Rediscovering the Joy of Science Writing

Over the last 12 years or so my writing has changed, and not necessarily for the better. As I recuperated following seven weeks of radiation treatments for tonsil cancer, I happened to come across a printout of an assigned essay I wrote as an undergrad in 2008. At the risk of sounding immodest, I was surprised by how much clearer and cleaner my earlier prose was than much of my later writing.

So what the heck happened? As I reread some of my other undergrad writing, what struck me was my focus on sharing the joy, pleasure, and satisfaction of learning about the world around us. Around 2010, the focus and tenor of my writing morphed into an outlet for my frustration and annoyance at—to be blunt—the stupidity of large numbers of my fellow human beings. As a result, my writing became denser and more detailed, increasing the likelihood og my flying off on a tangent—my favorite trig function—but also took much of the joy and pleasure out of the writing process.

Though raised in a very conservative, evangelical Christian home, I was a voracious reader whose curiosity knew no bounds. From my exposure to Christian belief, I developed an interest in ancient history and lost civilizations. Entering elementary school as the Apollo program was at its zenith I also became fascinated with—as I then called it—“outer space.” Over the course of my own life—for the most part—what caused me to adopt a more fact and evidence-based world-view were passionate, but matter-of-fact descriptions of what we know—and how we know it—of the history and nature of the universe on both the largest and smallest scales in the way Carl Sagan’s Cosmos—both the ground-breaking television series and the book—did.

Two good examples of this matter-of-fact approach is how, as a young person in church, I became familiar with the stories of the Old Testament (OT), such as the patriarch Abram (later re-christened Abraham by Yahweh) and of Moses and the Exodus. According to Genesis 11 (and elsewhere in the OT), the mysterious-sounding “Ur of the Chaldees” was the original home of Abraham. I was fascinated to later learn that Ur was a very ancient Sumerian city-state indeed, with the first signs of settlement dating back to the 4000’s BCE (i.e. the 5^th millennium BCE) , long before Abraham is believed to have lived.¹ One of the most famous artifacts found at Ur, dating from around 2600 BCE, is the Standard of Ur, depicting different aspects of ancient Sumerian life. Curiously, the Chaldeans were a much later ethic mix that founded the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 612 BCE, long after the time of Abraham. “Ur of the Chaldees” probably found its way into the Old Testament because the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, who had Chaldean ancestors, rebuilt some of the important religious sites at Ur, and was well-known as the arch-villain who destroyed the Jerusalem temple in 587 BCE and sent all but the poorest of Judah’s population in to exile in Babylon.

Unlike Nebuchadnezzar II, there is no unequivocal evidence, written or otherwise, to the existence for Moses or the Exodus outside the Bible. The pharaoh of the Exodus could have erased all written/carved evidence of Moses in Egypt, which the faithful believe explains away the lack of such evidence. However, when it comes to the 40 years of wandering by the Israelites in the desert, it bears noting that  humans, even in the ancient world, are notorious for generating a lot of rubbish in the form of bones, broken pottery, etc.—something for which archaeologists are very grateful. Yet despite over a century of archaeologists—those with and without a religious agenda—combing throughout the Sinai peninsula, no material evidence for any such trail of garbage has been found for a mass migration on the supposed scale of the Exodus at the time it is presumed to have happened.

In my writing over the last 10 years, I’d run around like a lone outfielder in a home run derby batting practice, making my prose dense, turgid, and obtuse as I flew off on an almost exponentially expanding number of tangents trying to tackle every conceivable objection and protest of the most benighted, uninformed reader. The more matter-of-fact approach I described above is to simply point out how it only takes the failure of a few links in story to throw the whole account into quite reasonable, justified doubt. If one persists in protesting past this point then I justly dismiss them as a fool and move on.

In light of this shift in the focus of my non-fiction essays, I will be starting a new blog in the next few months, perhaps on WordPress. Another reason I’m changing my blogging home is that the name of my Blogger blog, Romantic Rationalist, has been hijacked by a biography of C.S. Lewis of the same title—who I despise and have no interest in reading. I will provide a link to my new home in a final post.

Works Cited

1. ‘Ur’ Anc. East Encycl. Stud. Ed by. Ronald Wallenfels & Jack M. Sasson. (2000).