"Science does not think."
This past Saturday I was listening to CBC's Quirks and Quarks. I was amazed to hear one of the guests make the following statement:
You don't spend your life studying a miracle.
It immediately took me back to something I had just been reading in Heidegger:
It is important above all that on the way on which we set out when we learn to think we do not deceive ourselves and rashly bypass the pressing questions; on the contrary, we must let ourselves be admitted into questions that seek what no inventiveness can find...We said: man still does not think, and this because what must be thought about turns away from him...It withdraws from him. But how can we have the least knowledge of something that withdraws from the beginning, how can we even give it a name? Whatever withdraws, refuses arrival. But--withdrawing is not nothing. Withdrawal is an event. In fact, what withdraws may even concern and claim man more essentially than anything present that strikes or touches him...What withdraws from us draws us along by its very withdrawal, whether or not we become aware of it immediately, or at all. Once we are drawn in the withdrawal, we are--albeit in a way quite different from that of migratory birds--caught in the drift of what draws, attracts us by its withdrawal. And once we, being so attracted, are drawing toward what draws us, our essential being already bears the stamp of that "draft." As we are drawing toward what withdraws, we ourselves point toward it...To the extent that man is in the this draft, he points toward what withdraws. As he is pointing that way, man is the pointer. Man here is not first of all man, and then also occasionally someone who points. No. Drawn into what withdraws, drawn toward it and thus pointing into the withdrawal, man first is man. His essential being lies in being such a pointer. Something which in itself, by its essential being, is pointing, we call a sign. As he draws toward what draws away, it points not so much at what draws away as into the withdrawal. The sign remains without interpretation. [from "What Calls for Thinking?"]
I can't imagine spending my life studying anything other than a miracle.