A science guy

I've always lived my life head-on; not shying away or backing away from anything, and I intend to keep doing that. That's how I was raised. My mother was a 17-year-old small town girl when I was born but went on to beat all odds and become a nationally known fashion model because she lived her life the same way she was teaching me to live mine.

I didn't become famous but I assure you it wasn't for lack of trying. I wrote books, starred in a video series about love and relationships, appeared on radio and television, and was interviewed in newspapers but I was never 'discovered' by that one person who could have made a difference. Maybe there was nothing to discover or maybe I simply wasn't good enough or unique enough to sell the people a product they didn't know they wanted or needed until they heard it from me but I sure tried.

But today's column isn't about succeeding or failing in my career, in my relationships or in life itself. It's been my experience that life is orderly and somewhat predictable in a general sense, although at an individual level, anything could and sometimes does happen without warning. I've been a social scientist for over 40 years and to not see order in the universe is like walking through life blindfolded.

There are proofs practically everywhere we turn and every place we look, some dating back millions of years but I have never encountered the unexplainable. I've never seen a ghost or a spirit or an apparition. I've never been visited by the dead. I've never had a premonition that something was going to happen and then it did. I've never seen a flying saucer or an alien from another world. I've never seen a prayer being answered or a wish being fulfilled, just because that's what the person wants. I've never seen nor experienced anything magical or metaphysical in this scientifically explained world we all inhabit.

Now I'm not fool enough to say that none of these things exist just because I haven't seen them. At any point in time in everyone's life, there is far more we don't know than what we do.

I understand sociology and social behavior and can explain fairly specifically how people become who they are and why they do the things they do. That's because I studied it through four academic degree programs in higher education. When you learn as much about a subject as possible, you're considered an expert in the field and that's what happened to me with sociology.

But there are a million other things I know very little about at all, even in the academic world. I was never close to being an expert in the hard sciences or advanced math classes except for being an A student in geometry which always baffled me because I didn't understand why I picked that up so effortlessly while struggling somewhat in the other classes.

I'm not an electrician, a plumber, an architect or a farmer because I have no knowledge, training, or experience in those fields. So quality people in those fields know much more about them than I do, and I know more about sociology than they do.

So everyone has their own areas of expertise while at the same time, having other areas of relative ignorance and that description fits all of us. So even though I would not call someone crazy or accuse them of hallucinating or being mentally ill because they believe they experienced something that I don't believe exists, I have to see scientific proof before I become a believer too. I have to see evidence that these things happened or in my mind, they DIDN'T happen.

I record all the air disaster shows on the Discovery Channel and one thing the experts say over and over is that people often see things that didn't happen. People report flames or fire coming from an airliner when there were no flames or fire. They report it rolling over in the air several times when it didn't roll over at all. Their minds simply trick them into thinking they see something that they don't.

The same thing happens in a criminal case with eyewitnesses. Eyewitness testimony will get a defendant convicted of a crime faster than anything else and yet eye witness testimony has always been and continues to be one of the least trustworthy pieces of evidence a prosecutor can present, even though it almost always convinces the jury because, like many of you, they don't believe a person would testify under oath that they saw a defendant commit a crime unless they were sure they did. But research indicates they're just as likely to be wrong as right.

So it doesn't matter how certain you are of seeing or experiencing something that few others have, unless you can scientifically prove your claims, I'll remain a skeptic because that's what science has taught me to do.