When I was in high school, it was. Tenth grade. First period we went to biology class where we learned science, and second period we went to world literature, where in the first quarter we read the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Ovid, and Herodotus. Ah, the good old days.

Feminist Avatar, Huzzah!

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Hamlet, Scene v

Part of the goal, therefore, should not be to say who is right or wrong, but to reach a consensus that does not infringe on the rights of others. We make truth as a people; it is not ‘out there’ to be found or determined. As feminists, we want to make a ‘truth’ that has no place for patriarchy and oppression.

At the end of the day, even is there is a real truth written into the core of the earth (which not everybody thinks there is), it is a bit arrogant of us to assume that we got it right and everybody else, for the rest of time and across cultures, is wrong. Furthermore, just because we all agree on something still doesn’t make it true. We used to all agree that the sun went round the earth… it was testable because the sun came up in the same place every morning and set in the same place.

Yes, but are both systems testable & repeatable? in which case, we need to think about other ways to determine something akin to truth. Dammit, if Joe Muslim and Polly Prebyterian and Sara Sceptic all come up with the same thing, we can at least knock religion out of the running as the sole backing for a particular theory. YES??? And if Sara and Polly have - er - differences, and they remain despite all care, what does that mean? I would doubt both of their findings. If we don’t have some kind of testable & repeatable, how would we chose?

I *refuse* to accept the edicts of religion in these cases. What are our choices, then? If we differ, how do we determine?

I mean, saying that the Goddess decides…well, it doesn’t work for me, either. So then what?

A different example: a man who worked with and was associated with bears dies. The next day a bear walks into the town where he lived. This is unusual as bears are wary of people and towns. Western science would call this a coincidence. If you were Cree, you would say that the bear either was, or was sent by, the dead man. Western science would say ‘where is the evidence’ or ‘where is the causal link’? The Cree would say ‘the bear is the evidence’. The Cree are not wrong; they just count different things as evidence.

Similarly, in the past, they had a different understanding of how the body worked. They had evidence to prove it. We might not count it as evidence today, but they did. Based on the model they designed, they were able to predict things and those things were repeatable (testable). For example, their model explained why women menstuated and why they didn’t when they were pregnant. It explained why men were generally physically bigger and stronger and it also explained why some women were stronger than some men. They could use their understanding of the body to make medicines and those medicines worked, just like ours do. Their model gave answers to all their questions (or answers to as many questions as our model can answer). They were not crazy or even illogical; they just used different evidence from us. (Also I don’t think they ever measured physcial heat; heat was an element. They only had four elements: earth, air, water and fire. Today we still use elements as the basis of the world but we have a lot more of them, such as iron, mercury, radon etc).

The problem for Western Science, in my view, is that we do not know whether our system of doing things is ultimately the ‘right’ way (or for some people whether there is ultimately going to be a ‘right’ way). Because in the future, somebody might come along and say what you count as evidence isn’t really evidence at all and what you think causes something, doesn’t cause it at all. And we’ll say ‘but its testable and repeatable’; and they’ll say ’so is our system’.

We could actually critique evolution in this way. Western Science says we have archaeological evidence of people at different states of development. It seems that there is an obvious evolution between the different types of bodies found. Someone else (possibly a Christian but perhaps a future scientist) might come along and say actually these were just all very similar but entirely different species that have now died out. That they look similar and are differently evolved from each other is just a big coincidence. The bit where we link them together is ultimately a leap of faith that we call the scientific method. Western science thinks its the best way to do things, but there is no guarantee that it is.

Not, mind you, that I think modern “science” is infallible - by no means. Replicability, however, is a pretty good test; better than most of the other ways of telling fact from dream that I know of, anyway. I hate to toss it out and replace it with…well, what? There’s not even a candidate, is there?

“Until the eighteenth century, we believed that men and women were the same sex, differentiated only by a differing balance of heat within the body. This understanding of the body lasted for over 1500 years.”

Sorry everybody if I’m engaging a “mythical creature that lives under bridges known to throw stones.”