I've always been good at thinking of things on a very holistic model, thinking of all the interconnections of constituent parts, all the moving pieces working together to make a greater whole, but everyday experience is such a reduced view of existence.
To me, science has allowed me a much broader view - a point of view from above my own subjective experience. If existence is like an orchestra, then I'm just a cello player, only able to experience the grandeur of the orchestra from the point of view of a cello player. Science is what allows me to listen to the entire orchestra by showing me the entire thing.
I'll never experience a black hole (the pianist) with a spectrum of deep, looming menace, or the quick, high energy violence of a stars destruction. Nor will I be able to hear the slow, subtlety of evolution on a geological scale (the violinist) as each note is played with delicate care and a never ceasing, unrelenting motion that hovers between incoherence and stagnation. I'll never witness relativity (the french horns) on any meaningful scale, perceiving the universe from every octave and every note.
The universe operates on an elegant mathematical organization (the musical notes). I forget who said it (and I paraphrase) but the strangest thing about the universe is that we can understand it - at least on some level. Science is what allows me to walk away from experiencing the orchestra and sit in the audience, really taking it all in, experiencing how every note fits into place to create the grand whole - the Truth - that emerges from every subtle nuance, both known and unknown to us. Every piece has it's part to play, and each one is just as important as any other - the entire orchestra would crumble into chaos if each note was not played with pinpoint accuracy.
The only thing that excites me more then knowing what we know about the grand orchestra of the cosmos is the notion that it's being played on levels that we haven't even conceived of yet. Science, discovery, exploration, and understanding have time and again shown us that the universe operates on an echelon so much higher then our pitiful attempts to explain it - via religion, philosophy, superstition - and every time we think we grasp something, further exploration throws another wrench in the gears. Science has shown us that reality is even stranger then our myths, legends, and imaginations could ever possibly hope to be.
Because of gaining an understanding of science, just simply walking down the street has been enriched beyond expectations. I can just picture the air molecules vibrating away from my feet as they hit the pavement. These waves of energy reach my ears, and a grand symphony of reaction potentials, synaptic firings, and ion channels can interpret these fine vibrations into something meaningful to me.
I look up at the sky and picture the intense sunlight hitting the oxygen molecules in the ozone, the blue and indigo wavelengths being scattered in every direction, creating the blue dome of a sky, and the illusion of a yellow sun.
I can think about some other part of the universe five billion light years away, and know that it exists under the same physical laws, and that if some being there looked in our direction, they wouldn't even see our planet yet. I can think about the fact that when I move relative to that planet, nothing is happening simultaneously with me - my slow gait, at such a distance, is creating a time difference on the order of hundreds of years compared to when I stand still (I'm moving through that planets past and future with a simple change of direction).
I can look around at the trees and animals and bugs and understand the delicate balance of their existence. Each one of them is catalyzing billions of DNA transcriptions and translations, billions of chemical reactions (esterification, hydrolysis, photosynthesis, transesterification, protein folding etc). Each gene expresses itself in one individual way that by itself is almost meaningless, but as a whole a living, breathing, thinking organism emerges, which fits it's own niche in an ecosystem that's constantly shifting and differentiating alleles in a ruthless, unrelenting, yet elegant process of natural selection. We get but just one infinitesimally small sample of this entire process, yet with a scientific understanding I can see it happening before my very eyes.
Personally, I don't know how anybody could not be interested in science, or why anyone would want to deny themselves of the universes magnificence by mainting a narrow point of view or ignorance of such a colossal masterpiece of intricately woven, masterfully dynamic, and strangely understandable (in some cases) natural splendor. Science has, in my opinion, revealed the intrinsic exquisiteness of the universe that ideological ignorance and superstition had once (and still often does) covered up like a Burqa over a beautiful woman.
Anyway, I'm done rambling (as if anyone read it after seeing how long it was).
