I was reading an article in Slate a few days ago ... a travelogue written by a National Geographic writer who spent several months getting to know the west African state of Mali.  Among her observations was that the weather forecasters on Malian television start every one of their forecasts with insh'Allah: "God willing".

It is, of course, the traditional Muslim way of expressing the world's uncertainty, of reminding everyone that the Man Upstairs is really in charge.  Insh'Allah I will make it to your party by 5:00.  I would like insh'Allah to go visit a friend in France.  This aspirin insh'Allah will get rid of my headache.

Insh'Allah there is an 80% chance of rain tomorrow.  This is very handy, because if tomorrow happens to be in that 20% of not-rain, the meteorologist has an out: God apparently wasn't willing.

How convenient, I thought ... but also how unfortunate for the poor people of Mali.

Both religion and science operate in the theatre of the unknown.  But they approach the unknown from two entirely different directions.

For the religionist, the unknown is Mystery.  If we don't know why something happens the way it does, or why something is the way it is, that is because it is beyond our understanding.  He works in mysterious ways, known only to Him.  If we want to know why the leaves on the trees are green, study Him.

For the scientist, the unknown is Curiosity.  If we don't know why something is the way it is, the solution lies in coming up with testable ideas about it, trying out those ideas against measurable yardsticks, and keeping the solutions that best fit the observations.  If we want to know why those leaves are green, study the leaves.

Each approach tackles ignorance in its own way.  One accepts the ignorance as the price of faith, or even at the extreme as proof of it ... only blasphemers question the Mystery.  The other seeks to remove the ignorance.

And each has its place: there are many propositions that do not fall readily within the realm of science because they are untestable.  What happens to us when we die?  How can we live good lives?  How do we reconcile civil society with the fact that sometimes people hurt others and get away with it?  Questions like this that cannot easily be reduced to testable values are where religion is strong.

But it is so tempting to let this go too far, to use religion as a crutch.  Look at the weatherman in Mali.  If it doesn't rain when he said it would, he has a ready excuse for his inaccuracy: he can, as it were, blame God.  God wasn't willing for it to rain; ergo, it didn't.  If he is lazy, God is all the excuse he needs not to go back, look at the methods he used to forecast the weather, and improve them.  Meanwhile, the meteorologist in a place where he can't use insh'Allah as a crutch will have to work to improve his forecasts, or he will lose his job.

So in the end, the people of Mali get lower quality weather forecasts.  If the trend continues for too long, the people of Mali will eventually get no weather forecasts at all, since "It will rain today if God is willing" is a perfectly good weather forecast for every single day if you are willing to let it be so.  It also, of course, has entirely no value to anyone in terms of actually forecasting the weather.

A thousand years ago, the great centres of learning and culture in the Indo-European world were in the lands governed by Islam.  The great cultural works of Greece and Rome that sparked the Renaissance in Europe were there to provide the spark because the Muslims had recognised their value and preserved them.  The system that we use for writing numbers even today is called "Arabic numerals" for a reason.  Every modern student studies mathematics that were preserved and improved by Muslims: like many words that start with "al", the branch of maths that we call algebra (Arabic al Jabr) came to us by way of Islam.

And now the lands of Islam are poor backwaters ruled by despots and overshadowed by the Europeans.  What happened?  There was a slow shift over time in the world views of the Islamic lands and Europe.  Over time, the Muslims suffered invasions and losses, at the hands of the Mongols, the Crusaders, the Turks ... their religious leaders and their laws grew less flexible, less tolerant of dissent ... less tolerant of the willingness to question things that is at the core of Curiosity.  Over hundreds of years, the Islamic world drifted from Curiosity to Mystery.

Meanwhile, at the same time, the Europeans who had spent nearly a thousand years immersed in the study of their faith, with the continent's best minds devoted to the study of Him, began to rediscover the achievements of the Greeks and Romans, began to reconsider the study of this world as more than just a prelude to the next ... began to ask questions and to seek answers to those questions in places other than the Bible.  The Europeans began a centuries-long shift in their attitudes from Mystery to Curiosity.

When the Europeans returned to the lands of Islam in the 19th century, the Muslims had very little with which to resist the fruits of the Europeans' curiosity, and thus began Islam's great crisis that continues to this day.  Why are so many of the world's terrorists Muslims?  Because terrorism is the fighting tactic of a people who believe that they are so very weak that they cannot fight any other way.

So I am disheartened when I see trends that suggest that the United States, one of the world's great modern centres of Curiosity, may be tipping away from science and back toward Mystery.  Don't seek out answers to the things in the world that we don't yet understand.  Write these things off as "intelligent design" and add them to the Mystery instead.  Don't send your children to schools where they may be taught things about the world that differ from the Bible.  Give them an education at home where they can learn the Bible instead of that blasphemous science.  Don't study ways to cure diseases if those ways contradict the laws of Leviticus.  Vote for the leaders with "intuition" who openly denigrate the intellectual.  And if a scientist comes out and says he doesn't know something, use that as "proof" that it must be Mysterious and therefore undeserving of research, instead of accepting that this is how the scientist does his job.

Because whether we choose Curiosity or Mystery is what will determine America's path in the centuries to come.  Will America in the year 2700 be one of the world's centres of learning, filled with prosperous people?  Or will America be the source of the fanatical terrorists who flew airplanes into the tallest buildings in Shanghai?

I want America a thousand years after I am gone to be the Shining City on the Hill.

Insh'Allah.