It was largely Star Trek that focused my mind on science and reason, starting around 1972 – but it was the World Book Encyclopedia that first got it moving.
Dad had bought the 1970 edition for the family while we’d been living in East Point, and Mom stressed that it could be an invaluable homework tool, if I gave it a chance – which I did. The previous year, they had kept me up way past my bedtime to watch Neil Armstrong take his one small step, and that moment had captivated me. So when we arrived on Water Street in December of 1970, I pulled Volume S out of the World Book, sat down in the living room with it, and read the article “Space” for the first of dozens of times. Within a few months, I had the entire history of the space program memorized, from Explorer 1 through Apollo 12.
Next came the Lunar Lander model. And the Saturn V model. And the plastic-sheet 45 rpm record from an issue of National Geographic that gave a five-minute summary of Apollo program highlights. And the National Geographic Moon Poster, made famous in Lou Grant’s office on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, went up on my bedroom wall.
Then came chemistry. My parents got me a chemistry set, augmented by a high school chemistry textbook from my Grandpa John. I started testing foods to learn the levels of this or that they contained. I got a book on rocketry and started designing my own.
Then came science fairs, two of which I placed 2nd in, county-wide; then came a book about how computers worked, and a radio I built from scratch. Then came homemade gunpowder to be used in my rockets, with which I easily could have blown off one or both hands (my parents never knew about that).
And from the New Wave science fiction I’d discovered at the town library – Samuel R. Delaney and Ursula Le Guin and Harlan Ellison and Roger Zelazny and Robert Silverberg and Joanna Russ (Philip K. Dick and Thomas Disch would come later) - I had begun gradually forming a new worldview, that the science and technology that hovered vaguely at the edges of my very parochial existence were in fact at the very center of the real world, propelling it in directions that would have society-altering consequences.20
[At the time, I was unaware that Kirk was paralleling me in this. I would learn many years later that he had discovered these far-sighted authors at least as early as I had. Had I known, I’d have had someone to talk to about all the ideas that poured out of those books; but at the time, my only thoughts where he was concerned was jealousy over the fact that his dad worked for NASA...]
Science would, in the long run, change human beings, and change them far more than religion could.
This dawning awareness remained shapeless for many years, but I voraciously prepared for it, all the same. I soaked up math and physics and took a computer course my first semester at the University of Kentucky, eventually majoring in it.
This was a severe heresy, but one easy to overlook so long as I did not say the E word; the notion that one can be religious and a believer in science was beginning to represent a convenient compromise in Evangelicalism, as technology was beginning to creep into the economy with the advent of affordable computers.
I didn’t then, and don’t now believe that one can be religious and a believer in science, and I’ve written extensively about why that is so; I’ll not repeat it here.
But neither will I cop to any cognitive dissonance on this point; as I said up top, my continued dalliance with the church wasn’t a tug of war in my head; science, not religion, was worthy of my fealty - my mind was made up. My continuation in the church was a social concession. I knew no other way to live.
But as with music, the taboo side of science slipped right into me along with all the rest of it – and ended up defining me.
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