It's All Connected? No Way!

Being a Senior this year, I’m going through the usual headache of college applications and open houses. While it is rather irritating to sit for hours in a crowded auditorium listening to professors go on and on about why I should invest four years of my life and thousands of dollars attending their university, there are amusing moments as well.
One such moment of humor occurred while I was attending an open house a couple weekends ago. A good natured lady-professor with a Scottish accent was explaining the merits of a particular program her college offers. The one point she kept returning to was the unique system of learning they use in teaching their students. Unlike other universities, she said, they teach their students that everything is connected. She went on to explain how History is connected to Literature, and how Philosophy and Religion are connected to them both. No other college, she insisted, teaches students the connections between things.
At that point, my eyes grew very wide. And suppressing the urge to laugh out loud, I turned to my Mom (sitting beside me) and gave her a knowing look. You see, as a home-school student, I have been taught from the time I was in elementary school that everything is connected. That concept was nothing new to me. It seemed ludicrous to try to understand the world any other way.
Although I joked with my mom about it on the way home, it also made me think. I realized with a sort of slow shock, that this fundamental principle of connection that I take so much as a matter of fact is totally foreign to most people. There are two theories about the nature of reality floating around right now: The first, as I have already mentioned, is the “Everything is Connected” Theory. The Second, and by far the more popular, is the Compartmentalization Theory.
The Compartmentalization Theory says that things are not connected. Everything is isolated and separate from everything else. So, according to this theory, History and Literature are not connected, because they are categorized under different subjects in school. In the same way, the Secular and the Sacred are supposed to be unconnected because one deals with the natural realm and the other with the supernatural realm. Essentially, Compartmentalization says you have a bunch of boxes in your brain, and none of those boxes touch any of the other boxes.
The only problem with this theory is that it does not reflect reality.
Let me illustrate with an example. Take two sciences: Chemistry and Biology. At first glance this seems a perfect example of Compartmentalization. Chemistry is the science that deals with non-living matter, and Biology is the science that deals with living matter. Pretty simple. But wait a moment, what happens when you take biology down to the cellular level? Eventually what you get is living matter (cells) composed of nonliving matter (proteins, amino acids, lipids, etc.). Is this biology or chemistry? Actually it’s both. It’s called Biochemistry, and it is where biology and chemistry overlap.
You see why Compartmentalization, while a nice way of organizing information, is not really consistent with the way reality works. Nothing is totally isolated from everything else. There is always some connecting point, some overlap. This is because we live in a wholistic universe. That is, when God created the cosmos, he designed it to function according to natural laws that govern every area of life. The universe we live in is a unified whole, not a bunch of disconnected boxes. So instead of boxes, your brains actually look more like a light spectrum where each color flows into the next.
This principle of connection has implications not only for the sciences, but also for the fundamental questions of life. What we believe about God (theology) will affect what we believe is real (philosophy), and what we believe is right and wrong (ethics). In turn, what we believe about these areas will inform what we value and how we live. If we connect the dots, we see that what we believe about one area of life has repercussions for every other area of life. This is why it doesn’t work to try to separate the Secular and the Sacred, because ultimately, what we believe about God will determine how we live our lives.
Although this blog is nominally a science ethics blog, you will notice that we talk about a wide variety of issues ranging from theology to politics. I hope this understanding everything is connected will help you follow along and make connections yourself.