a scientific era

"To Science"
Science! True daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
-Edgar Allen Poe

I love this poem. I first read it in class a few years ago, but I didn't think it anything special then. Since that time, however, I have really come to appreciate it. I might even count it as one of my favorites.

Poe is, through his poem, lamenting the constant advance of science. This march of cold facts and reason has wrought irreparable havoc on the world of fantasy and imagination. Forests are now viewed in terms of soil nutrients and photosynthesis, when they were once viewed as the homes of naiads and dryads. Fairies have been debunked as archaic myth, and the mystery and awe of dragons has been confined to the study of dinosaurs and bone structures. I definitely agree with Poe that science and enlightenment influence has deprived our world of much of its beauty. I still think in terms of fairies and dragons and dryads.

I am finding the same sickening onslaught of science in my study of psychology. Take, for example this quote from my textbook.
"You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it, 'You're nothing but a pack of neurons.'"
-Geneticist Sir Francis Crick

Pardon me while I gag, then go off and have a good cry. This absolutely disgusts and saddens me!! Science has no room for souls. It cannot explain hopes and dreams and things like true love. It therefore reduces everything to chemical interactions between brain cells. Honestly, what is this world coming to? I'll take true love and naiads over hormones and chemical/electrical impulses any day. Care to join me in my outdated world?