate. Beforehand my family had planned a Hannah-recognition ceremony, which was very thoughtful and special. I was very surprised.

Here's something that I was thinking about lately: I have read in history books and other such literature about people in the 17th/18th centuries that they attributed everything to divine providence because they didn't understand how science worked. For example, people believed they were having a baby because God gave them a baby, or that someone was sick because God made them sick, or that weather patterns and geological formations were what they were because that was what God made. According to these books, this was because they did not know the scientific explanations for these things. The implied (though not explicitly stated) comparison is that we today, with our vast knowledge, know better and can explain everything with science. My opinion is that the two are not at all mutually exclusive. Let's look at the example of weather, say, having nice weather on a day when you have to work outside a lot. Yes, we know that weather is caused by a lot of things like wind patterns and lots of other things that I don't fully understand but meteorologists can explain to us. But does that mean that God had nothing to do with it? May it never be! Clearly it is not completely deterministic- otherwise weathermen would be able to perfectly predict the weather for all time. There is some uncertainty with everything. We might say that we KNOW that given the existing weather conditions, there is a certain probability that it will be nice tomorrow, and another probability that it will be hot, and another probability that it will be rainy. So what determines which of those options it is? The scientific explanation leaves a hole there.

Even in chemistry/physics, in the study of electrons, the typical model that says there are such-and-such number of electrons in this shell, so-and-so many here, and so forth, those are probabalistic- it's just a probability that a certain electron will be in a certain place. The placement of these tiny electrons isn't fully predictable! So it doesn't make sense to say something like, "that person recovered from that illness because his immune system was able to kill the disease cells and it worked in such-and-such fasion... [lots of details]," because there is never perfect uniformity in these results. Yes, we can understand more of the specifics of how things physically happen, but there is still no certainty. What makes one person recover and another get worse under the same circumstances, other than God's plan?

I don't like when history books take on this "we know everything now" attitude.